Using an existing Linux system

Assuming you already have a running Linux system with a spare disk or partition, you can easily grab Mere’s pacman package and install Mere to it. Setting up the partitions and boot loader is left as an exercise to the reader, but you can use the section Using the ISO Image as a generic guide. Note that Mere’s kernel currently only supports ext2,3,4 filesystems, but we are open to adding support for more as we mature. If you would like to use a different file system, please create a new Github issue.

First, download pacman.

curl -LO https://pkgs.merelinux.org/core/pacman-latest-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

You can validate the file using the pacman-latest.SHA512SUM file.

curl -LO https://pkgs.merelinux.org/core/pacman-latest.SHA512SUM
sha512sum -c pacman-latest.SHA512SUM

Extract it to a temporary location.

mkdir -p /tmp/pacman
tar -C /tmp/pacman -xf pacman-latest-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

Now you can use /tmp/pacman/usr/bin/pacman --config /tmp/pacman/etc/pacman.conf to install the system in the same way that is described under Installing the base system. Simply replace every usage of pacman with /tmp/pacman/usr/bin/pacman --config /tmp/pacman/etc/pacman.conf.

If you want to use Mere’s syslinux package to boot the system, install that package as well, either to a temporary location on the host system, or into the destination system, and use one of the boot methods described in Configure the boot loader for a legacy boot or Configure the boot-loader for an EFI boot.