LARBS

Luke's Auto-Rice Bootstrapping Scripts

(Not actually Luke)

LARBS

LARBS is an efficient shell script that will install a fully-featured tiling window manager-based system on any Arch or Artix Linux-based system, without any of the routine of manual post-install processes and configuration.

By default, LARBS installs and deploys my own personal dotfiles which people may know from my videos on YouTube. It will install my special build of dwm which is very cool.

Two types of LARBS users

Is LARBS for you? Probably yes. I don't know how else you would've found this site. The script is for two types of people:

  1. People who already know their stuff and just want to automate installing a system without doing the boring stuff you've done a million times.
  2. Novices who want to use and learn about a leet hackerman computer setup like those in the movies for either efficiency or looking cool.

No actual phonies allowed though. The goal of the system for novices is helping you understand how a good Unix system works and how it is modified. I give huge amounts of documentation for this (see below), but this is not a hand-holding distro that does things automatically for you. Instead, you realize how easy it is to set things up automatically yourself.

Gallery

If you see pretty much any of my videos that are screencasts, you will see what LARBS looks like on initial install.

You can also see user-submitted screenshots of LARBS (some with modification) here.

Yeah, mostly just people pulling up htop and stuff to look busy of course...

Installation

On any (preferrably fresh) install of an Arch or Artix Linux, make sure curl is installed and just run the following as the root user:

curl -LO larbs.xyz/larbs.sh
sh larbs.sh

LARBS will then guide you through installation, which is typically relatively snappy. On my slow internet, it takes around 10 minutes.

Note that the LARBS scripts will not partition any drives or wipe anything, but when it deploys the dotfiles, it will overwrite any preexisting files: e.g. the LARBS bashrc will replace your old bashrc, etc. To avoid even this risk, you can tell LARBS to install for a new username and nothing will be overwritten.

What does LARBS install?

You can check out the programs list that LARBS parses for installation right here! It also gives a brief explanation of why the program is included. Yup, the input text is the documentation. You might call it lazy—I call it peak efficiency!

Here is some idea of the programs installed:

Note that making your own fork of LARBS is as easy as using your own dotfiles, making a programs file like the one above, and making any other direct changes to the script you want.

Learning the system is fun and easy!

You can figure out about the system in a lot of different ways:

LARBS fan?

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Advertise it with this sticker on your website linked here:

LARBS

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Contact!

You can also ask me questions via email at luke@lukesmith.xyz.

I'll be posting updates about LARBS on my RSS feed.