KISS Linux Community Installation Guide

Since Dylan is on a (permanent) hiatus, the KISS community is maintaining a set of repos and a fork of the package manager. We have made enough minor changes to the system that some differences to the install process should be noted. Dylan's page (https://kisslinux.github.io/install) is still the canonical reference. This page lists the differences to the official guide.

If you run into any problems, please join us in IRC (#kisslinux in libera.chat) and ask.

[001] Tarball

(Official guide steps 001-005)

You should start with the updated rootfs tarball from the latest release which is currently 24.12.18. Make sure you extract it as root. The tarball is not signed so step 004 doesn't apply. You should still verify the checksums though.

[002] Repos

(Official guide steps 007-009)

The core repos should be cloned from https://codeberg.org/kiss-community/repo. For example, you might want to do something like this:

$ mkdir ~/repos
$ cd ~/repos
$ git clone https://codeberg.org/kiss-community/repo
$ export KISS_PATH="$HOME/repos/repo/core:$HOME/repos/repo/extra:$KISS_PATH"

You can put the repos wherever you like; ~/repos is just an example. Note that you should set KISS_PATH in your .profile so that it is set every time you log in, rather than having to run the last line every time.

To make sure that kiss can find these packages, you can run

$ kiss s \*

(* needs to be escaped so that it isn't used as a glob for all the files in your current working directory). The command should output every package found in $KISS_PATH as well as all installed packages (listed in /var/db/kiss/installed). Check that the paths like ~/repos/repo/core/... show up.

We also maintain a community repo with many more packages than are found in repo. You will probably want to use this; it can be found at https://codeberg.org/kiss-community/community and enabled similarly to above.

[003] Commit signing

(Official guide steps 010-013)

gnupg1 used to be used for signature verification but now commits are signed with ssh (only for repo). To enable verification, run:

$ cd /path/to/repo
$ git config gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile .allowed_signers
$ git config merge.verifySignatures true

[004] Kernel

(Official guide step 018)

pkgconf is used to detect ncurses when using menuconfig; install it with

$ kiss b pkgconf

There are a number of patches which may need to be applied to the kernel depending on your version. Check the FAQ page for details.