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Pre-installation

Acquire an installation image

First off, download the official Axis Linux installation file from the GitHub release page.

Verify the downloaded file

It's a good practice to verify the ISO image after downloading it. It's a safety precaution and should be taken into consideration.

On a system with GnuPG installed, run the following commands:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys A182D760A59FDFDD
gpg --verify axislinux-XXXX.XX.XX-x86_64.iso.sig axislinux-XXXX.XX.XX-x86_64.iso

You can optionally verify shasums of the file too.

sha512sum --check axislinux-XXXX.XX.XX-x86_64.iso.sha512sum

Prepare an installation disk

To install Axis Linux you will need a USB flash drive or an optical disk, or a network with PXE (ipxe images coming soon).

Installing Axis in a VM requires neither, just the ISO file itself.

Boot the live environment

1. Point your BIOS's current boot device to the installation disk. This is usually achieved by making External Devices/Optical Disks the first priority in the BIOS. Refer to your motherboard's manual for more details.

2. When the installation medium's boot loader menu appears, select Axis Linux installation medium and press Enter to enter the installation environment.

3. You will be logged in on the first virtual console as the root user, and presented with a Zsh shell prompt.

Set the keyboard layout

The default console keymap is US. Available layouts can be listed with:

ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/**/*.map.gz

To modify the layout, append a corresponding file name to loadkeys, omitting path and file extension. For example, to set a Polish keyboard layout:

loadkeys pl

Console fonts are located in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/ and can likewise be set with setfont.

Verify the boot mode

To verify the boot mode, list the efivars directory:

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

If the command shows the directory without any errors, then the system is booted in UEFI mode. If the directory does not exist, the system may be booted in BIOS (or CSM) mode. If the system did not boot in the mode you desired, refer to your motherboard's manual.

Connect to the internet

To set up a network connection in the live environment, go through the following steps:

1. Ensure your network interface is listed and enabled, for example with ip-link:

ip link

2. For wireless and WWAN, make sure the card is not blocked with rfkill.

3. Connect to the network:

• Ethernet - plug in the cable.

• Wi-Fi - authenticate to the wireless network using iwctl.

• Mobile broadband modem—connect to the mobile network with the mmcli utility.

4. Configure your network connection:

• DHCP: dynamic IP address and DNS server assignment (provided by systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved) should work out of the box for Ethernet, WLAN and WWAN network interfaces.

Update the system clock

timedatectl set-ntp true

To check the service status, use timedatectl status.

Partition the disk

When recognized by the live system, disks are assigned to a block device such as /dev/sda (for SATA disks), /dev/nvme0n1 (for NVMe disks) or /dev/mmcblk0 (for SD/MMC cards). To identify these devices, use lsblk or fdisk.

fdisk -l

Results ending in rom, loop or airoot may be ignored.

The most common tools for formatting are fdisk, parted or cfdisk (recommended, the most friendly partitioning tool for CLI).

UEFI systems should have 3 partitions, while BIOS with MBR can have just 2.

Mount point	Partition	Partition type	Suggested size
[SWAP]	/dev/swap_partition	Linux swap	More than 512MB
/mnt	/dev/root_partition	Linux	Remainder of the device

Mount point	Partition	Partition type	Suggested size
/mnt/boot or /mnt/efi	/dev/efi_system_partition	EFI system partition	Minimum 200MB
[SWAP]	/dev/swap_partition	Linux swap	More than 512MB
/mnt	/dev/root_partition	Linux	Remainder of the device

Format the partitions

Once the partitions have been created, each newly created partition must be formatted with an appropriate file system. You can decide what filesystem you want to use.

• ext2

• ext3

• ext4

• jfs

• ReiserFS

• XFS

• Btrfs

Recommended and the fastest filesystem is Ext4. You can format a partition to Ext4 using:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/root_parition

If you created a swap partition, initialize it by issuing:

mkswap /dev/swap_parition

Mount the partitions

Mount the root volume to /mnt. For example, if the root volume is /dev/root_partition.

mount /dev/root_parition /mnt

If you created a swap volume, enable it using swapon:

swapon /dev/swap_parition