Install

No ISO, no guided installer. Boot any live Linux with tar, curl or wget, and disk tools - ScrapLinux's own media is not needed for this step. The short version is on the main page; this covers the parts that guide leaves out.

Partitioning

By hand, with fdisk/sfdisk/cfdisk or whatever the live environment gives you. What you need depends on firmware and bootloader:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX2
mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt
mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdX1
mount --mkdir /dev/sdX1 /mnt/boot

Root can be ext4, ext3, ext2, btrfs, xfs or f2fs - whatever the live environment's mkfs.* tools support. For an encrypted root, run cryptsetup luksFormat and cryptsetup open before formatting, and write /etc/crypttab by hand once chrooted in (a single cryptroot UUID=<luks-uuid> none luks line) - scraplinux-mkinitramfs reads it back to decide whether to bundle cryptsetup into the initramfs.

Extracting the tarball

tar -xJf scraplinux-tarball.tar.xz -C /mnt

One tarball, with dinit as the init. It bundles glibc, toybox, busybox, zsh, doas, e2fsprogs, iwd, dhcpcd, the LLVM toolchain and scraps itself, pre-installed and ready to sync. It does not bundles scraplinux-base, a kernel, or a bootloader - those come from scraps add once repo indexes are synced.

Bootstrapping scraps

/mnt/usr/bin/scraps-strap /mnt

scraps-strap's only job is syncing fresh repository indexes into the extracted tree. It passes SCRAPS_CONF/SCRAPS_REPOD explicitly rather than relying on their defaults, because those default to host-absolute paths - correct when a live ScrapLinux session with real /etc/scraps config is doing the installing, wrong here, since whatever booted this could be any live Linux with no /etc/scraps at all.

fstab, before chroot

SCRAPS_ROOT=/mnt SCRAPS_CONF=/mnt/etc/scraps/scraps.conf SCRAPS_REPOD=/mnt/etc/scraps/repos.d \
  /mnt/usr/bin/scraps add genfstab
/mnt/usr/bin/genfstab /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

genfstab reads /proc/mounts from the live environment's own view - it has to run before chroot, not after, since a chroot has no view of the outer mount table without /proc bind-mounted first. It writes UUID=, never PARTUUID=: the initramfs resolves root= with busybox findfs, which only understands LABEL=/UUID=.

Inside chroot

/mnt/usr/bin/scraplinux-chroot /mnt

Bind-mounts /proc /sys /dev /run and drops you into a shell with a correct backspace (stty erase ^? is set explicitly, since the target has no terminfo database yet to agree with the terminal on what backspace even sends).

passwd
adduser you
scraps add scraplinux-base
scraps add scraplinux-base-kernel
scraps add limine
scraplinux-mkinitramfs
scraplinux-rebuild

Swap limine for grub on a BIOS install if you'd rather have GRUB. Swap scraplinux-base-kernel for any other flavor - scraps search kernel lists them, see kernels. scraplinux-mkinitramfs only needs to run explicitly here because you're doing it from inside a chroot rather than through a normal package upgrade, which triggers it as a hook automatically afterward.

The passwd/adduser pair above is the imperative way to set the root password and create your own user. There's a declarative alternative that does the same thing: write your account into /etc/scraplinux/users.conf (users.declared[ / you:/bin/zsh:wheel / ]) and the wifi network into /etc/scraplinux/network.conf before running scraplinux-rebuild below - it creates the account and writes the network as an iwd profile that iwd joins on its own, no interactive step needed. Either path works; pick whichever fits how you're installing - by hand at a console, or scripted.

scraplinux-rebuild has to run here, inside the chroot, not after exiting it - it reads plain /etc/fstab, /etc/crypttab and /boot, which only mean the target's own copies from inside the target. It activates any kernel package still marked -nomod (a kernel installed from inside a chroot can't run its own post-install hooks there - no running kernel to build an initramfs against yet) and writes limine.conf/grub.cfg. It never runs the actual deploy command - that's the one manual step left, and it happens back outside.

Exit the chroot when done (exit or Ctrl-D).

Networking

Still inside the chroot, before or after the account step above:

scraps add wifi-connect-default
wifi-connect

wifi-connect-default is the core tool plus the common wireless drivers (iwlwifi for Intel) and a working resolver - not just association, actual name resolution afterward. If your hardware needs a less common driver (Broadcom's wl and similar), add wifi-connect-extra too. The interactive picker itself is wifi-connect-cli, pulled in by wifi-connect-default automatically.

After a successful connection, wifi-connect asks "Add networking to init?" - saying yes writes the SSID/PSK to /etc/scraplinux/network.conf and enables the wifi service, so it reconnects automatically on every future boot. That reconnect is deliberately the last thing that happens at boot, after a display manager if one is running - a boot that waited on an association or a DHCP lease before showing a login prompt made every single boot slower for it, whether or not anyone at the console cared about the network yet. Skip wifi-connect entirely and write /etc/scraplinux/network.conf directly if you'd rather configure it without the prompt - see the declarative note above.

Deploying the bootloader

Back on the live environment, as root - scraps system boot does this in one step, fstab included:

# UEFI, Limine
SCRAPS_ROOT=/mnt scraps system boot limine-efi /dev/nvme0n1p5

# BIOS, GRUB
SCRAPS_ROOT=/mnt scraps system boot grub-bios /dev/nvme0n1p5

Point it at the boot partition either way - Limine needs the ESP itself (files go on it directly, plus an NVRAM entry via efibootmgr); GRUB BIOS installs to the disk's MBR, not a partition, so it derives the whole disk (/dev/nvme0n1p5 → /dev/nvme0n1, /dev/sda5 → /dev/sda) from whatever partition you give it. Both regenerate /etc/fstab from genfstab first, so a filesystem that changed since the earlier fstab step is never boot-configured against a stale one.

Doing it by hand instead - what the command above actually runs:

# EFI, Limine - the target's own copy, not the live environment's
mkdir -p /mnt/boot/EFI/BOOT /mnt/boot/EFI/scraplinux
cp /mnt/usr/share/limine/BOOTX64.EFI /mnt/boot/EFI/BOOT/
cp /mnt/usr/share/limine/BOOTX64.EFI /mnt/boot/EFI/scraplinux/scraplinuxx64.efi
efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/sdX --part 1 \
  --loader '\EFI\scraplinux\scraplinuxx64.efi' --label 'ScrapLinux'

# BIOS, GRUB
grub-install --target=i386-pc --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sdX

Reboot.

Repairing an existing install

Mount the root partition (and boot partition, if separate) under /mnt, then /mnt/usr/bin/scraplinux-chroot /mnt - the same tool used during install works identically afterward. Re-run scraplinux-rebuild from inside that chroot, same as during install, to fix a stale bootloader config or reactivate a kernel.