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-def-tarball.tar.xz -C /mnt

Two flavors: def (busybox init, the tested default) and openrc (OpenRC already wired up as init instead). Both bundle glibc, toybox, busybox, zsh, doas, e2fsprogs, and scraps itself, pre-installed and ready to sync. Neither 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.

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).

Deploying the bootloader

Back on the live environment, as root:

# BIOS, Limine
limine bios-install /dev/sdX

# 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 linux'

# 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.