The title says it all. Your job is to provide infrastructure (a VM) on which we should be free to run whatever OS we want.
Why can’t I provide a custom ISO to boot the droplet from and continue the installation, or better, why can’t I log into a recovery shell from which I can mount the / partition and install whatever I want?
Linode provides Arch by default and allows you to access a recovery shell from which you can install whatever you want by mounting the root partition and copying the files manually.
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In the past we did provide Arch Linux as an option. Unfortunately for several reasons including a larger burden on our support team we do not offer it as an official image anymore. ISO imports have been a major requested feature for quite a while and may be available at some time in the future but not in the immediate future. However, there is an un-supported option to run Arch on a droplet. This script, written by an outside developer will convert a standard Debain droplet to Arch. After running this script you should be able to create a snapshot of your droplet, which would give you a ready to go Arch image for your own use.
Also, we do provide a recovery ISO image which our support team can mount for you (this is a debian based livecd image) which will allow you to affect changes to your partition table (again, not a currently supported option). If you open a ticket with the support team they will be happy to boot your droplet to this recovery environment.
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