add installation instructions

README.md

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-# solar
-Theme for solar-powered low-tech magazine
-More documentation to come soon.
+# solar pelican theme
+
+Solar is a pelican theme designed for <solar.lowtechmagazine.com>. It is an attempt to radically reduce the energy use the associated with accessing our content. 
+
+The theme is designed to be extremely light and give visitors insight into the material conditions of the hardware the website runs on.
+
+To this end we've developed a [few custom pelican plugins](https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar-plugins) and [additional scripts](https://github.com/lowtechmag/materialserver).
+
+## Installation of dependencies
+
+This theme is based on Pelican and a few custom plugins.
+
+To generate the website you will need to install some basic utilities. Instructions are for machines based on Debian stretch.
+
+`sudo apt update && sudo apt install git python3-dev python3-setuptools python3-pip zlib1g-dev libjpeg-dev jq`
+
+Installing pelican:
+
+`sudo pip3 install wheel pelican markdown typogrify`
+
+Installing dependencies for the plugins:
+`sudo pip3 install Pillow bs4 git+https://www.github.com/hbldh/hitherdither webassets libsass cssmin`
+
+