Arch Linux -- My first week

[sffvba[e0rt]

I installed Arch a few years ago, wasn't "easy" but with the wiki doable. Tried it today, wow! Why did they make it even more complicated (so I installed Xubuntu, took 15 minutes and everything works )


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[trent.josephsen]

Yeah, it's a bit different without the old install script. Not really a big deal though. Installation is a one-time thing; the everyday stuff like package management (and vanilla XFCE) is the reason I use Arch.

[Habitual]

i was planning to install arch...

Well, I did install it in Vbox and it took a couple of tries to get xfce4, dhcpd and sshd working on reboot.

Installed slim for grins and giggles.

Reminds me of the bad ol' days when c-li was "king" and it took hours and hours of ./configure && make && sudo make install'ing everything you needed for a Generic Desktop.

I'll beat on it some more as time goes by...

It's all the same "under the hood" I always like to say (except for Package Management)

[kevdog]

I wrote my own pkgbuild to install some fonts downloaded from dafont. Took me about an hour since I had no idea what I was doing although I knew about the goal in general. Unfortunately with most things dealing with computers the devil is in the details.

Worked real well. I wish I could generate apt packages so easily. It's nice that packages can be custom installed by feeding them directly through the pacman package manager

[kevdog]

New update

Installed all the android sdk and android platform tools and udev. I've done this in Ubuntu and its taken me awhile.

In arch, I installed 3 packages from the AUR, and plugged in the phone to the USB port -- and boom!!!! connected via adb. Painless. I'm just wondering why ubuntu couldn't create a ppa that would be so painless!!!!

[cecilpierce]

I have a few Arch Linux installs they all work fine except Cinnarch, its crashed after two installs, goes into a root terminal and when I try to use pacman it says command not found ???

Really a bummer...

[ubume2]

Thanks for the blog kevdog. I can relate to it.

I made a couple of attempts to install Arch on my hard drive, and failed.

Then I discovered Virtualbox. With the beginners guide up on the browser in my host OS, and after 3 or 4 attempts to install Arch I succeeded in getting a working Arch XFCE.

Having detailed notes I had taken during the install, I successfully installed Arch on the hard drive. And I had a working XFCE (for the most part) on my hard drive.

Arch has recently made it a little more difficult to install, and it seems that the new install is a little bit closer to installing from scratch.

I'm glad I tried Arch. I've learned a lot about linux. I will keep on fiddling with it, but I appreciate Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and Kubuntu all the more!

[fantab]

I wrote my own pkgbuild to install some fonts downloaded from dafont. Took me about an hour since I had no idea what I was doing although I knew about the goal in general. Unfortunately with most things dealing with computers the devil is in the details.

Worked real well. I wish I could generate apt packages so easily. It's nice that packages can be custom installed by feeding them directly through the pacman package manager

I installed my favorite fonts directly from 'font viewer'... but they install in ~/.local/share/fonts and not in /usr/share/fonts, not an issue really as long as they available for use.

Every distro has its own idea of what a distro should be like... Arch has The Arch Way. Ubuntu has its own and so does Debian or Fedora... Gentoo has its own 'way' of doing things...

Of all the package managers I tried, I find pacman to be the best out there. I dual boot Ubuntu and Arch ... looks like I have more or less settled with my distro hopping.

I really appreciate the simplicity of Arch. What I dislike about arch is the AUR...

My two cents...

[kevinmchapman]

The new installation method is an interesting one. The old scripts were dropped simply for lack of a maintainer, not to put anyone off. Not even Arch is that harsh

I upgraded to an SSD on one laptop last week and so had to reinstall for the first time with the new method and was not looking forward to it. OK, I have used Arch for five years, but I found the new procedures surprisingly simple. As ever, the Wiki told me all I needed to know, and it did not seem to require more work or time than the old installer.

[viperdvman]

I decided to jump into the Arch realm of distros during my winter vacation. And no, I didn't mess with ArchBang!, Manjaro, Bridge Linux, KahelOS, or CinnArch first... I went with straight vanilla Arch Linux. Part of the fun (and pain) of using Arch is the installation process. All I would've had with the Arch-based distros was the rolling-release model, the pacman package manager, and the repos (including the AUR). It might've been nice to try one of the derivatives first since they came pre-installed with a working DE, but I decided on the straight Arch install.

For me, I had the Beginner's Guide and Installation Guide through their wiki that I ran on my netbook while I was installing Arch on my desktop. I also had some extra help from one of my buddies on a Nintendo-theme IRC who's also an Arch user (though his help wasn't quite step-by-step with the wikis). The only two hiccups I had were with my built-in ethernet adapter and getting GRUB installed correctly. Both were oversights on my part and quite easy to fix and get working.

But after a good process of going through the wikis and my friend's help, I got Arch (at least in CLI mode) working perfectly. I even got xorg, a DE, and even my NVidia drivers all working very well. And for my Arch install... I went with KDE.

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As far as running Arch goes, I've found it every bit as much of a blast to run as (K)Ubuntu. Once you learn pacman syntax, using sudo pacman -S "package" and sudo pacman -Syubecomes every bit as second-nature as using sudo apt-get install "package" and sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.

I've come to like the AUR as well. It's certainly an excellent one-stop shop for all kinds of apps, games, packages, etc. that aren't in the repos... unlike having to set up tons of PPA's in Ubuntu. In fact, I'm starting to prefer the AUR instead over having to find PPA's for whatever app I'm wanting to install. And I can do it both manually (download and compile) and with yaourt. Yaourt is definitely an excellent tool to use when working with the AUR, as it works almost exactly like using pacman. I don't know what others' beef with the AUR is, but I've had no problems with installing packages from the AUR, but the only PITA I've had with installing packages from the AUR is when said packages have dependencies that must also be installed from the AUR. It's even more of a PITA when those dependencies require more dependencies from the AUR.

The other pain with Arch compared to Ubuntu: I'm running 64-bit Arch. Ubuntu has excellent multiarch support. If it doesn't have the 32-bit libraries that some apps you may run require, it installs them all automagically. This wasn't a problem for me in Arch since Arch has the multilib repository for that. However, stuff like Netflix, Second Life, and a few other apps that are obtained from the AUR required extra 32-bit libraries and even 32-bit NVidia libraries to get working right... most of them also from the AUR. And THAT was where I ran into the chain of dependencies that had to be installed from AUR. Good thing I was using yaourt for that and not the manual method, or that would really have been a PITA.

Other than that... I love running pacman, running Arch once everything's installed is a blast, and other than a couple of minor hiccups with installing stuff I've had absolutely no problems running Arch. It's been very stable for me, I've had no errors, no segfaults, nothing but smooth sailing. I'm definitely going to keep it on my desktop... at least as a toy to play around with.