Why is arch linux so..."Good"?

[Ntacman]

I've been seeing a lot of good reviews about Arch linux lately, and Im wondering why. Would you please explain to me why Arch linux has been getting a lot of good reviews?

[Bölvaður]

because of the control the user has over what she installs. You begin with close to nothing and go from there... you can have very minimalistic and fast system if you go that way, but it takes some understanding of the user's behalf to set it up.

[Grant A.]

It has killer documentation.

[absinthe]

Well, it's praised for it's simplicity. Not simplicity in that it's easy for a beginner but that it provides a bare-bones system that a user builds onto as he/she desires.
When you install Arch you're left with just the most basic CLI-only system that provides the bedrock for the rest of your setup.
It's fast, bleeding-edge, and has a good community.

[handy]

Really, the only way to find out whether Arch is for you is to try it.

Along the path of setting up Arch, the new user is introduced to how it works, which due to the use of the BSD style init (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Q.29_What_exactly_is_this_.27BSD-style.27_init_framework_I_keep_hearing_about.3F), is a much simpler system than the other Linux distro's use. This simplicity makes Arch so much easier to maintain also.

To install Arch it is required that the new user follow the Beginners Guide (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide), to the letter, or they are going to land in trouble.

Providing that you don't have a wireless internet problem or some other strange hardware related obstruction, the Arch install is not a long laborious process.

For a first install it would be good to set aside a day, during which you can install Arch get your sound set up, X, graphics drivers, a DE or WM & add whatever other app's you like to use. In this process you start to learn about the Arch package management system, which is brilliant.

Ideally it is great if you have a 2nd machine connected to the internet for reference purposes. If not the Beginners Guide is supplied on the installation CD & can be referenced in a v/c.

As already stated in this thread, the Arch Wiki contains superb documentation & the Arch Forum is also a great resource. Though a word of caution, if you go to the Arch Wiki & ask questions that everyone knows are very easily answered by searching the Arch Wiki, you may not get the same kind of considerate patience that you will find in the Ubuntu Absolute Beginners Talk. ;-)

Following is a link to an introduction to Arch that is on our new Other OS Talk forum, which is my way of attracting more users.

Also, there are quite a few very knowledgeable Arch users registered here, so it is a good place to get help:

http://grubbn.org/otheros/showthread.php?tid=18

[Edit:] Thought I'd add the following:

What happens as you use Arch, due to its way of only having what you installed available, your Arch becomes the most perfect fit possible for you.

As time goes by & you become more familiar with how Arch works, this only goes to increase the intimacy of the relationship. This coupled with the fact that you don't have to do a reinstall unless you have a drive failure, but always have the latest versions of whatever you are using just continues to allow the comfort of your Arch system to grow. This is due to the rolling release upgrade system that Arch uses.

Some people consider the rolling release system to be a draw back, they think that it promotes instability in the Arch system. This from my experience is not true. In over 10 months of using Arch I have twice upgraded into trouble. The first time taught me how to downgrade packages, which very quickly & easily brings you back to where you were before the trouble. After which you can check out the Arch forum & find out what is going on & take appropriate action.

Here is a link to a quick how-to on downgrading packages in Arch, it is essential knowledge for all users of Arch:

http://grubbn.org/otheros/showthread.php?tid=11

[Bart_D]

Really, the only way to find out whether Arch is for you is to try it.

Along the path of setting up Arch, the new user is introduced to how it works, which due to the use of the BSD style init (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Q.29_What_exactly_is_this_.27BSD-style.27_init_framework_I_keep_hearing_about.3F), is a much simpler system than the other Linux distro's use. This simplicity makes Arch so much easier to maintain also.

To install Arch it is required that the new user follow the Beginners Guide (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide), to the letter, or they are going to land in trouble.

Providing that you don't have a wireless internet problem or some other strange hardware related obstruction, the Arch install is not a long laborious process.

For a first install it would be good to set aside a day, during which you can install Arch get your sound set up, X, graphics drivers, a DE or WM & add whatever other app's you like to use. In this process you start to learn about the Arch package management system, which is brilliant.

Ideally it is great if you have a 2nd machine connected to the internet for reference purposes. If not the Beginners Guide is supplied on the installation CD & can be referenced in a v/c.

As already stated in this thread, the Arch Wiki contains superb documentation & the Arch Forum is also a great resource. Though a word of caution, if you go to the Arch Wiki & ask questions that everyone knows are very easily answered by searching the Arch Wiki, you may not get the same kind of considerate patience that you will find in the Ubuntu Absolute Beginners Talk. ;-)

Following is a link to an introduction to Arch that is on our new Other OS Talk forum, which is my way of attracting more users.

Also, there are quite a few very knowledgeable Arch users registered here, so it is a good place to get help:

http://grubbn.org/otheros/showthread.php?tid=18

[Edit:] Thought I'd add the following:

What happens as you use Arch, due to its way of only having what you installed available, your Arch becomes the most perfect fit possible for you.

As time goes by & you become more familiar with how Arch works, this only goes to increase the intimacy of the relationship. This coupled with the fact that you don't have to do a reinstall unless you have a drive failure, but always have the latest versions of whatever you are using just continues to allow the comfort of your Arch system to grow. This is due to the rolling release upgrade system that Arch uses.

Some people consider the rolling release system to be a draw back, they think that it promotes instability in the Arch system. This from my experience is not true. In over 10 months of using Arch I have twice upgraded into trouble. The first time taught me how to downgrade packages, which very quickly & easily brings you back to where you were before the trouble. After which you can check out the Arch forum & find out what is going on & take appropriate action.

Here is a link to a quick how-to on downgrading packages in Arch, it is essential knowledge for all users of Arch:

http://grubbn.org/otheros/showthread.php?tid=11



Upgrade, downgrade, upgrade, downgrade............AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH HHH!!!!!!!

[chucky chuckaluck]

no extra crap. clear and to the point documentation (no stupid tl/dr nonsense where some dork is bragging about which algorhythm he cleverly thought of using). it's fast, and both pacman and yaourt rock.

[ghindo]

It's lightweight
The documentation is very good.
The user has a lot of control over their system.
There are some disadvantages, too, which is why I am switching back to Ubuntu. However, the quality of a distro is entirely up to user preference, so you should try it out if you are interested and decide for yourself.

[RiceMonster]

use and find out why

[sujoy]

Arch is good because it doesnt tell you "what to do", but there is always a "how to do", if you figure out what you need. ;)

and then there is AUR, the Arch User Repository, which means that the admins can be picky about what to package and what not to, but you as a user can choose your own flavour of firefox or that svn port of tint2 and package it yourself with some help from the community.

AUR combined with yaourt(package manager for official repo + AUR) makes Arch so popular. offcourse pacman itself is one of the best package managers out there.

as for stability, i only had trouble with the hotplugging thing, which was resolved in 10 minutes. basically, if you are comfortable reading guides and editing text files, you'll love Arch cause thats all thats needed. :)

[DirtBitCo]

I've used it, And it really isn't that good tbh (unless you like fixing broken packages and compiling from source)

Ubuntu Now, Ubuntu Tomorrow, Ubuntu Forever!

[handy]

Upgrade, downgrade, upgrade, downgrade............AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH HHH!!!!!!!

That's right twice in 10 months! :lolflag:

I always had much more trouble, & it was always vastly more time consuming, every 6 months, when I used the wonderful Ubuntu. (Don't get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is great.)

Just a trouble free upgrade of Ubuntu every 6 months takes a whole lot more time than the very rare < 5 minutes spent to backtrack a pacman or yaourt -Syu --aur which is a full Arch system upgrade. An upgrade that I do usually once per day. :p

So in practical terms I've been up for less than 10 minutes of computer work to get me out of trouble I had upgraded into, in a period pushing 11 months.

That's less than a minute a month of forced maintenance to repair Arch, which isn't bad considering I have probably done 300 full Arch system upgrades in that period of time. :p

On a system I built which has only what I want on it & nothing more, & is also incredibly light & exactly as feature full as I have chosen it to be... 8)

I like it!

The only lower maintenance computer OS I have ever used is the boring proprietary & extremely closed up & un-configurable OSX. :D

[handy]

I've used it,

I don't think you have.



And it really isn't that good tbh (unless you like fixing broken packages and compiling from source)


:lolflag:

You don't know what you are talking about, Gentoo compiles from source, Arch uses binary packages & installs them extremely quickly. & it is incredibly rare for any of the Arch packages to be broken, & if one is it is fixed in a flash.

[chucky chuckaluck]

maybe he meant ark linux.

[DirtBitCo]

I don't think you have.



:lolflag:

You don't know what you are talking about, Gentoo compiles from source, Arch uses binary packages & installs them extremely quickly. & it is incredibly rare for any of the Arch packages to be broken, & if one is it is fixed in a flash.

RIIIIIIGHHT

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchLinux_User-community_Repository_(AUR)

Don't pay attention to the link above, it contains useless software that nobody needs to worry about. Arch is still great if you like a limited set of precompiled packages.

Have fun with your PKGBUILDs.

[Skripka]

I just did my 1st Arch install in the last 24 hours, and I can honestly wonder why I didn't do it before. KDEmod on Arch kicks Kubuntu's derriere.

But. Is Arch for you? Handy summed it up nicely.


I've had a few hiccups, which aren't yet explained...but I've gotten the hang of things...and went from saying OMGWTHBBQ!!!! Arch!!!???? To-YES Arch.

[handy]

Arch is still great if you like a limited set of precompiled packages.


Oh! So you were talking about AUR. :D

Again: I do a yaourt -Syu --aur everyday, & twice in over 300 complete system upgrades I have upgraded into trouble, & both times the problems came from upstream, once it was a kernel bug, the second time it was the major X.server upgrade which affected a lot of hardware.

Fine by me. :p

[handy]

I just did my 1st Arch install in the last 24 hours, and I can honestly wonder why I didn't do it before. KDEmod on Arch kicks Kubuntu's derriere.

But. Is Arch for you? Handy summed it up nicely.


I've had a few hiccups, which aren't yet explained...but I've gotten the hang of things...and went from saying OMGWTHBBQ!!!! Arch!!!???? To-YES Arch.

Welcome aboard. :KS

It just gets better the more you use it.

[aaaantoine]

RIIIIIIGHHT

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchLinux_User-community_Repository_(AUR)

Don't pay attention to the link above, it contains useless software that nobody needs to worry about. Arch is still great if you like a limited set of precompiled packages.

Have fun with your PKGBUILDs.

Yaourt makes installing AUR packages trivial.

I've been... ahem... "test-driving" Arch+KDE since December. I like the rolling release system, a lot. Getting KDE 4.2 in a package upgrade on the day of its release was a lot of fun.

The worst part about Arch? The initial setup. I spent all weekend getting my laptop in desirable running condition when I first installed. And still, not everything works the way I want it to.

I'm thinking about installing Gnome on Arch to see how that works. KDE 4.2 is still quite buggy and might be skewing my judgment.

[Skripka]

Welcome aboard. :KS

It just gets better the more you use it.

Thx handy :D

Question for you (Outside the Support Forums :o )-HAL doesn't seem to start on boot. I typed the commands listed in the Wiki to run HAL at boot, I thought-but it didn't seem to take. I start KDM, but there's no keyboard or mouse input in Xorg--I hard reboot and restart HAL, and I get a "FAIL" for stopping HAL, but HAL starts--and the KDM will load fine.

[handy]

I used Gnome initially when I started with Arch, it worked fine.

Then I installed Openbox, which I had never used before & it blew me away, as far as the speed increase was concerned. There are 3 files that you have to edit to get Openbox setup.

Anyway I then gave Xfce a go, & was very impressed with its simplicity of installation & setup, (apart from a bit of a fiddle to get more access to its menu configuration via the GUI).

I really liked the way I had Xfce set up. Xfce is noticeably faster than the other DE's but also noticeably slower than Openbox, so recently I reinstalled Openbox & set it up to use my already configured xfce4-panel, with a few other tweaks, my desktop now looks like & functions as it did with Xfce, but the menu is better & the whole machine now runs at Openbox speed. :-)

The only thing I lost in the deal was a session manager. Openbox doesn't remember what you had open after you close Openbox down. I tried the Xfce session manager, which worked, but also slowed the system down to Xfce speed, so I don't use it, & really rarely ever miss the function.

Also, back in the past I tried lots of different WM's & KDEmod 4.1, I didn't like the other WM's as much as Openbox & I'm not really a KDE fan, it was buggy as hell as well at the time.

[Rokurosv]

If you're using AUR, yaourt is a must.

Arch is probably the distro that has hit the spot for me, it was exactly what I needed to stop distro hopping. As I was getting more and more involved in Linux I was noticing how much time I was spending on the terminal and that some of the GUI tools we're slow, and sometimes limited. Plus their simple package management is hard to beat(.tar.gz > rpm > deb). AUR is an awesome concept and it provides with more software that you can think of, I'm happy I started using it.

Now I admit is not a distro for everyone, but if you're looking for an intermediate level distro then Arch is for you.

[handy]

Thx handy :D

Question for you (Outside the Support Forums :o )-HAL doesn't seem to start on boot. I typed the commands listed in the Wiki to run HAL at boot, I thought-but it didn't seem to take. I start KDM, but there's no keyboard or mouse input in Xorg--I hard reboot and restart HAL, and I get a "FAIL" for stopping HAL, but HAL starts--and the KDM will load fine.

I'm no wiz, I just talk a lot. ;)

It is possible that you are experiencing a problem that came with the major X.server upgrade.

You may be able to solve this problem by adding the following to your xorg.conf

In the following section or create it if it doesn't exist:

Section "ServerFlags"

Add this line:


Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"

If you created the

Section "ServerFlags"

then you will need to close it with

EndSection

Which will be obvious when you look at the other sections in your xorg.conf

See how that goes, reboot to test it out.

[Edit:] I just searched up the Arch Wiki page on this X.org stuff, you may not feel like getting into it at the moment, but it is possible that it could be of benefit to you at a later date, as their is configuration changes that can be made that work for some people who's hardware is affected by the new X.org. Personally, I just edited the xorg.conf & turned all the trouble off, I'm very happy with how my system works as it is, for others it is not quite so easy.

Good luck on this one, it was the 2nd & last problem I have had whilst using Arch.

[Dr Small]

See how that goes, reboot to test it out.

Reboot?! You've got to be kidding. Just restart X. ;) When I go for the longest uptime, rebooting isn't even an option :D

[handy]

Reboot?! You've got to be kidding. Just restart X. ;) When I go for the longest uptime, rebooting isn't even an option :D

I could say I was fishing... ;)

So good Dr, do you think that Skripka's problem is due to the X.org upgrade?

[pgatrick]

I like Arch because it's just simple and clean or something. No extra weird crap all over, just what I want there. :D

I was using sidux before which also rocks, but I wanted to try out kde4.2 and installing Arch seemed a better idea than upgrading sidux to debian experimental.

Also Arch was quick and easy to install imo, and I'm no expert or anything. :)

[adamlau]

More installation control than most distros (I still have my gripes with certain things in Arch), does not take a full day to set up like CRUX, or Gentoo.

[SunnyRabbiera]

I also dont get why arch is so popular, I mean it looks good for those who like practically building the OS from scratch along the lines of slackware or something like that but for those of us who want to have systems that dont require compiling anything or have a system that doesnt need a large user manual to install...

[handy]

I also dont get why arch is so popular, I mean it looks good for those who like practically building the OS from scratch along the lines of slackware or something like that but for those of us who want to have systems that dont require compiling anything or have a system that doesnt need a large user manual to install...

The Arch installation is not that hard, it is just different.

You do it.

It is a manual installation & it teaches you about Arch as you go.
Which many of us find really interesting & fun.

(I don't think that Arch virgins should use Chakra, as they don't know how it works, which could get them into more trouble if they strike trouble, as Arch is different.)

Once you get Arch set up with your DE or WM of choice, & the app's that you want to use, the hardest part is over, beyond that Arch becomes the lazy man's distro as so little needs to be done. It is up to the user/builder if they want to get inquisitive & try different DE's/WM's & whatever else they want to set up.

If on the very rare occasion a bug gets through, you can downgrade very easily & quickly.

The benefit of that large manual = the Beginners Guide, is that it is teaching the user, as they install, a lot about how Arch works. This pays great dividends when you need to change something in the rc.conf which is the main configuration file in Arch, due to it using the BSD style init (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Q.29_What_exactly_is_this_.27BSD-style.27_init_framework_I_keep_hearing_about.3F).

So now you have a more simple Linux distro installed, with only what you installed on it, set up how you wanted it to be. You don't have to reinstall & do all the set up work again unless your HDD dies. The rolling release system upgrade method means that everyday you can have the latest version of Arch.

As the months role by you keep becoming more familiar with how Arch works & you tweak it here, you tweak it there, you change from a DE to a WM, you change back, you remove this app' & replace it with that... Whatever you do stays for longer than 6 or 12 months, Arch just keeps on keeping on. :KS

[SupaSonic]

I tried arch in a VM once. Seemed like too much work for me.

I don't want to know and like my OS in 2 months. I want it now. That's why I'm on Ubuntu.

[handy]

I tried arch in a VM once. Seemed like too much work for me.

I don't want to know and like my OS in 2 months. I want it now. That's why I'm on Ubuntu.

I'm a slow learner with a very poor memory, & it didn't take me very long to get used to typing pacman -Syu once a day. :D

In the early days I used Gnome, so it was just like using a faster Ubuntu, that didn't use apt, & that I wouldn't have to keep on reinstalling.

[desm]

It has killer documentation.

That it does.

I have only been using Arch about a week - and it seems less buggy than Ubuntu.
It's more leightweight and faster too.

A good distro. They make it sound complex to install but I'm quite a newb and providing you follow the instructions and have a small amount of knowledge (some bits are poorly explained) you can't go that wrong.

[handy]

That it does.

I have only been using Arch about a week - and it seems less buggy than Ubuntu.
It's more leightweight and faster too.

A good distro. They make it sound complex to install but I'm quite a newb and providing you follow the instructions and have a small amount of knowledge (some bits are poorly explained) you can't go that wrong.

The Official Arch Linux Install Guide (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide) wiki article goes into more detail & is worth looking at whenever something in the Beginners Guide leaves you in doubt.

[bfc]

I don't think Arch is any better than any other distro. It contains virtually the same software, it's config files are the same, it uses a linux kernel, etc. The only difference is it's package manager and the fact you build the system from the ground up, which does have it's advantages, but can be time consuming to initially setup and maintain.

It all depends on what you want out of your Linux installation. I would not say that Arch is better or worse, or faster/slower than any similarly configured Linux installation.

[nothingspecial]

I tried installing Arch on a Saturday Night a few weeks ago and all was going good initially.

Trouble is, I opened a bottle when I started and ...... let`s just say, after a while I no longer had the mental faculties required to complete the process.:oops:[-X

Luckily, reinstalling Ubuntu is a breeze which I managed even in my slightly confused state.

Next time I`ll do it without the bottle:-\"

[handy]

I don't think Arch is any better than any other distro.

It's not a matter of better, it just comes down to what suits the individual. People think Arch is harder than it is, most after their first successful install are really surprised how much easier it was than they thought it was going to be.



It contains virtually the same software, it's config files are the same,

No. The config files are not the same. Arch is different than all of the other distro's due its using the BSD style init (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Q.29_What_exactly_is_this_.27BSD-style.27_init_framework_I_keep_hearing_about.3F). It is much simpler underneath the hood due to this fact. It uses the very powerful /etc/rc.conf file to do many things, in a very simple fashion.

Here is a copy of mine:


#
# /etc/rc.conf - Main Configuration for Arch Linux
#

#
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# LOCALIZATION
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# LOCALE: available languages can be listed with the 'locale -a' command
# HARDWARECLOCK: set to "UTC" or "localtime"
# TIMEZONE: timezones are found in /usr/share/zoneinfo
# KEYMAP: keymaps are found in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps
# CONSOLEFONT: found in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts (only needed for non-US)
# CONSOLEMAP: found in /usr/share/kbd/consoletrans
# USECOLOR: use ANSI color sequences in startup messages
#
LOCALE="en_AU.utf8"
HARDWARECLOCK="UTC"
TIMEZONE="Australia/Sydney"
KEYMAP="us"
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR="yes"

#
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# HARDWARE
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Scan hardware and load required modules at bootup
MOD_AUTOLOAD="yes"
# Module Blacklist - modules in this list will never be loaded by udev
MOD_BLACKLIST=(net-pf-10 pcspkr) ## turns off ipv6 & pc speaker
#
# Modules to load at boot-up (in this order)
# - prefix a module with a ! to blacklist it
#
MODULES=(sky2 snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm-oss snd-hwdep snd-page-alloc snd-pcm snd-timer snd snd-hda-intel soundcore fglrx)
# Scan for LVM volume groups at startup, required if you use LVM
USELVM="no"

#
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# NETWORKING
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
#
HOSTNAME="archtypical"
#
# Use 'ifconfig -a' or 'ls /sys/class/net/' to see all available
# interfaces.
#
# Interfaces to start at boot-up (in this order)
# Declare each interface then list in INTERFACES
# - prefix an entry in INTERFACES with a ! to disable it
# - no hyphens in your interface names - Bash doesn't like it
#
# Note: to use DHCP, set your interface to be "dhcp" (eth0="dhcp")
#
lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
# eth0="eth0 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255"
eth0="dhcp"
INTERFACES=(lo eth0)
##INTERFACES=(eth0)
#
# Routes to start at boot-up (in this order)
# Declare each route then list in ROUTES
# - prefix an entry in ROUTES with a ! to disable it
#
# gateway="default gw 192.168.0.1"
ROUTES=(!gateway)
#
# Enable these network profiles at boot-up. These are only useful
# if you happen to need multiple network configurations (ie, laptop users)
# - set to 'menu' to present a menu during boot-up (dialog package required)
# - prefix an entry with a ! to disable it
#
# Network profiles are found in /etc/network-profiles
#
#NET_PROFILES=(main)

#
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
# DAEMONS
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Daemons to start at boot-up (in this order)
# - prefix a daemon with a ! to disable it
# - prefix a daemon with a @ to start it up in the background
#
### handy - @hal - hal's out due to worker. @fam replaced by gamin ###

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network portmap nfslock @netfs @crond @sshd @transmission-daemon @alsa @stb-admin @gpm)


# End of file

As you can see, there isn't anything like that in other Linux distro's, it is part of the BSD style init (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Q.29_What_exactly_is_this_.27BSD-style.27_init_framework_I_keep_hearing_about.3F) that is a foundation of Arch.



it uses a linux kernel, etc. The only difference is it's package manager and the fact you build the system from the ground up,

As previously stated, & in much more detail in other posts in this & other threads, the package manager & the building from the ground up are not the only differences of Arch from other distro's. Apart from the rolling release system that allows the user/builder to always have the latest version - everyday - & not have to loose there custom set up, until their HDD fails.



which does have it's advantages, but can be time consuming to initially setup and maintain.

Yes, to setup, but not to maintain, in the long run you are miles in front because you don't have to do invasive upgrades or total reinstalls any more.



It all depends on what you want out of your Linux installation. I would not say that Arch is better or worse, or faster/slower than any similarly configured Linux installation.

It is faster, & no other Linux, can be similarly configured, as Arch is built in a fundamentally different way than all the others, as I hope the BSD style init links show.

[bfc]

It is faster, & no other Linux, can be similarly configured, as Arch is built in a fundamentally different way than all the others, as I hope the BSD style init links show.

I don't agree, if I configure a distros with the same software, and the same kernel as Arch. Please explain how Arch can be faster.

It the same argument that has been shown the be false for Gentoo, for all the use of processor specific use flags, and building the installation from source, the overall gain in speed is negligible at best.

As for maintenance, Arch does not have a good way of handling config file changes/updates. So, I have to hunt for *.pacnew or *.pacsave files, load them in diff reader, see what changes were made, and manually edit them.

[cb951303]

very simple: pacman!

[handy]

I don't agree, if I configure a distros with the same software, and the same kernel as Arch. Please explain how Arch can be faster.

Arch is not built the same way (I tried to demonstrate this in my previous post with the link to a general overview of what the BSD style init is & by posting the prime Arch configuration file) as any other Linux.

If you don't understand what I'm saying, then that is my fault, I must be being inarticulate & somehow hiding the truth.

Go & read up on Arch in the wiki, or better yet, as it will be quicker & you will eventually get answers to your specific questions; post your technical questions to the guru's at the Arch forum if you want all of the in depth details?



It the same argument that has been shown the be false for Gentoo,

So you say.

Why do you compare Arch to Gentoo, the only similarity is that you build it from scratch.

Apart from that, Gentoo is fundamentally designed in a similar fashion as all of the other Linux distro's, except of course for Arch, which IS different.



for all the use of processor specific use flags, and building the installation from source, the overall gain in speed is negligible at best.

So you think.

That has not been my experience.

I have only read posts from a tiny minority of people who had Arch installed for a very brief period, that have complained about it not being faster, or it even being slower than whatever distro they were running previously.

The reason for this would have been that it was not yet optimally configured in the rc.conf & elsewhere, &/or they had made errors in their installation.

The policy of Arch, is to change any source code only when absolutely necessary. True Arch is built to run on i686 hardware which does give it a speed advantage. Otherwise, why bother?



As for maintenance, Arch does not have a good way of handling config file changes/updates. So, I have to hunt for *.pacnew or *.pacsave files, load them in diff reader, see what changes were made, and manually edit them.

On the relatively rare occasion that a .pacnew file is created, you are immediately informed, so why do you have to hunt for it?

It is part of the Arch way to not have GUI automation complicate otherwise very simple processes.

As far as comparing a .conf & .conf.pacnew is concerned? There are a variety of ways to do it, I personally prefer to use nano in two tabs of sakura to see if there is anything worthwhile in the .pacnew file. Rarely is there any need to do anything other than just delete the .pacnew file.

By not having the new .conf file automatically merged with the old, Arch is far more stable, the only things that get changed are changed by the user.

That is how we like it. ;)

[Eisenwinter]

Arch is a wonderful OS, and unlike what some people tend to think, it's not difficult to install at all.

I installed Arch successfully on the first time I tried, and it only took me an hour to set up, and that's with only very minimal reading of documentation (stuff about internet connection).

It has a superb package manager, it's lightweight, fast, super customizable, and only has the software you want it to have.

I definitely recommend Arch to anyone who is looking to try out a system that requires a bit more knowledge of Linux than say, Ubuntu - but doesn't want the headaches that come with a system like Gentoo.

Arch ftw!

[bfc]

Arch is not built the same way (I tried to demonstrate this in my previous post with the link to a general overview of what the BSD style init is & by posting the prime Arch configuration file) as any other Linux.

If you don't understand what I'm saying, then that is my fault, I must be being inarticulate & somehow hiding the truth.

Go & read up on Arch in the wiki, or better yet, as it will be quicker & you will eventually get answers to your specific questions; post your technical questions to the guru's at the Arch forum if you want all of the in depth details?



So you say.

Why do you compare Arch to Gentoo, the only similarity is that you build it from scratch.

Apart from that, Gentoo is fundamentally designed in a similar fashion as all of the other Linux distro's, except of course for Arch, which IS different.



So you think.

That has not been my experience.

I have only read posts from a tiny minority of people who had Arch installed for a very brief period, that have complained about it not being faster, or it even being slower than whatever distro they were running previously.

The reason for this would have been that it was not yet optimally configured in the rc.conf & elsewhere, &/or they had made errors in their installation.

The policy of Arch, is to change any source code only when absolutely necessary. True Arch is built to run on i686 hardware which does give it a speed advantage. Otherwise, why bother?



On the relatively rare occasion that a .pacnew file is created, you are immediately informed, so why do you have to hunt for it?

It is part of the Arch way to not have GUI automation complicate otherwise very simple processes.

As far as comparing a .conf & .conf.pacnew is concerned? There are a variety of ways to do it, I personally prefer to use nano in two tabs of sakura to see if there is anything worthwhile in the .pacnew file. Rarely is there any need to do anything other than just delete the .pacnew file.

By not having the new .conf file automatically merged with the old, Arch is far more stable, the only things that get changed are changed by the user.

That is how we like it. ;)


First off, I've run Arch on and off for years, so, I do understand how it works and understand it's advantages and disadvantages.

I've run Gentoo continuously from 2002 to 2006 and recently started running it again. But, I do not suggest that Gentoo is any faster than any updated Distro such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

So, I am talking from experience, and your attempt to suggest otherwise is laughable.

There is nothing overly special about the BSD style int system, check out the OpenRC implementation of funtoo.

How does the BSD init system benefit the end user? I've run various distros over my 13 years of running linux exclusively, and it doesn't strike me of any thing special.

[bomanizer]

Yes, to setup, but not to maintain, in the long run you are miles in front because you don't have to do invasive upgrades or total reinstalls any more.

That's a huge selling point for Arch over Ubuntu. Even for the desktop. This is the reason why I sometimes consider Arch, though I've never done a dist-upgrade...

Sometimes, when I'm doing a fresh install after the release, I'm thinkin that this is Windows all over again... I don't want this.. :)

A rolling-release Ubuntu would be just too good :D

[handy]

How does the BSD init system benefit the end user? I've run various distros over my 13 years of running linux exclusively, and it doesn't strike me of any thing special.

I'm obviously far easier to impress than you. ;)

The BSD style init that Arch uses reduces the number of system files, directories & links, it simplifies maintenance for the user, it is easier for a new Arch user to work with because there's a smaller number of config files to have to remember & find, the rc.conf is joy to behold & work with, so much can be done simply in that one file.

If you believe you know all about Arch, & you disagree with me that is fine.

I don't believe I know all about Arch, but I do still disagree with you. You do seem to have some kind of set against Arch for some reason? That's fine too I guess. I don't by the way have a set against any other distro, or BSD, I'm grateful for all the fantastic choices, it is just that for me, in 23 years of computing I have never been anywhere near as comfortable with an OS distro or whatever you want to call them, as I am with Arch.

[handy]

A rolling-release Ubuntu would be just too good :D

Wouldn't that be something else eh!?

Don't know what Debian would think about that? lol

[bomanizer]

Wouldn't that be something else eh!?

So it would :) Anyway, there is the LTS release...

[lancest]

Just got Arch running yesterday. Using it now.

Like it alot on this ageing P4 machine.

Hardy- my rc.conf MODULES() is empty. Guess I got more work to do.

Arch has it's place and so does Ubuntu in my opinion.
Best of two worlds if you can enjoy both.

[Pogeymanz]

You should check the Arch wiki. The documentation along with the transparency and simplicity of design makes doing any tweaking very easy.

Nearly all startup configuration takes place in /etc/rc.conf, which has comments all throughout it to guide you during any configuration. Plus pacman is the BEST package manager ever. Period.

pacman -S foo ---install foo
pacman -Ss foo ---search for packages with "foo" in the description
pacman -Sy foo ---sync repo list then install foo
pacman -Syu ---sync repos and then upgrade all packages

pacman -R foo ---remove foo
pacman -Rd foo ---only remove foo and NOT its dependencies

pacman -Qs foo ---search through installed packages for foo

[tjwoosta]

i have been using linux for about two years

during this time i hopped around many different distros

not in this exact order but ..

Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Debian, FreeBSD, elive, ozos, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fluxbuntu, LinuxMint, Puppy, DSL, slax, slackware, gentoo, knoppix, kanotix, PCLinuxOS, backtrack, STD, and probably others that i cant think of

i was in search of the perfect linux


with Arch i found it !!

i found arch about 6 months ago and have not even thought about switching distros again

arch is the true "end of the road" for any distro hopper

[handy]

Handy- my rc.conf MODULES() is empty. Guess I got more work to do.


So you haven't set up your sound yet?

[handy]

pacman -S foo ---install foo
pacman -Ss foo ---search for packages with "foo" in the description
pacman -Sy foo ---sync repo list then install foo
pacman -Syu ---sync repos and then upgrade all packages

pacman -R foo ---remove foo
pacman -Rd foo ---only remove foo and NOT its dependencies

pacman -Qs foo ---search through installed packages for foo

All this & more can be set up as aliases in you .bashrc so that what you type means something to you.

[chucky chuckaluck]

It all depends on what you want out of your Linux installation. I would not say that Arch is better or worse, or faster/slower than any similarly configured Linux installation.

'similarly configured' being the key. for an end user like me, getting ubuntu down to being as minimal as my arch setup, was next to impossible, simply because i had no idea what all the leftovers were. with ubuntu, there's also no choice of file system at installation. if i did get ubuntu down to the size i wanted, a six month upgrade would mess it up completely. so, you're correct: it all depends on what you want. while one may be able, in theory, to get any distro to be however you want it, it might just be best to start off with one that's close, rather than one that's on the other end of the spectrum. arch isn't "so good" if that's not what you're looking for.

[handy]

arch is the true "end of the road" for any distro hopper

It seems that the vast majority of Arch users have that very same opinion.

Distro hopping now is done to satisfy my curiosity, not an attempt to find something more satisfying than what I'm using.

[Icehuck]

with ubuntu, there's also no choice of file system at installation.

This is false. When the partitioner loads up, select manual and you have the ability to set up mount points and file systems.

[mikeize]

I finally installed Arch on my laptop, because people made me feel stupid for not being able to do it. It took a long time, and a lot of help on irc--mostly because I couldn't connect to the internet for ftp installation (ethernet or wireless). After downloading the full image, I finally got the settings correct for my ethernet card, and was able to install.

At this point, the documentation/wiki/guides were pretty helpful, and before long I had all the programs I wanted installed, and everything else was just like Ubuntu since I used gnome, and kept my /home partition. Overall, I'm quite happy with Arch for a couple of reasons:

-light/fast (noticeably faster than ubuntu/mint on my laptop)
-some things "just work" that didn't with ubuntu/mint (ie, suspend/hibernate!!!)
-I LOVE having up to date kernels and programs!
-I proved to myself that I could install it

I'm still having some problems though. Some things that "just worked" in ubuntu/mint are eluding me with Arch. Namely:

-touchpad scrolling (I've tried every configuration recommended in the wiki--it either has no effect, the wrong effect, or breaks X)
-media keys don't work (admittedly, I haven't even tried to solve this yet since the touchpad issue is monopolizing my frustration)

If you want to try Arch be prepared that you must configure nearly everything yourself--meaning you must choose the correct drivers for your video card, ethernet/wireless card, monitor, etc. If you don't have some free time (like a whole day), then don't even bother. If you want all your hardware automatically recognized and installed--don't bother.

Don't feel bad for not wanting to do everything yourself (like I did!); there's no reason you have to use Arch. Having said that, if you DO decide to try it out, you will probably get it working sooner or later. For now, I'm keeping it on my laptop (still hope to get scrolling to work!), but my desktop will stay ubuntu.

[handy]

@mikeize: The Other OS Talk forum, linked to in my signature has some great Arch brains involved in it, if you go & register & then copy & paste your problems into a new thread in the Arch sub-forum over there, I expect you will get some very helpful advice.

The forum is only new, so it is small, you may or may not have to suffer some delay in getting answers due to time zone realities.

Though it is getting closer to when good help will be there.

All the best, I'm off to bed. ;)

[RiceMonster]

@mikeize: The Other OS Talk forum, linked to in my signature has some great Arch brains involved in it, if you go & register & then copy & paste your problems into a new thread in the Arch sub-forum over there, I expect you will get some very helpful advice.

The forum is only new, so it is small, you may or may not have to suffer some delay in getting answers due to time zone realities.

Though it is getting closer to when good help will be there.

All the best, I'm off to bed. ;)

No offence meant, but I think the official Arch forums are the best place to get help for Arch. That is if you couldn't solve your problem by checking the wiki or searching or w/e.

[mips]

arch is the true "end of the road" for any distro hopper

+1 That is until something better comes along one day.

I have used Arch for over a year now and have not switched distros since. I have downloaded the odd other distro here and there and ran them as a LiveCD or in a VM but just to have a peek. Nothing has really wowed me so far.

I do admit that I want to try and run a BSD on my laptop wich has generic Intel hardware. I have tried some BSDs before and I like them so I would like to set one up as a desktop env. on my laptop at some stage.

[chucky chuckaluck]

This is false. When the partitioner loads up, select manual and you have the ability to set up mount points and file systems.

oops! i had no idea. my bad.

[TravisNewman]

Hmm... I kinda always distro hop. I thought I had tried Arch but apparently I haven't, looking over things. Why haven't I tried it? I'm not worried about it being too hard, I've done a few stage 1 gentoo installs, and done a basic linux-from-scratch install, so that doesn't phase me. The reason I didn't *stay* with gentoo was because to keep my system the way I wanted it, it required a lot of work on my end.

As for people saying that you have to constantly reinstall Ubuntu, I've never seen that happen personally. I had the same installation of Ubuntu, dist-upgraded from the very first release on up to 8.04, with relatively minor problems only coming up once in a while. I replaced the PC and started fresh at 8.10 though.

But I will have to give Arch a shot. I, too, distro hop just for the sake of curiosity, and I really can't imagine Arch pulling me away from Ubuntu, but I am curious enough to try it out.

[Kopachris]

I only had Arch for a little bit (I got rid of it for Debian so I could make my own distro), but it looked quite interesting. Getting my wireless up wasn't that hard, package management was intuitive. I think I might reinstall it after I'm done screwing up my hard drive.

[Pogeymanz]

[...]I really can't imagine Arch pulling me away from Ubuntu, but I am curious enough to try it out.

Oh, but it will. I thought I would find nothing better than Ubuntu with pure XFCE... Oh how wrong I was.

[Skripka]

I could say I was fishing... ;)

So good Dr, do you think that Skripka's problem is due to the X.org upgrade?

Well, your fix didn't do the trick...'tis a shame other OS talk got nixed (ho ho ho that was terrible) otherwise this would be a thread for the Arch board.

After trying your fix, I went to install some apps...evidently a depend got installed along the ride--and b0rked plasma...symptoms being the Plasma crashes and restarts every 15 seconds or so, wallpaper now changes every cycle too, System prefs has all the entries there in kdemod-but all the entries are blank when you click on them.

For argument, reformatted and installed (1st install took an hour...this time ~20 minutes to Arch)...installed kdemod-and problem persists. I take it this is one of those updates b0rkings we ArchNe\/\/b3 are warned about?

[gn2]

Why is Arch so good?

Depends on what you want from a distro.

For those who want what Arch provides it's good.

For those who don't it's not good.

Wonder if anyone actually uses the Arch forums?

[Icehuck]

For argument, reformatted and installed (1st install took an hour...this time ~20 minutes to Arch)...installed kdemod-and problem persists. I take it this is one of those updates b0rkings we ArchNe\/\/b3 are warned about?

Well you're using KDEmod which is not from the Arch repositories. So it wouldn't be an one of those random arch updates that whacked your system. Though you can do a pacman -Rd kdemod-uninstall to remove kdemod instead of wiping arch entirely.

[imlinux]

can i triple boot arch with ubuntu and xp

[mips]

can i triple boot arch with ubuntu and xp

Yes. Grub is Grub.

[crimesaucer]

I finally installed Arch on my laptop, because people made me feel stupid for not being able to do it. It took a long time, and a lot of help on irc--mostly because I couldn't connect to the internet for ftp installation (ethernet or wireless). After downloading the full image, I finally got the settings correct for my ethernet card, and was able to install.

At this point, the documentation/wiki/guides were pretty helpful, and before long I had all the programs I wanted installed, and everything else was just like Ubuntu since I used gnome, and kept my /home partition. Overall, I'm quite happy with Arch for a couple of reasons:

-light/fast (noticeably faster than ubuntu/mint on my laptop)
-some things "just work" that didn't with ubuntu/mint (ie, suspend/hibernate!!!)
-I LOVE having up to date kernels and programs!
-I proved to myself that I could install it

I'm still having some problems though. Some things that "just worked" in ubuntu/mint are eluding me with Arch. Namely:

-touchpad scrolling (I've tried every configuration recommended in the wiki--it either has no effect, the wrong effect, or breaks X)
-media keys don't work (admittedly, I haven't even tried to solve this yet since the touchpad issue is monopolizing my frustration)

If you want to try Arch be prepared that you must configure nearly everything yourself--meaning you must choose the correct drivers for your video card, ethernet/wireless card, monitor, etc. If you don't have some free time (like a whole day), then don't even bother. If you want all your hardware automatically recognized and installed--don't bother.

Don't feel bad for not wanting to do everything yourself (like I did!); there's no reason you have to use Arch. Having said that, if you DO decide to try it out, you will probably get it working sooner or later. For now, I'm keeping it on my laptop (still hope to get scrolling to work!), but my desktop will stay ubuntu.

Have you checked out the hotplugging issue yet:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg_input_hotplugging#I_don.27t_want_this_crap.2C _how_do_I_turn_it_off.3F


http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg_input_hotplugging#Tapping_and_sliding_doesn.2 7t_work_anymore_with_my_touchpad.21


..... and if it's not the nex xorg that's causing your Synaptics Touchpad driver to not scroll then maybe you haven't configured your xorg.conf correctly in the Section "InputDevice" section for Synaptics:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Synaptics#Configuration_via_xorg.conf_.28hotpluggi ng_disabled.29



As for your media keys..... if you are using gnome they should be easy to configure with the gnome keybindings tool:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Extra_Keyboard_Keys#Introduction


I use xfce4 so I have to use the "keytouch" program to set my keybindings:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Keytouch

[armageddon08]

Because it is so...."Good".. :-)

[mikeize]

@crimesaucer

yea, hotplugging issue is a mess. one of the steps simply did not work (forget which atm). i'm taking a break from it right now, but i'll be diving back into it when my frustration level dies down a bit XD.

The thing is, that the pad works for cursor movement, and i even got the double tap to work, but couldn't get scrolling to happen no matter what i did. anyway, like i said, i'll be working on it again soon. thanks.

[hatten]

Wow, after reading more about arch i almost cannot wait until tomorrow when i will get another computer that i can install it at!

[Therion]

I've been soooo tempted to try Arch. I just installed a brand new hard drive in my tower on which I did a clean install of 8.10 to use on a day-to-day basis. The old hard drive is now slotted for distro-hopping duty.

I slide the old drive in and distro-hop away, knowing that in just a couple minutes I can swap the drive-cage and boot into a stable distro should the need arise.

The seductive song of a rolling-release distro is difficult one for me to resist. I just came off a trial period with Sidux, but it just wasn't meant to be... Arch, you may be next.

[crimesaucer]

@crimesaucer

yea, hotplugging issue is a mess. one of the steps simply did not work (forget which atm). i'm taking a break from it right now, but i'll be diving back into it when my frustration level dies down a bit XD.

The thing is, that the pad works for cursor movement, and i even got the double tap to work, but couldn't get scrolling to happen no matter what i did. anyway, like i said, i'll be working on it again soon. thanks.

I don't need hotplugging so I just added this to xorg.conf:



Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection


Then, all of my Synaptic Touchpad troubles AND my Mulitmedia Keys (using keytouch) worked perfectly again..... just like they had before xorg added hotplugging.

[Skripka]

Well you're using KDEmod which is not from the Arch repositories. So it wouldn't be an one of those random arch updates that whacked your system. Though you can do a pacman -Rd kdemod-uninstall to remove kdemod instead of wiping arch entirely.

Well, I went and helped myself o'er at the Arch and Chakra forums (amazing what you can find on Google when you actually stop and think)....packaging oops on kdemod's end, which b0rked others kdemod in the last 12 hours. Once I get back to my box tonight it *should* work by reports.

[Cenotaph]

the hotplugging thing didnt bother me too much, i just installed xf86-input-synaptics and everything seems fine as long as the HAL daemon is running. I don't even need a xorg.conf.

It's kinda funny, coz my touchpad always had the scroll funtion on the right side and now on Arch with these drivers to scroll i just need to use two fingers on it, kinda like Macbooks, i didnt even know that was possible with this old touchpad before lol.

[TalioGladius]

I need to crank up a VM with it and see what it's all about...

[billgoldberg]

I've been seeing a lot of good reviews about Arch linux lately, and Im wondering why. Would you please explain to me why Arch linux has been getting a lot of good reviews?

It's good yes.

Why?

Small download.

Absolute control while setting your **** up.

Good package manager.

Rolling releases.

That means it will be faster then Ubuntu and more up to date.

But lots of software isn't in the repos so get your compiling hat on.

[handy]

No offence meant, but I think the official Arch forums are the best place to get help for Arch. That is if you couldn't solve your problem by checking the wiki or searching or w/e.

I'm won't argue with that.

I will only say that we are more kind to new users & questions that many on the Arch wiki may treat harshly because they expect you to have found out for yourself already. ;)

[handy]

I slide the old drive in and distro-hop away, knowing that in just a couple minutes I can swap the drive-cage and boot into a stable distro should the need arise.

I have 3 drive drawers in my test machine, aren't they great for distro hopping? :D

[handy]

I don't need hotplugging so I just added this to xorg.conf:



Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection


Then, all of my Synaptic Touchpad troubles AND my Mulitmedia Keys (using keytouch) worked perfectly again..... just like they had before xorg added hotplugging.

I already posted him the info' for turning off hotplugging?

[handy]

the hotplugging thing didnt bother me too much, i just installed xf86-input-synaptics and everything seems fine as long as the HAL daemon is running. I don't even need a xorg.conf.

I don't use HAL, so I just turned hotplugging off, & happily carried on as usual.

[fistfullofroses]

Getting away from the fanboy-ism I was just reading in the thread here, it's mainly the new Gentoo. People are going to spend hours getting things set up "just so" in order to save 5 seconds per boot, and 10 seconds per application startup... not really all that impressive. When choosing a distribution it is all about what you prefer. Some people merely get annoyed with bloat, others are fine with unused apps. There is also a lot that needs to be said about whether or not you like to tinker. Linux is for those who like to tinker and for those who do not, and often this determines which distribution is "right" for you.

[handy]

It's good yes.

Why?

Small download.

Absolute control while setting your **** up.

Good package manager.

Rolling releases.

That means it will be faster then Ubuntu and more up to date.

Arch is also built for i686 which helps make it faster.



But lots of software isn't in the repos so get your compiling hat on.

Not in AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/)?

[handy]

Getting away from the fanboy-ism I was just reading in the thread here, it's mainly the new Gentoo. People are going to spend hours getting things set up "just so" in order to save 5 seconds per boot, and 10 seconds per application startup... not really all that impressive.

That is nowhere near the reason why Arch is so good. :lolflag:

Simplicity.

Package management.

Rolling release.

Ease of & lack of maintenance, once set up.

The customisations inherent in the build system & therefore the lightness persist due to rolling release.

Long term refinements as the user continues to learn & adjust their system to suit them, keep on making the Arch experience a more & more comfortable one.

No wonder it creates the so called fan boy users. ):P



When choosing a distribution it is all about what you prefer. Some people merely get annoyed with bloat, others are fine with unused apps. There is also a lot that needs to be said about whether or not you like to tinker. Linux is for those who like to tinker and for those who do not, and often this determines which distribution is "right" for you.

& Arch due to its inherent simplicity is good for those of us (like me) that aren't terribly smart, & don't have brilliant memories, because it is so very much easier to fix if there is ever a problem & to modify if we so desire.

The KISS foundation of Arch works for so many of us.

[thisllub]

It seems that the vast majority of Arch users have that very same opinion.

Distro hopping now is done to satisfy my curiosity, not an attempt to find something more satisfying than what I'm using.

I have used Arch for 15 months and it has taken the shine off Linux and made it very boring.

In return I get a system that has had 2 Xorg problems in that time. Other than that it is fast and reliable.
Considering that I use Linux as a workstation that is important to me.

I find it funny how the newer users gravitate towards Compiz and the diehard pros end up on Openbox.

Openbox and gmrun is perfection.

I have a list of shortcut keys for window placement in my rc.xml that keep me away from the mouse as much as possible and I use [start-z] to bring up gmrun. 5-6 keystrokes starts and positions just about anything.

[handy]

I'm sorry to hear that Arch has made the Linux dimension of your life boring! :-|

It does reinforce what I have been trying to say about how stable Arch is & how little ongoing maintenance it requires, though.

[crimesaucer]

I already posted him the info' for turning off hotplugging?

I only skimmed through this thread..... so I didn't see that you had already posted the hotplugging tip. My bad.


As for Arch being "soooo Good"..... my reasons are:

Arch ABS/AUR - for building optimized packages
pacman and pacbuilder-svn - for a stable binary or a compiled package
ArchWiki guides - Full of info
Rolling Releases - I like the latest kernels and apps
Minimal Install - built from the base/dev up with only what I need
FTP Install CD - SUPER FAST INSTALL

...... and the forums/wikis are a good place to learn about Linux.

[thisllub]

I'm sorry to here that Arch has made the Linux dimension of your life boring! :-|

It does reinforce what I have been trying to say about how stable Arch is & how little ongoing maintenance it requires, though.

Ha.

That is the best thing about it.
I have realised that I was looking for less not more.

My analogy is that using Arch is like using the right spanner where other systems are more like using shifting spanners.
It is better because it is easier to have the way I want it.

Unfortunately though no Linux works properly on my laptop. There is an unresolved kernel bug that causes regular and prolonged bus freezes.

Fortunately BSD and OpenSolaris work perfectly.

However there is no BSD support for VirtualBox and OpenSolaris has poor support for filesystems like NTFS and EXT3.

After 6 months on PC-BSD I rate OpenSolaris a better overall choice.
If they get a ntfs-3g port it will enjoy a meteoric rise in popularity.

[santaslittlehelper]

As Judd Vinet, the founder of the Arch Linux project said: "[Arch Linux] is what you make it."
I believe it's as simple as that.

[kk0sse54]

Arch ABS/AUR - for building optimized packages
That right there I think is the best feature of Arch



However there is no BSD support for VirtualBox
Outside of using linux as the guest OS vbox is horrible, especially in it's regards to running BSD as a guest vm. Instead vmware is available through the linux compadibility layer and Qemu has been ported to every *BSD.

[mikeize]

I don't need hotplugging so I just added this to xorg.conf:



Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection


Then, all of my Synaptic Touchpad troubles AND my Mulitmedia Keys (using keytouch) worked perfectly again..... just like they had before xorg added hotplugging.

yeah, i've got that in xorg.conf already...

[mikeize]

the hotplugging thing didnt bother me too much, i just installed xf86-input-synaptics and everything seems fine as long as the HAL daemon is running. I don't even need a xorg.conf.

It's kinda funny, coz my touchpad always had the scroll funtion on the right side and now on Arch with these drivers to scroll i just need to use two fingers on it, kinda like Macbooks, i didnt even know that was possible with this old touchpad before lol.

i have this installed as well.

[crimesaucer]

yeah, i've got that in xorg.conf already...

You should post your xorg.conf either in here or in Arch's Forum..... (you might have already done this)


EDIT: One last question..... when you followed all of the wiki guides did you measure the area's of your scrollpad using:


synclient -m 100

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Synaptics#Fine_tuning_with_synclient

[kagashe]

Arch Linux is NOT "Good". It is a distribution for Linux geeks and not newbies. Only advantage is it runs faster mainly because limited no of services are running.

Ubuntu is better for newbies and even for Linux Geeks who don't have lot of time to set right something in Arch Linux when it breaks. Although, something breaks even in newest version of Ubuntu you can easily find solution due this forum and large user base.

There is nothing like Ubuntu.

kagashe

[sloggerkhan]

I like Arch because of rolling release and loose package manager dependancy couplings. So you can set up once and go form there for years.

I dislike the amount of work to get it set up to start with, though.

[duncanidaho391]

God, I could go on and on about Arch all day; it really is a great distro. Its for the person that wants to read the instruction manual before they use something.

Anyway, I've seen a lot of points made on previous posts that are reasons I love arch, but I'd also like to add that with Arch you also get the best KDE experience out there. There is vanilla kde 4, kdemod 4 (with nice patches and cool extra stuff), and kde3.

[chucky chuckaluck]

Its for the person that wants to read the instruction manual before they use something.

(uh-oh, part2)

[cardinals_fan]

Arch Linux is NOT "Good". It is a distribution for Linux geeks and not newbies. Only advantage is it runs faster mainly because limited no of services are running.

Ubuntu is better for newbies and even for Linux Geeks who don't have lot of time to set right something in Arch Linux when it breaks. Although, something breaks even in newest version of Ubuntu you can easily find solution due this forum and large user base.

There is nothing like Ubuntu.

kagashe
No, nothing is "good" in general.

[Kopachris]

Arch Linux is NOT "Good". It is a distribution for Linux geeks and not newbies. Only advantage is it runs faster mainly because limited no of services are running.

Ubuntu is better for newbies and even for Linux Geeks who don't have lot of time to set right something in Arch Linux when it breaks. Although, something breaks even in newest version of Ubuntu you can easily find solution due this forum and large user base.

There is nothing like Ubuntu.

kagashe
Ubuntu is great, that much is true. I love Ubuntu, and it's the distro that I have set as the default in GRUB. Arch wasn't meant for newbies or geeks that don't have a lot of time on their hands. To those of us who follow and use Arch, it's like a game. To us, customizing and tinkering with our computers is what we do for fun. That's the real reason we started using Linux: because it's fun to use the command line. It gives us a feeling of sweet nostalgia and power, even for those of us who never grew up in the pre-GUI days and have never known a CLI-only system until Linux.

Also, because Arch is so minimal, there are almost endless guides for customization and support. It took me a couple hours to hunt down how to get my wireless adapter to work in Debian, but it only took a quick search on the Arch wiki to figure it out for Arch.

Arch is not for the faint of heart, but it's a godsend for those brave enough to understand it.

Plus, they have space invaders on the installation CD! How cool is that? :p <lolz />

[imlinux]

Arch Linux is NOT "Good". It is a distribution for Linux geeks and not newbies. Only advantage is it runs faster mainly because limited no of services are running.

Ubuntu is better for newbies and even for Linux Geeks who don't have lot of time to set right something in Arch Linux when it breaks. Although, something breaks even in newest version of Ubuntu you can easily find solution due this forum and large user base.

There is nothing like Ubuntu.

kagashe
so how to disable extra or unnecessary services in ubuntu to make it tun like arch and what are these unnecessary services.

[Rokurosv]

I don't think Arch is for users scared of CLI, but if you're up for the challenge and have the documentation at hand I think a newcomer can install it.

Offtopic:
I think handy is the biggest Arch fan in these forums :D

Btw compiling e-17 from svn right now on Arch, got sick of gnome.

[kevdog]

You got instructions for e17-svn on Arch somewhere?

[mikeize]

You should post your xorg.conf either in here or in Arch's Forum..... (you might have already done this)


EDIT: One last question..... when you followed all of the wiki guides did you measure the area's of your scrollpad using:


synclient -m 100

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Synaptics#Fine_tuning_with_synclient

Don't want to hijack this thread any further, so here is my post over at the arch forums:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=502331#p502331

[handy]

Arch Linux is NOT "Good". It is a distribution for Linux geeks and not newbies. Only advantage is it runs faster mainly because limited no of services are running.

& being i686 specific, & having a simpler foundation.



Ubuntu is better for newbies and even for Linux Geeks who don't have lot of time to set right something in Arch Linux when it breaks. Although, something breaks even in newest version of Ubuntu you can easily find solution due this forum and large user base.

There is nothing like Ubuntu.

kagashe

As I keep saying, it takes no time at all to downgrade if you upgrade into trouble.

Apart from that if you need to set something right, you most likely broke it yourself, & Arch is no more a candidate for doing that than any other distro; it is probably less likely because of the manual configuration involved.

& yes, Ubuntu is great for newbies, intermediate & advanced users. It all comes down to what distro suits the individual user, it's great to have so many wonderful choices.

[Rokurosv]

You got instructions for e17-svn on Arch somewhere?

There is a section in the e-17 wiki about easy_e17. It's a script that downloads and compiles e-17 and it's apps for you. I'm testing it right now and so far it's solid.

[kelvin spratt]

I think Arch is as stable as anything out there certianly as or more than the newer versions of Ubuntu. I'm dyslexic I don't have problem with Arch set up files in fact they don't come any simpler. The wiki is second to none mainly copy and paste. The forum is also very helpful but you are expected to look for you problem 1st unlike some.

[PrimoTurbo]

Both of my favorite distros are Arch and Ubuntu, Arch is good because it has a good repository and allows you to assemble your own operating system with the components you want with out the need of compiling in most cases.

Ubuntu comes with everything already, which means less time spent setting things up but also means there are certain restrictions like customization is a slightly limited but not impossible.

Also Arch always has the newest releases of software.

[mips]

You got instructions for e17-svn on Arch somewhere?

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/E17#I_want_my_e17_packages_updated_more_often

[kagashe]

As I keep saying, it takes no time at all to downgrade if you upgrade into trouble.Please tell me how to downgrade Mplayer on Arch Linux.

kagashe

[fuzzyk.k]

its lightweight,its minimalistic, because of its minimalistic nature you learn a lot when using because you basically configure most of the system yourself

[RiceMonster]

Please tell me how to downgrade Mplayer on Arch Linux.

kagashe

cd /var/cache/pacman/pkg/
ls mplayer*

If you haven't cleared the old version from your cache, the package for the older vserion should be there.

So do this as root:
pacman -Rd mplayer
pacman - U (older mplayer-version).pkg.tar.gz

then edit /etc/pacman.conf

look for the line "#IgnorePkg ="

and change it to:
IgnorePkg = mplayer
or add it add the obove line if it's not there. Then pacman won't upgrade it.

[handy]

I don't think Arch is for users scared of CLI, but if you're up for the challenge and have the documentation at hand I think a newcomer can install it.

Offtopic:
I think handy is the biggest Arch fan in these forums :D

Btw compiling e-17 from svn right now on Arch, got sick of gnome.

No, I just have the time to type a lot, I'm the most vocal Arch user at the moment is all. ;)

[handy]

Please tell me how to downgrade Mplayer on Arch Linux.

kagashe

What I'm saying is that if you upgrade into trouble, you can look into your log, & then downgrade again so that you are back where you were before the upgrade.

After that, you have properly functioning system again & you can investigate on the Arch forum & elsewhere to gain an understanding as to what is causing your problem if you need to so you can solve it. Or at least know that you have to wait for upstream to fix the bug.

This how-to covers the steps involved:

http://grubbn.org/otheros/showthread.php?tid=11

[SomeGuyDude]

1) It's fast

2) It's light

3) It's easy

4) AUR is a gift from the gods

Anything else?

[K.Mandla]

Just about every complaint I had about Ubuntu was answered by Arch Linux, and that's why I used it as my main OS for more than a year. Ubuntu was sluggish, Arch was fast. Ubuntu was overloaded, Arch was sparse. Ubuntu was prepackaged, Arch was minimal.

These days I use something else (Crux), but I still go back to Arch from time to time. It's definitely one of the finest distributions out there. I heartily endorse it ... for whatever that's worth. :roll:

[SomeGuyDude]

Well CRUX is the Debian to Arch's Ubuntu, isn't it? How's that treating you? I've been tempted to try it, but I'm not sold just yet.

And handy, it's true though! I do so little maintenance it's almost boring now. I run an update once in a while but that's all.

[aaaantoine]

I don't think Arch is for users scared of CLI, but if you're up for the challenge and have the documentation at hand I think a newcomer can install it.

I would never dare recommend Arch to a Linux newbie. I would direct them to Ubuntu first, so that they can first see what Linux is capable of without wasting any time setting up.

Arch is more for people who know what they want in their distribution (or think they know what they want ;)).

Edit: Unless you mean a newcomer to Arch; in which case, everyone is one of those at some point. :)

[Kopachris]

I would never dare recommend Arch to a Linux newbie. I would direct them to Ubuntu first, so that they can first see what Linux is capable of without wasting any time setting up.

Arch is more for people who know what they want in their distribution (or think they know what they want ;)).

Edit: Unless you mean a newcomer to Arch; in which case, everyone is one of those at some point. :)
If a newbie wanted to become a guru, here's the distros I'd recommend the master in order:


Ubuntu
Debian
Arch
Gentoo
LFS

Arch is a good crossover from most everything preinstalled to building your OS yourself, IMO.

[chris4585]

I didn't read the whole thread, but this is a good Arch review

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090119#feature

[Rokurosv]

I would never dare recommend Arch to a Linux newbie. I would direct them to Ubuntu first, so that they can first see what Linux is capable of without wasting any time setting up.

Arch is more for people who know what they want in their distribution (or think they know what they want ;)).

Edit: Unless you mean a newcomer to Arch; in which case, everyone is one of those at some point. :)

Yeah I meant a newcomer to Arch.

I don't think I'll be touching LFS, perhaps Crux but that's as far I think I'll go :D.

[Polygon]

arch is the farthest i go. I dont want to spend half of my time compiling stuff, for almost no performance gain.

and arch was a PITA to set up because of damn madwifi. curse you atheros........

[Simian Man]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed. I think that once you set up a minimal distro like Arch or Gentoo, there's kind of a Placebo effect. You spent so long configuring that you imagine it feels more streamlined because otherwise you'd have wasted your time.

I have also found it to be more unstable than any other distro I've used. And to the poster who said that the only bugs they had were upstream, well yeah, Arch makes a point of using unpatched upstream sources.

Good for playing around with? Yes! Good for a production machine? It wouldn't be in my top ten.

[Polygon]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed. I think that once you set up a minimal distro like Arch or Gentoo, there's kind of a Placebo effect. You spent so long configuring that you imagine it feels more streamlined because otherwise you'd have wasted your time.

I have also found it to be more unstable than any other distro I've used. And to the poster who said that the only bugs they had were upstream, well yeah, Arch makes a point of using unpatched upstream sources.

Good for playing around with? Yes! Good for a production machine? It wouldn't be in my top ten.

it seems stable for me. its not like they are using bleeding edge svn, they are using like, actual release of each of the programs

[RiceMonster]

arch is the farthest i go. I dont want to spend half of my time compiling stuff, for almost no performance gain.

Yeah me neither. I don't buy it that you can really notice a performance gain and that it's worth all that compiling. That's why I won't use Gentoo.

[K.Mandla]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed.
Logic suggests that would be true, but just speaking from my own experience, it is definitely not.

[handy]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed. I think that once you set up a minimal distro like Arch or Gentoo, there's kind of a Placebo effect. You spent so long configuring that you imagine it feels more streamlined because otherwise you'd have wasted your time.

Apart from being a simpler design than the other distro's (whatever effect that has on speed?) it is quick & easy to build a very stable & reliable system up from nothing (that was designed for this kind of build) than it is to tear down a complicated structure, the tearing down would I'm sure for most users create an unstable mess.

The other thing that helps Arch as far as speed goes is that it is built for the i686 architecture.



I have also found it to be more unstable than any other distro I've used. And to the poster who said that the only bugs they had were upstream, well yeah, Arch makes a point of using unpatched upstream sources.

You were unlucky or something, because there are only a tiny minority of Arch users that find it unstable. As most consider it to be boring due to the lack of maintenance it requires.



Good for playing around with? Yes! Good for a production machine? It wouldn't be in my top ten.

Isn't it great to have so many great distro/BSD choices. I guess this is why they exist. Horses for courses eh!? ;-)

[smartboyathome]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed.

Not true. Especially on Debian-based systems, you can have a ton of packages which you can't remove, or it will remove half of your system. Yet, you don't use those packages. On Arch, the dependencies are much "cleaner", if you get what I mean. There aren't as many unneeded dependencies as there are on Debian-based systems.

Of course, I'm speaking from experience, so someone may have had a different one.

[thisllub]

The other thing that helps Arch as far as speed goes is that it is built for the i686 architecture.




I was under the impression mine was x86_64 :p


My experience of rolling release is that new releases either occur because of bug fixes or enhancements.
For a desktop system if these are relatively stable I am happy.

If something goes wrong it will be easier to find than with a full system upgrade.

I have a very simple setup with Openbox and gmrun. No panels no wallpaper just a black screen.
I recently reinstalled Arch from scratch after a hard disk failure.

If you have backups of your rc.conf & your home directory it is a very quick install & restore followed by pacman -Syu to bring everything up to date.

Nothing hard at all.

[cardinals_fan]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed. I think that once you set up a minimal distro like Arch or Gentoo, there's kind of a Placebo effect. You spent so long configuring that you imagine it feels more streamlined because otherwise you'd have wasted your time.
Removing things is often harder than adding them.

[Skripka]

Removing things is often harder than adding them.

H*ll, Arch with KDEmod is faster than Kubuntu any day of the week..it also runs and works better.

[benerivo]

I like any distro that allows you to choose what packages are installed, rather than uninstalling and reinstalling packages from the default setup. There are a few such distros, but i'm comfortable with Arch now, and the currency of the packages is excellent. With regards to stability, i would not use it if i were running a business (i would choose/recommend debian stable), but that is a totally different ball game.

EDIT - I'll also say that package dependencies are light, and it is fast, although in both cases not significantly better than my debian installation.

[handy]

I was under the impression mine was x86_64 :p

ha ha.

So's mine.

[adamlau]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed. I think that once you set up a minimal distro like Arch or Gentoo, there's kind of a Placebo effect. You spent so long configuring that you imagine it feels more streamlined because otherwise you'd have wasted your time.
Nope. Ubuntu Minimal + Xfce definitely lags behind Arch + Xfce with the exact same packages. I know.

[SomeGuyDude]

It is a neat distribution for tinkering and learning, but I think it's pretty bogus to claim that it's faster. If you install all of the things you need in Arch, and remove all of the things you don't need in another distribution, the results will be comparable in terms of speed. I think that once you set up a minimal distro like Arch or Gentoo, there's kind of a Placebo effect. You spent so long configuring that you imagine it feels more streamlined because otherwise you'd have wasted your time.

I have also found it to be more unstable than any other distro I've used. And to the poster who said that the only bugs they had were upstream, well yeah, Arch makes a point of using unpatched upstream sources.

Good for playing around with? Yes! Good for a production machine? It wouldn't be in my top ten.

Um, a few things.

1) Do you have any idea how hard it is to remove everything that comes on a big distro? It's the difference between building a chair and carving one out of a tree.

2) I've had ONE issue with Arch and it wasn't even a "break" so much as a change in design when Xorg changed.

3) I managed to complete my senior year of college with Arch. I'd say it's PLENTY stable.

[crimesaucer]

Please tell me how to downgrade Mplayer on Arch Linux.

kagashe

First off.... if you have upgraded any package (like mplayer) and you don't like the new version..... then you can always go back to your "/var/cache/pacman/pkg" directory and manually install your old package version with "pacman -U old-package-version.x86_64.pkg.tar.gz". (this is only possible if you don't erase your old packages with the cache cleaning command of "pacman -Scc")



If you don't have the old mplayer package in your "/var/cache/pacman/pkg"..... then I'm just guessing that you could use an edited ABS PKGBUILD....


Just use the current mplayer ABS PKGBUILD and then edit the pkgver= "old-version-numbers"


Then run "makepkg -c" to build it, and "pacman -U" to install it..... then to avoid upgrading it you put mplayer on the "IgnorePkg = mplayer" line in your /etc/pacman.conf file.

[crimesaucer]

Don't want to hijack this thread any further, so here is my post over at the arch forums:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=502331#p502331

I hope you saw my answer of adding:


InputDevice "SynapticsTouchpad" "SendCoreEvents"

to your ServerLayout section of your xorg.conf:



Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "SynapticsTouchpad" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

[imlinux]

is shiftlinux (http://www.shiftlinux.net/) based on arch? or is it going to be in its next release.

[kagashe]

What I'm saying is that if you upgrade into trouble, you can look into your log, & then downgrade again so that you are back where you were before the upgrade.

After that, you have properly functioning system again & you can investigate on the Arch forum & elsewhere to gain an understanding as to what is causing your problem if you need to so you can solve it. Or at least know that you have to wait for upstream to fix the bug.

This how-to covers the steps involved:

http://grubbn.org/otheros/showthread.php?tid=11Arch Linux has MPlayer dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-4.3.2 version which is broken it does not produce any video. There is no solution on Arch Linux forums because the bug is upstream.

I don't have the old version on my hard drive. Please tell me whether it is possible to get the old version from the repositories.

The current Arch Linux installation on my hard drive is useless if the mplayer can't play the videos.

kagashe

[ghindo]

Nope. Ubuntu Minimal + Xfce definitely lags behind Arch + Xfce with the exact same packages. I know.Why is that?

[handy]

Arch Linux has MPlayer dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-4.3.2 version which is broken it does not produce any video. There is no solution on Arch Linux forums because the bug is upstream.

I don't have the old version on my hard drive. Please tell me whether it is possible to get the old version from the repositories.

The current Arch Linux installation on my hard drive is useless if the mplayer can't play the videos.

kagashe

If you don't have the old package that you want in your cache, you are probably out of luck.

The only way to get a recently superseded package is to go to a mirror that is slow to update.

Under those circumstances this site can help:

http://users.archlinux.de/~gerbra/mirrorcheck.html

Because of this problem that you are experiencing, I use pacman -Sc instead of pacman -Scc , & only when I'm sure that my recent -Syu didn't bring me any problems.

I can't email you the package because I don't use mplayer, but hopefully someone else here or on the nOOST forum may be able to make it available to you?

[mips]

is shiftlinux (http://www.shiftlinux.net/) based on arch? or is it going to be in its next release.

Next release.



Posted Jan 16 2009 by simon360
More (http://www.shiftlinux.net/news/item/organizing-meeting-on-sunday-january-18-100-pm-est)

Shift Linux to be based on Arch (http://www.shiftlinux.net/news/item/shift-linux-to-be-based-on-arch)

As part of our new direction, I am proud to announce that Shift Linux will be moving away from Ubuntu, and instead switching over to Arch Linux. There are many reasons for this, including a more customizable distribution for us as developers to work with, and a faster and more streamlined start point.



There might be a Tech Demo out.
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=703946&st=0
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=707018 Make your own

[bryonak]

@handy:
I've read half through the thread, and I applaud your effort and enthusiasm about Arch.
I might try it out some time, but some of your comments rather put me off of it than make me curious...



No. The config files are not the same. Arch is different than all of the other distro's due its using the BSD style init (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Q.29_What_exactly_is_this_.27BSD-style.27_init_framework_I_keep_hearing_about.3F). It is much simpler underneath the hood due to this fact. It uses the very powerful /etc/rc.conf file to do many things, in a very simple fashion.

Makes it sound like all other Linux' are the same... there are lots of distros which diverge much further from the "mainstream" than Arch.



As you can see, there isn't anything like that in other Linux distro's, it is part of the BSD style init (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Q.29_What_exactly_is_this_.27BSD-style.27_init_framework_I_keep_hearing_about.3F) that is a foundation of Arch.

I consider myself a power user. Most by-choice-Linux-users are, unless someone did the setup and configuration for them.
However I never wanted to fine tune runlevels and the /etc/rc files (except rc.local for setting my fan speed at the beginning), because I find it too much of a time effort.
I don't want to spend time maintaining my machine, but rather using it. Having to do any maintenance (even 2 minutes) more than once every other week is too much.***
I consider upgrading some minor program version which gives no features I will use 'maintenance'.
Ubuntu has so far done the best job of it for me, and making a 2 hour investment every six months + maybe 2-8 (varies greatly from one version to another) for fixing things/trying out new stuff is acceptable in my view. I don't use the update button unless it indicates a security update (exclamation mark), which isn't that frequent. And then all the other queued updates get installed too.
Also being able to install in under 10 mouse clicks plus not having to be present most of the actual install time is definitely worth something.

*** Note that this is different from customising. Customising gives me a direct benefit for the invested time, as opposed to keeping things as they are.
Additionally, optional customisation at any chosen time after the install is more valuable than forced customisation at install time.
I realise that Arch is very apt in terms of customisation, but so is FOSS in general.




It is faster, & no other Linux, can be similarly configured, as Arch is built in a fundamentally different way than all the others, as I hope the BSD style init links show.
The statement that "no other Linux" could have a similar configuration and speed is plainly wrong (LFS anyone?), but I wont indulge in hairsplitting here.
Anyway, this is something I don't really buy in.
It has been hyped much more with Gentoo, but as it turns out, I could make Ubuntu as fast by removing stuff, optimizing/pruning the services and profiles, etc. They're there for a reason, which is called usability (or 'feature creep' ;)).
Of course, people who prefer to add them by hand if needed will find this possibility great. I don't mind a bit of HD and menu space used if I can simply start an application (say an instant messenger) from the menu... instead of first informing myself about which one to use on the web and then installing it (you know, 5 seconds vs 20 min).


Now don't get me wrong. Arch is certainly one of the most notable Linux distributions out there, and I'm sure it's very good at what it does.
It's just that the vast majority of computer users is a lot less of a 'power user' than I am, and I find it too much of a hassle myself. (...mind you, without even having really tried it)

If Arch had become famous a few years earlier, I would have been quite a fan now... but at the moment, I don't want to spend time fiddling with my computer instead of doing actual work on it.

[tjwoosta]

If Arch had become famous a few years earlier, I would have been quite a fan now... but at the moment, I don't want to spend time fiddling with my computer instead of doing actual work on it.

i can see your point here and i agree to a certain extent

arch is a great distro, but keep in mind that arch is "do it yourself"

you build it from the base up, and you configure most things manually

this type of distro does give great flexability, and it can be very stable and fast when setup right, but it is always going to require some effort on your part to get it there

if your a linux user who would rather just plug it in and go, i would just say stick to ubuntu

[Skripka]

i can see your point here and i agree to a certain extent

arch is a great distro, but keep in mind that arch is "do it yourself"

you build it from the base up, and you configure most things manually

this type of distro does give great flexability, and it can be very stable and fast when setup right, but it is always going to require some effort on your part to get it there

if your a linux user who would rather just plug it in and go, i would just say stick to ubuntu

Yep, it takes some time to setup...then again you earn that time back over time with Ubuntu needing reinstalled to the latest version every 6 months.

But in all honesty, the difference between Arch and Ubuntu is the difference between ordering your pizza (from Domino's, let us say...ewww) or opening a cookbook and reading and making it how you want yourself. If you can follow a cookbook-you can build Arch. Of course, you need the right midset and set of expectations to do it-but it ain't that hard.

Also, it is well known the Kubuntu is probably at or near the bottom of the hierarchy of KDE distros, and I'd say that KDEmod on Arch is at or near the top.

[Simian Man]

If you want a minimal install of any distribution, I wouldn't recommend starting with the default and then stripping stuff out. As others have said, that is difficult and you are likely to break your system, especially with Ubuntu because the package dependencies can be a little insane.

I'd recommend starting from scratch and then installing only what you want. With Ubuntu it can be done with the mini.iso CD, and with others like Fedora, you can customize the install from the DVD. In my experience, if you do this there is no noticeable difference from Arch.

And the i686 packages will make some difference, though Fedora does use i686 on architectures that support it for the kernel and glibc (the rest of the packages are rarely bottlenecks). I wonder if Ubuntu does this? Also if you are using the x86_64 architecture, this is obviously not an issue.

As for stability that is always anecdotal. I am glad to here that most people find Arch suitably stable. I will definitely try it again before too long.


Isn't it great to have so many great distro/BSD choices. I guess this is why they exist. Horses for courses eh!?
Absolutely!

[gn2]

Um, a few things.

1) Do you have any idea how hard it is to remove everything that comes on a big distro? It's the difference between building a chair and carving one out of a tree.

But you're not compelled to use the Desktop CD.
It's perfectly possible to create your own personalised Ubuntu installation by choosing precisely what you want to install.

[eldragon]

@ bryonak

all i can say is, one day will come when an ubuntu relase breaks, or simply does not work with your hardware, and you will find yourself using arch.

that was the very reason that made me switch this laptop to arch. had to do it twice since i couldnt set up the DE correctly, but im a bit of a .....

ubuntu has one big problem, there is an increasing lack of attention towards bug reports. maybe its because launchpad is flooded by the ammount of users. but, in my experience, a bug that goes crossing release dates one after another being ignored is unacceptable. especially when patches got released.

i managed to get that patch includded in the arch kernel patchset (since its a hack, it doesnt belong to the vanilla kernel) in less than a month of reporting it to the arch devs. if you want more info on it, follow kernel bug ticket 9905 where many people contributed to have the patch done, yet even after notifying ubuntu debs about it, nothing happened. but heck, there must be a reason.

the arch ecosystem is a bit harsher on newbies, but only on those that fail to use google, the wiki(incredibly up to date), or the forum search button.

i still roam these forums because i know i can be of assistance here. but unless there is a big change of attitude consiering bugs. ubuntu is nothing but a free cd and stickers every 6 monthes.

[CarpKing]

And the i686 packages will make some difference, though Fedora does use i686 on architectures that support it for the kernel and glibc (the rest of the packages are rarely bottlenecks). I wonder if Ubuntu does this? Also if you are using the x86_64 architecture, this is obviously not an issue.

IIRC that's what the "generic" kernel is for- before that there were i686 and k7 kernels in addition to i386. Not sure about glibc though.

[scottuss]

I got bored and decided to install Arch on an old laptop, it blew me away so I replaced Ubuntu on my main desktop box too. For anyone wanting to argue about the speed issue, I'm on the side that says Arch IS faster.

And as for ease of use, it's just not for newbies that's all. If you know a little about Linux in general and want to get your hands (slightly) dirty, Arch is the way to go.

Compiz runs more smoothly on my Arch setup than it ever did on Ubuntu, and setting up 64 bit Flash for Firefox was a one liner in the console:

(pacman -S flashplugin) and I can tell you that it wasn't that simple on Ubuntu! Lol!

Anyway, going to keep going with Arch for some time (The urge to distro hop has finally been put out.. weird)

[Polygon]

yes, sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree is so hard =P

and i cant get compiz working on my arch box. the wiki's instructions dont work....and now i know why we really do need compiz or some sort of compositing, without it, its ugly! (stuff like switching work spaces is just windows flickering in and out depending on what work space your in, yechhh!)

[handy]

@handy:
I've read half through the thread, and I applaud your effort and enthusiasm about Arch.

Thanks. ;-)



I might try it out some time, but some of your comments rather put me off of it than make me curious...

Some of your queries that follow have already been answered, but I'll have another go.



Makes it sound like all other Linux' are the same... there are lots of distros which diverge much further from the "mainstream" than Arch.

Do any others use the BSD style init?



I consider myself a power user. Most by-choice-Linux-users are, unless someone did the setup and configuration for them.
However I never wanted to fine tune runlevels and the /etc/rc files (except rc.local for setting my fan speed at the beginning), because I find it too much of a time effort.

Power user is a very loose variable, without a definition it means little I think. From your above statement I think that you & I have two very different definitions, which matters not, except when we communicate on the subject. ;-)



I don't want to spend time maintaining my machine, but rather using it. Having to do any maintenance (even 2 minutes) more than once every other week is too much.***

Again this does not fit my definition of power user.



I consider upgrading some minor program version which gives no features I will use 'maintenance'.
Ubuntu has so far done the best job of it for me, and making a 2 hour investment every six months + maybe 2-8 (varies greatly from one version to another) for fixing things/trying out new stuff is acceptable in my view. I don't use the update button unless it indicates a security update (exclamation mark), which isn't that frequent. And then all the other queued updates get installed too.
Also being able to install in under 10 mouse clicks plus not having to be present most of the actual install time is definitely worth something.

Again, (& please, I am not in any way meaning any disrespect, it is just a matter of definition) I don't consider your usage to be that of a power user, you are a Linux user who prefers to do the minimum amount of system maintenance & exploration. Which is fine, that is how I mostly use Arch these days myself. Only occasionally choosing to get my hands dirty trying something different.



*** Note that this is different from customising. Customising gives me a direct benefit for the invested time, as opposed to keeping things as they are.

As you may appreciate, the entire Arch installation is customisation, & being a rolling release it just continually becomes more & more comfortable for the user/builder as the years go by.



Additionally, optional customisation at any chosen time after the install is more valuable than forced customisation at install time.

For you. ;-)



I realise that Arch is very apt in terms of customisation, but so is FOSS in general.

That statement is almost too loose for me to do anything with; Arch is a Linux distro' which requires choices all the way through the installation. These choices tailor the personally customised installation to suit the user/builder of the system.



The statement that "no other Linux" could have a similar configuration and speed is plainly wrong (LFS anyone?)

True. I should have said that differently.

Arch was built via LFS, & the pacman system was written for it by the builder.




but I wont indulge in hairsplitting here.
Anyway, this is something I don't really buy in.
It has been hyped much more with Gentoo

Gentoo does not use the BSD style init. It is my understanding that no other Linux is built this way. Though I am becoming aware that other systems are starting to base themselves on Arch, such as Shift Linux.



but as it turns out, I could make Ubuntu as fast by removing stuff,

Not really, I believe you would have a hell of time due to the way that Ubuntu so tightly integrates its packages. For example, if you remove evolution, you will remove half of Gnome. The Ubuntu meta-packaging system makes it very difficult to work with, it is far, far easier & much much quicker to build a system up, than to dismantle one, especially if you want it to work properly.



optimizing/pruning the services and profiles, etc. They're there for a reason, which is called usability (or 'feature creep' ;)).


Ubuntu tries to be all things to all people, this means that very few users would use all of the app's & tools that are available in a standard Ubuntu install. Therefore there are services & such that are redundant, which is the major reason why Ubuntu is probably the slowest Linux distro available.



Of course, people who prefer to add them by hand if needed will find this possibility great. I don't mind a bit of HD and menu space used if I can simply start an application (say an instant messenger) from the menu... instead of first informing myself about which one to use on the web and then installing it (you know, 5 seconds vs 20 min).

You pay for what you get. The benefit of setting up Arch is that it stays set up the way that you have set it up, which really should be the way that suits you best. It doesn't change unless you change it, it is not changed because a committee deciding a change was beneficial to the general user base of a distro.



Now don't get me wrong. Arch is certainly one of the most notable Linux distributions out there, and I'm sure it's very good at what it does.

It surely is, for those that it suits.



It's just that the vast majority of computer users is a lot less of a 'power user' than I am

Again, there is this definition thing going on... ;-)



and I find it too much of a hassle myself. (...mind you, without even having really tried it).

& trying it is really the only way to know about it.



If Arch had become famous a few years earlier, I would have been quite a fan now... but at the moment, I don't want to spend time fiddling with my computer instead of doing actual work on it.

Which is what a user, as a opposed to a power user does.

[cardinals_fan]

Do any others use the BSD style init?

Oh yes. Slackware and CRUX do as well.

You might want to check out the SliTaz init system. It is a whole different deal, and I've fallen in love with the simplicity.

[handy]

Oh yes. Slackware and CRUX do as well.

You might want to check out the SliTaz init system. It is a whole different deal, and I've fallen in love with the simplicity.

Cool, thanks. :-D

[crimesaucer]

Arch Linux has MPlayer dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-4.3.2 version which is broken it does not produce any video. There is no solution on Arch Linux forums because the bug is upstream.

I don't have the old version on my hard drive. Please tell me whether it is possible to get the old version from the repositories.

The current Arch Linux installation on my hard drive is useless if the mplayer can't play the videos.

kagashe


From the package repositories:
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=mplayer


From the AUR 1st page:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?O=0&K=mplayer&do_Search=Go


From the AUR 2nd page:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?O=25&K=mplayer&do_Search=Go&PP=25&SO=a


The Mplayer wiki:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mplayer


and beside all of these option.... you could always just got to the mplayer page: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

..... And either build mplayer the old way with the ./configure make & make install..... or install ABS: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS and then edit your ABS PKGBUILD to use any of the working versions from the mplayerhq download page that I linked you to.....


OR use VLC, totem, totem-xine, xine-ui, even banshee can play videos now...... and there are plugins like mozplugger that work very well.

[handy]

There surely is more than one way to skin that cat! lol

[kagashe]

Arch Linux has MPlayer dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-4.3.2 version which is broken it does not produce any video. There is no solution on Arch Linux forums because the bug is upstream.

I don't have the old version on my hard drive. Please tell me whether it is possible to get the old version from the repositories.

The current Arch Linux installation on my hard drive is useless if the mplayer can't play the videos.

kagasheAfter setting the Preference/Video to x11 X11(XImage/Shm) in GUI, it works.

I don't know why it selects xv (may be because I am running without any xorg.conf).

kagashe

[grndslm]

Much CRUD being thrown around.

Slackware is for sure BSD-style init. I am fairly certain Gentoo is as well.

And the speed issue... if Ubuntu and Arch had nearly identical packages, Arch would win because everything will have been compiled for the i686 architecture. And the BSD-style init system helps a bit, I'm sure.

Everything comes down to Ubuntu trying to be everything to everyone. That's all it is. That's their main objective. That's why they compile on the generic i386 arch instead of i686. That's why they use ISOLINUX on their LiveCDs instead of GRUB. That's why they only use LiveCDs instead of LiveDVDs. That's why they ship out LiveCDs for free to anyone who doesn't have broadband and/or CD burner & blanks. That's why they use GNOME. That's why they focus so much on plug and play hardware support more than any other distro.

It's really not that hard to "whittle down" Ubuntu's Sessions and Services menus... and trim down some more scripts with sysv-rc-conf. Or clearly, openbox could be installed on Ubuntu if preferred. It would all be much quicker doing it like than than reading the Arch wiki just to get wireless drivers working or to grab, install, & show GNOME.

That being said....

I'd love to try Arch for the many reasons mentioned here already, mainly the rolling release schedule. If Ubuntu offered something like this, perhaps bugs would actually get squashed. If they skip 2 or 3 minor kernel versions, who knows when & where the bug was introduced.

Ubuntu hardware-detection and their continued "sane" defaults for "sane" human beings (not some tweakers) plus the latest packages the day they're officially released would be Heaven.

[handy]

Slackware is for sure BSD-style init. I am fairly certain Gentoo is as well.

Arch & Slackware use the BSD style init, Gentoo uses a customised version.



It's really not that hard to "whittle down" Ubuntu's Sessions and Services menus... and trim down some more scripts with sysv-rc-conf. Or clearly, openbox could be installed on Ubuntu if preferred. It would all be much quicker doing it like than than reading the Arch wiki just to get wireless drivers working or to grab, install, & show GNOME.

I think I'd rather the tidy installation gained from building from scratch, than the mess I would make tearing a distro apart. That's me anyway.

Some people have wireless trouble on some distro's. Arch is not the sole owner of that problem, but with Arch you ain't going anywhere without internet. ;-)

Gnome's no drama to install on Arch?



Ubuntu hardware-detection and their continued "sane" defaults for "sane" human beings (not some tweakers) plus the latest packages the day they're officially released would be Heaven.

Strange that people consider Arch to be an insane tweakers distro?

The only way to find out what Arch is, is to try it. Everyone who successfully installs Arch is always surprised by the experience, rarely are they not pleasantly surprised.

Though the interesting thing I find is, that many months down the track you are enjoying this new way of computing even more...

[hatten]

sat and installed arch yesterday, and it was easier than i thought. But ******* how i hate that in doesn't have the swedish dvorak keyboard as a layout, and that the default is us-qwerty meaning a lot of searching to be able to type "root" and "km". After installing and at bootup it forced me to enter my root password...i enter it and it is wrong...qwerty -_-'
after several tries i have decided to reinstall. with 12345 as a temporary root password (that's the same on almost every keyboard layout.)
guess i did something wrong in xorg.conf or something. And i will download the se-dvorak layout, put on a USB stick, and move into the correct folder.

[scottuss]

yes, sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree is so hard =P
and i cant get compiz working on my arch box. the wiki's instructions dont work....and now i know why we really do need compiz or some sort of compositing, without it, its ugly! (stuff like switching work spaces is just windows flickering in and out depending on what work space your in, yechhh!)

Actually, it isn't hard your right. But then the lack of stability (you must have read about the issue in Firefox where in place of Flash components you get a grey box?)

And as for the compiz stuff, do you have 3d drivers installed for your card?

[kelvin spratt]

Originally Posted by Polygon http://ubuntuforums.org/images/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6775394#post6775394)
yes, sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree is so hard =P
and i cant get compiz working on my arch box. the wiki's instructions dont work....and now i know why we really do need compiz or some sort of compositing, without it, its ugly! (stuff like switching work spaces is just windows flickering in and out depending on what work space your in, yechhh!)

Compiz is so simple to install and the default settings are all most people need. if you have problems with the CLI, pacman -S shaman will get you a graphical pacman then search compiz for your architecture then search cssm and emerald and fusion icon and install. if your card is nvidia its pacman -S nvidia to install the driver so simple

[Skripka]

Compiz is so simple to install and the default settings are all most people need. if you have problems with the CLI, pacman -S shamin

Psss-that should actually be:



pacman -S shaman


Bloody spelling;)

[mips]

But ******* how i hate that in doesn't have the swedish dvorak keyboard as a layout...

When you initially boot the Arch cd in the text on the screen where it tells you the command to run 'setup' it also mentions two other commands to set your date/time as well as your keyboard layout. Is the Swedish Dvorak keyboard not in the list of available keyboards? Are there any Dvorak keyboards listed at all?

[kelvin spratt]

pacman -S shaman oops. Your write thank you

[bryonak]

@ bryonak

all i can say is, one day will come when an ubuntu relase breaks, or simply does not work with your hardware, and you will find yourself using arch.


I don't think so :D.
There are lots of other distros that'd suit my needs well at the moment.




Thanks. ;-)

Do any others use the BSD style init?



Slackware does. As well as Frugalware, Stampede, Vector and other Slackware derivatives like SLAX. (there's quite a bunch of those)



Power user is a very loose variable, without a definition it means little I think. From your above statement I think that you & I have two very different definitions, which matters not, except when we communicate on the subject. ;-)



Indeed, we should find a common denominator.
Let's try an analogy (with computer terms in parentheses)... For a world champion (extremely skilled coder/tweaker) of a sport - let's say soccer, the local regional champion (someone clued up about computers who maintains all PC's of his friends and extended family) of said sport in a given district is a very weak player (much less of a 'power user').
Nevertheless, this regional guy is much a stronger player than thousands of people who play soccer as a hobby in his district ('normal' users). He goes to soccer trainig 5 times a week and spends a lot of money for shoes, balls etc.
What I wan't to say: he plays the sport much better (is more of a power user) than 99% of the soccer players in the world (normal computer users like your parents, the bus driver, that girl at the counter...).

Feel free to find any flaws in this...
I hope it makes it a bit more clear where I draw the line for 'power users'.



Again, (& please, I am not in any way meaning any disrespect, it is just a matter of definition) I don't consider your usage to be that of a power user, you are a Linux user who prefers to do the minimum amount of system maintenance & exploration. Which is fine, that is how I mostly use Arch these days myself. Only occasionally choosing to get my hands dirty trying something different.


I do (or have done, recently less) a lot of exploration, this is why I stress the point between maintenance and customising.
The machines I use as desktops/laptops usually bear little resemblance to a default Ubuntu setup, and certainly not only theme-wise.
Just for example: I've written a bunch of custom on-wlan-connect scripts that mount folders and start certain tools when I connect to my home wlan.
Or a fan regulating script for my MBP.
Or I've written a wrapper for Unison, which makes backups a bit simpler and thus saves me time (the crucial point).
I'm using Mint's menu on the machine I'm typing on now, because I like it better than Gnome's.
That's what I call customising, it gives me a new, 'real' benefit which wasn't there before.

What I look upon as 'maintenance' is largely determined by comparison. Surely configuring things from ground up gives me a benefit which wasn't there before, but then there are distros where it's already there and well configured too. The maintenance aspect especially comes in when it's about features which I don't want to use/configure.

Personally, I don't like having to select (= being forced to divert my time and attention to) install options which won't really matter much later while they are already sanely preconfigured somewhere else.

This is where you and me diverge, and I fully acknowledge the benefits of Arch there!

Why this discussion then? For the sake of a discussion, of course. It may give people a better view on the differences, and maybe some compelling arguments to Arch proponents ;)




For you. ;-)

I don't like that catchphrase :P
Generally (that is, not just personally, if I may be so bold), I do think it's better to have sane defaults and the ability to customise if I don't agree with those. It gives me more freedom of choice.





That statement is almost too loose for me to do anything with; Arch is a Linux distro' which requires choices all the way through the installation. These choices tailor the personally customised installation to suit the user/builder of the system.

I just wanted to say that it's generally possible to customize much more on a given Linux distro than you have time for. Even hardcore uber power users ;)




Not really, I believe you would have a hell of time due to the way that Ubuntu so tightly integrates its packages. For example, if you remove evolution, you will remove half of Gnome. The Ubuntu meta-packaging system makes it very difficult to work with, it is far, far easier & much much quicker to build a system up, than to dismantle one, especially if you want it to work properly.

There have been hundreds of arguments over this. It's not the different binaries. I just have to turn off all the services/features and install a lighter WM/DE.
That's because compile flags (which result in different binaries, especially in Gentoo's case) do not make much of a speed difference***. It is measurable, but rarely translates into real world usage.
Tracker running in the background all the time in Ubuntu and not in Arch makes a difference. That's (and a lot of others in this category... volume and drive managers etc...) what makes Arch faster.

*** Some Gentoo users still argue that they do, but most have switched to proclaiming that it simply gives more control and 'personality' instead of speed.



Ubuntu tries to be all things to all people, this means that very few users would use all of the app's & tools that are available in a standard Ubuntu install. Therefore there are services & such that are redundant, which is the major reason why Ubuntu is probably the slowest Linux distro available.

Exactly.



You pay for what you get. The benefit of setting up Arch is that it stays set up the way that you have set it up, which really should be the way that suits you best. It doesn't change unless you change it, it is not changed because a committee deciding a change was beneficial to the general user base of a distro.

That's certainly a strong point of Arch.



& trying it is really the only way to know about it.

True. I'm afraid I don't want to spend that time right now (or in the foreseeable future), so I'll resort to talking smartly about it ;D

[hatten]

When you initially boot the Arch cd in the text on the screen where it tells you the command to run 'setup' it also mentions two other commands to set your date/time as well as your keyboard layout. Is the Swedish Dvorak keyboard not in the list of available keyboards? Are there any Dvorak keyboards listed at all?

there is ANSI dvorak, classic dvorak, left hand dvorak, right hand dvorak and norweigan dvorak. All of them got the punctation marks at the wrong places :(
Yep i read the manual ;):popcorn:

[dragos240]

IMHO simplicity.

[chucky chuckaluck]

IMHO simplicity.

and speaking of which... arch taught me the difference between 'simplicity' and 'easy'. it's like the difference between having just a bar and some plates and owning a bowflex machine.

[cardinals_fan]

and speaking of which... arch taught me the difference between 'simplicity' and 'easy'. it's like the difference between having just a bar and some plates and owning a bowflex machine.
...or an indoor track vs. a trail through the woods.

[handy]

I don't think so :D.
There are lots of other distros that'd suit my needs well at the moment.





Slackware does. As well as Frugalware, Stampede, Vector and other Slackware derivatives like SLAX. (there's quite a bunch of those)



Indeed, we should find a common denominator.
Let's try an analogy (with computer terms in parentheses)... For a world champion (extremely skilled coder/tweaker) of a sport - let's say soccer, the local regional champion (someone clued up about computers who maintains all PC's of his friends and extended family) of said sport in a given district is a very weak player (much less of a 'power user').
Nevertheless, this regional guy is much a stronger player than thousands of people who play soccer as a hobby in his district ('normal' users). He goes to soccer trainig 5 times a week and spends a lot of money for shoes, balls etc.
What I wan't to say: he plays the sport much better (is more of a power user) than 99% of the soccer players in the world (normal computer users like your parents, the bus driver, that girl at the counter...).

Feel free to find any flaws in this...
I hope it makes it a bit more clear where I draw the line for 'power users'.



I do (or have done, recently less) a lot of exploration, this is why I stress the point between maintenance and customising.
The machines I use as desktops/laptops usually bear little resemblance to a default Ubuntu setup, and certainly not only theme-wise.
Just for example: I've written a bunch of custom on-wlan-connect scripts that mount folders and start certain tools when I connect to my home wlan.
Or a fan regulating script for my MBP.
Or I've written a wrapper for Unison, which makes backups a bit simpler and thus saves me time (the crucial point).
I'm using Mint's menu on the machine I'm typing on now, because I like it better than Gnome's.
That's what I call customising, it gives me a new, 'real' benefit which wasn't there before.

What I look upon as 'maintenance' is largely determined by comparison. Surely configuring things from ground up gives me a benefit which wasn't there before, but then there are distros where it's already there and well configured too. The maintenance aspect especially comes in when it's about features which I don't want to use/configure.

Personally, I don't like having to select (= being forced to divert my time and attention to) install options which won't really matter much later while they are already sanely preconfigured somewhere else.

This is where you and me diverge, and I fully acknowledge the benefits of Arch there!

Why this discussion then? For the sake of a discussion, of course. It may give people a better view on the differences, and maybe some compelling arguments to Arch proponents ;)



I don't like that catchphrase :P
Generally (that is, not just personally, if I may be so bold), I do think it's better to have sane defaults and the ability to customise if I don't agree with those. It gives me more freedom of choice.




I just wanted to say that it's generally possible to customize much more on a given Linux distro than you have time for. Even hardcore uber power users ;)



There have been hundreds of arguments over this. It's not the different binaries. I just have to turn off all the services/features and install a lighter WM/DE.
That's because compile flags (which result in different binaries, especially in Gentoo's case) do not make much of a speed difference***. It is measurable, but rarely translates into real world usage.
Tracker running in the background all the time in Ubuntu and not in Arch makes a difference. That's (and a lot of others in this category... volume and drive managers etc...) what makes Arch faster.

*** Some Gentoo users still argue that they do, but most have switched to proclaiming that it simply gives more control and 'personality' instead of speed.


Exactly.


That's certainly a strong point of Arch.


True. I'm afraid I don't want to spend that time right now (or in the foreseeable future), so I'll resort to talking smartly about it ;D

I'm running out of steam, as far as saying the same things over & over, again & again; so I'll just say, yep, I totally agree with you, in that after trying, we end up using what suits us at that time.

Similarly to everyone else (I hope) I too am extremely grateful for the wondrous array of Linux/BSD systems at our disposal. :D

[PrimoTurbo]

I think arch is good because it's simple and to some degree easy but also has a lot of good documentation and many problems can be fixed by searching the forums.

[Starlight]

I'm curious, is Arch noticeably faster than Ubuntu when using it? I downloaded the Chakra Live CD recently and I'm thinking whether I should try installing it. It's the same as Arch Linux, but it has a graphical installer, already included KDE, and seems to do some of the initial configuration automatically. :) And another question, is it just as easy to install proprietary stuff like flash, codecs, etc. on Arch as it is on Ubuntu?

[PrimoTurbo]

I'm curious, is Arch noticeably faster than Ubuntu when using it? I downloaded the Chakra Live CD recently and I'm thinking whether I should try installing it. It's the same as Arch Linux, but it has a graphical installer, already included KDE, and seems to do some of the initial configuration automatically. :) And another question, is it just as easy to install proprietary stuff like flash, codecs, etc. on Arch as it is on Ubuntu?

I think it's faster in general but also can be made much faster if you choose to run less daemons and a light wd like openbox.

I'm running arch on a P3 730Mhz and it runs very well. Flash and all the codecs are very easy to install with only 1 or 2 commands. I suggest to configure it yourself by following the wiki.

[Tmi]

And another question, is it just as easy to install proprietary stuff like flash, codecs, etc. on Arch as it is on Ubuntu?

I installed Arch yesterday and had no problems what so ever with flash or codecs. Flash was just a simple "sudo pacman -S flashplugin" and the codecs I think came as dependencies to players. When installing some media players pacman also gives a message where it givs tips on "optional dependencies" which often is codecs. Then you just have to copy&paste them and install them too and you have the codecs.

[Skripka]

I'm curious, is Arch noticeably faster than Ubuntu when using it? I downloaded the Chakra Live CD recently and I'm thinking whether I should try installing it. It's the same as Arch Linux, but it has a graphical installer, already included KDE, and seems to do some of the initial configuration automatically. :) And another question, is it just as easy to install proprietary stuff like flash, codecs, etc. on Arch as it is on Ubuntu?

The latest Chakra Alpha2 ISO is buggy-and known to crash around 82%.

I HIGHLY recommend just installing Arch, then adding KDEmod. Why you ask? Because the Arch install is a tutorial into how Arch works, and why. Skip the tutorial-and you're left up a creek without a paddle if something goes wrong. The Arch install is nowhere near as hard or as long as it would seem. If you can follow a cookbook recipe, you can install Arch.

[Cenotaph]

Installing Arch is really easy, don't let the CLI scare you away, seriously. I was skeptical about some of Arch's aspects, and overall i think Ubuntu is still "the" distro to have, but Arch was a nice refreshing surprise.

The best i felt when trying a new distro since i first tried ubuntu back in 2005.

[oobuntoo]

Does Arch have subpixel rendering enable by default like Ubuntu? I like to try out a new distro with better KDE implementation, but I don't want to compile my own package just to have lcd subpixel rendering support. It's my only reason I'm sticking with Kubuntu.

[Skripka]

Does Arch have subpixel rendering enable by default like Ubuntu? I like to try out a new distro with better KDE implementation, but I don't want to compile my own package just to have lcd subpixel rendering support. It's my only reason I'm sticking with Kubuntu.

Arch by "default", is a minimal text based linux. Ergo "by defualt" there is no GUI per se. You grab the GUI and DE you want to use yourself (as easy as "pacman -S kdemod" or "pacman -S kdemod-complete"). KDEmod is one of the best implementations of KDE out there. The option for sub-pixel rendering is right there in KDEmod where it would be in Kubuntu-it isn't on by default-but it is just a check box away in the KDE Sys preferences>Appearance>fonts

[gjoellee]

Why is Arch so good?


It is optimized for i686 or X64x84
It is very fast :p
It is light, but yet full of options! :p
It lets YOU be in control, you start off with the basic command line, then install what you would like with pacman (package manager). You has only what YOU want installed, and you pretty much "build" and configure the system your self. That again makes Arch fast!
It is bleeding edge on up to date software!!!!!!!!
It is extremely flexible
It is on rolling release (that means that you just have to update it normally to get the new versions of Arch Linux)
It is fast (yes, I wrote it again) :p
You are able to install packages from the Arch Linux User Repository (AUR), where you can find packages that you don't find in the normal repositories.
It is Linux :p
If you install Arch you will learn about Linux... that is why Arch users usually know slightly more then many users of other distributions.
It is fast (yes, I wrote it again) :p

[chucky chuckaluck]

If you install Arch you will learn about Linux... that is why Arch users usually know slightly more then many users of other distributions.

there are some definite exceptions to that rule.

[oobuntoo]

Arch by "default", is a minimal text based linux. Ergo "by defualt" there is no GUI per se. You grab the GUI and DE you want to use yourself (as easy as "pacman -S kdemod" or "pacman -S kdemod-complete"). KDEmod is one of the best implementations of KDE out there. The option for sub-pixel rendering is right there in KDEmod where it would be in Kubuntu-it isn't on by default-but it is just a check box away in the KDE Sys preferences>Appearance>fonts

I'm aware the KDE font setting you're referring to. What I'm referring to is the David Turner's font hinting patches that render fonts similar to MS ClearType. Ubuntu seems to be the only distro that uses these patches. Most other distro don't because these patches may infringe on MS patent, so end-users have to patch Freetype and other libraries themselves. On LCD, these patches make huge difference.

[Skripka]

I'm aware the KDE font setting you're referring to. What I'm referring to is the David Turner's font hinting patches that render fonts similar to MS ClearType. Ubuntu seems to be the only distro that uses these patches. Most other distro don't because these patches may infringe on MS patent, so end-users have to patch Freetype and other libraries themselves. On LCD, these patches make huge difference.

I believe this thread o'er in yonder Arch forums may answer your query:

http://bbs.archlinux.org:80/viewtopic.php?id=41256

[mips]

there are some definite exceptions to that rule.

lol. Please don't sell yourself short, we can all do so much more then we give ourselves credit for :)

[gjoellee]

there are some definite exceptions to that rule.

Yes there are...but if we look in to the totally basic user of both Arch, and ex: PCLinuxOS an Arch user would probably know more about the "advanced" stuff in Linux.

[kidux]

Reading this thread has made me want to set up an Arch machine. The points brought up were the reasons I was such a Slackware fan forever, but then the choice to go exclusively KDE and the lack of a real package management system got to be too much trouble so I jumped over to Ubuntu. I prefer XFCE, but it doesn't work that well on the Ubuntu platform, IMHO, so Arch is sounding better and better.

[handy]

Reading this thread has made me want to set up an Arch machine. The points brought up were the reasons I was such a Slackware fan forever, but then the choice to go exclusively KDE and the lack of a real package management system got to be too much trouble so I jumped over to Ubuntu. I prefer XFCE, but it doesn't work that well on the Ubuntu platform, IMHO, so Arch is sounding better and better.

Xfce works beautifully on Arch, it is not as fast as Openbox; I have Openbox using the xfce4-panel. I prefer the configurability of the Openbox menu system to that of Xfce.

[namegame]

I guess one of the primary reasons I prefer Arch is the sheer transparency of the OS. Arch does not intefere with what you want. I guess the bad thing is that you have to know what you want.

With the exception of KDEmod, any DE/WM you choose to install is unaltered. You can install the "vanilla" DEs/WMs on Ubuntu but it's a bit more involved.

[smartboyathome]

With the exception of KDEmod, any DE/WM you choose to install is unaltered. You can install the "vanilla" DEs/WMs on Ubuntu but it's a bit more involved.

KDEMod is unaltered now. It only makes the packages more modular than the KDE packages in the official Arch repository.

[namegame]

KDEMod is unaltered now. It only makes the packages more modular than the KDE packages in the official Arch repository.

Well, I stand corrected. If you don't count the Chakra LiveCD, I haven't used/tried KDEmod since 3.5.

[Omnios]

Think is Arch can be somed up with this.

Currently using Omega linix a fedora spin, any ways checkinstall is borked to maintaining taballs might be a head ach as wont have yum control to look at them and uninstall them.

Ubutnu debs are nice and all and making packages are ok but found most of the the stuff I wanted to taball ,, odd stuff like sequences etc would break when making a package expecially with long turm support.

Now repos are great and all and I love that ability but I want to explore program packages that will be a pain in Ubuntu and even more in Fedora.

In this aspect with Arch being able to manage tarballs its sound it might be for me so after researching it I am going to give it a try because it seems to be able to do what I want to do.

[MisfitI38]

Please tell me how to downgrade Mplayer on Arch Linux.

kagashe
Use ABS...you can have any version you wish.

[handy]

Use ABS...you can have any version you wish.

It's about time you got here... :lolflag:

Other OS Talk has moved to a new address, see my signature. (just in case you hadn't noticed) ;-)

[kidux]

Xfce works beautifully on Arch, it is not as fast as Openbox; I have Openbox using the xfce4-panel. I prefer the configurability of the Openbox menu system to that of Xfce.
That's good to hear. Even running Xubuntu, I couldn't quite get away from the feeling I was just running XFCE on top of Gnome. I need to sit down with some time to read the guides and do it, prolly in a VM first to see what's it like, but it sounds like what I've been looking for.

[mips]

Well, I stand corrected. If you don't count the Chakra LiveCD, I haven't used/tried KDEmod since 3.5.


You are excused :)

KDEmod 3.5 was heavily patched. They decided not to go down this road with KDE 4. The only few patches you will find in KDEmod 4 is branding related, their chakra logo etc. The code is essentially from upstream without patches, ala the Arch way.

[mips]

I prefer XFCE, but it doesn't work that well on the Ubuntu platform, IMHO, so Arch is sounding better and better.

XFCE 4.6 is available in the testing repo. http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64506

[bailout]

I have been intrigued by the Arch threads here and thinking of trying it on my aspire one netbook. I have fedora 10 on there at the moment but not really happy with it for various reasons but one issue is that it has beta versions of apps in its repos. I know that arch has a rolling release with latest versions being put into the repos as they are released but do they stick to stable releases of packages or use beta versions as f10?

[mips]

I know that arch has a rolling release with latest versions being put into the repos as they are released but do they stick to stable releases of packages or use beta versions as f10?

Latest stable versions as far as i'm aware.

Goes a little something like this: Unstable->Testing->Stable

All depends on which repos you wan to use.

[na12]

Arch is the best,but isn't for beginners.

[chucky chuckaluck]

Arch is the best,but isn't for beginners.

i don't think it's that difficult, but i agree, it's not for beginners. i don't beginning linux users can tell the difference between an iceberg and just an ice cube.

[ThaRabbit]

It's definately not for the "click and go" people out there.

If you fear commandline, shrug at non-graphic installation and like your things to work out of the box without updates breaking your system: don't go arch.

The wiki is amazing, the community is good and the build is simple.. all that is true. But don't expect click and go ;)

[Omnios]

Hi.

Currently using Omega 10 a fedora spin and not really liking Fedora all that much. So going to try something different and think Arch may be a good fit for me.

Kind of got some questions as I will be running arch on a laptop so got thinking if it is possible to use a lighter wm not to speed things up but rather week things to use less battery power and there for make the battery life better. The thinking so far is less cpu and ram usage and also tweeking out desktop rendering, generally not using 3d to render the desktop uses a lot less battery power but this also got me thinking is it possible to use a lighter desktop with 3d renering that will use less batter power than say Gnome or KDE with 3d. The other aspect is I do not want to loose functionality. Generally a different file manager would be ok as not crazy about nautilus so will try others. As for eye candy. remember a backage years ago that did animated desktop switching and few other neet things but was light and think non 3d, Matilda or something.

Genrally looking for something I can play around with and tweek based on using less power in battery mode but still have good fucntionality on ac. So sort of light weight when I need it and still fully featured when I do not.

Any suggestions?
EDIT: the 32bit vs 64bit option? . I really want to run the vise C-64 emulator but think its only 32 bit, now as for wine would I be able to use wine 32bit properly on a 64 bit system as wine will be 100% 32bit usage? Leaning towards 32bit as of now. Only thing holding me off of downloading Arch as of now.

[chucky chuckaluck]

Genrally looking for something I can play around with and tweek based on using less power in battery mode but still have good fucntionality on ac. So sort of light weight when I need it and still fully featured when I do not.

Any suggestions?

there are a lot of good choices for light wms: openbox, jwm, dwm, etc. for file managers, i like mc or thunar, and, there are a lot of terminal apps you can use that don't use up much power (cplay, to me, is just as good as any gui music player).

[tjwoosta]

Hi.

Currently using Omega 10 a fedora spin and not really liking Fedora all that much. So going to try something different and think Arch may be a good fit for me.

Kind of got some questions as I will be running arch on a laptop so got thinking if it is possible to use a lighter wm not to speed things up but rather week things to use less battery power and there for make the battery life better. The thinking so far is less cpu and ram usage and also tweeking out desktop rendering, generally not using 3d to render the desktop uses a lot less battery power but this also got me thinking is it possible to use a lighter desktop with 3d renering that will use less batter power than say Gnome or KDE with 3d. The other aspect is I do not want to loose functionality. Generally a different file manager would be ok as not crazy about nautilus so will try others. As for eye candy. remember a backage years ago that did animated desktop switching and few other neet things but was light and think non 3d, Matilda or something.

Genrally looking for something I can play around with and tweek based on using less power in battery mode but still have good fucntionality on ac. So sort of light weight when I need it and still fully featured when I do not.

Any suggestions?
EDIT: the 32bit vs 64bit option? . I really want to run the vise C-64 emulator but think its only 32 bit, now as for wine would I be able to use wine 32bit properly on a 64 bit system as wine will be 100% 32bit usage? Leaning towards 32bit as of now. Only thing holding me off of downloading Arch as of now.

using apps that use less resources may help improve battery life some, but your best bet for power management is cpu frequency scaling

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_Frequency_Scaling

[Omnios]

Scaling is good but thinking more on the lines of using less energy under use. Say I was watching a dvd or something on a bus.

[raf_kig]

I don't actually think that arch is a very good distro, it is rolling release though and if you need/want bleeding edge packages it's probably quite ok.

What I personally don't like about arch is the retarted 'strip info pages' stuff and that updates tend to randomly break stuff.


What I find quite interesting about this thread is how people play down the issues that arch definitely has.

Especially people who don't seem to really have a clue what they are talking about.



[...] downgrade packages, which very quickly & easily brings you back to where you were before the trouble

It should maybe be mentioned that this is not really supported and only works if you happen to still have the old package in your cache.


You don't know what you are talking about, Gentoo compiles from source, Arch uses binary packages & installs them extremely quickly. & it is incredibly rare for any of the Arch packages to be broken, & if one is it is fixed in a flash.
This is only true if you only need a rather narrow selection of software, otherwise you will be compiling quite some stuff from the AUR.



Arch is built to run on i686 hardware which does give it a speed advantage

The difference is absolutely insignificant. There are some packages where you would have a real chance to notice the difference in speed between a generic x86 build and i686, for example mencoder/mplayer.
Nearly all distributions provide arch[0]-specific packages for those (yes ubuntu does, too). Arch being somewhat 'faster' is just bull.
Obviously, if you compare a full blown Ubuntu + Gnome with dozens of Daemons running to a nearly naked arch with OB it will feel faster.
But you could get the same effect by just doing a minimal Ubuntu installation and only installing the packages you really want.

I probably could go on like this for hours, bottom point is:
Arch is ok, whether is is for you is something you'll have to find out yourself.
Most people advocating it in this thread have no clue whatsoever.

[0] not the 'arch' in 'arch linux'

[adamlau]

Um...This is coming from a guy who only runs two distros these days: Ubuntu Minimal and Arch. Arch definitely boots and runs faster with both running xorg + xfce4 and their dependencies only. No bull. Regardless of why, it just does.

[raf_kig]

Um...This is coming from a guy who only runs two distros these days: Ubuntu Minimal and Arch. Arch definitely boots and runs faster with both running xorg + xfce4 and their dependencies only. No bull. Regardless of why, it just does.
That it boots faster is something i can imagine, after all ubuntus init scripts deserver that name and are way more sophisticated than arch's. Another thing that might have an influence on startup time is for example gdms file precaching on ubuntu (that is, if you use gdm ;-)).

But i wasn't talking about boot time, I use linux because I don't enjoy rebooting ;-)

[chucky chuckaluck]

This is only true if you only need a rather narrow selection of software, otherwise you will be compiling quite some stuff from the AUR.

i guess 'narrow' is relative. i don't think that arch has that much less available and yaourt makes getting stuff from AUR fairly simple.

[raf_kig]

arch has about 5k packages in the repos, debian has about 25k,
but yes, for many users this might not be a problem

[kelvin spratt]

raf_kig
So if everybody does not have a clue about what they are talking about, what qualification
have you to make such a broad accusation. apart from flaming.

[handy]

that updates tend to randomly break stuff.

Twice in eleven months is fine by me. :-)



What I find quite interesting about this thread is how people play down the issues that arch definitely has.

Especially people who don't seem to really have a clue what they are talking about.



[...] downgrade packages, which very quickly & easily brings you back to where you were before the trouble

It should maybe be mentioned that this is not really supported and only works if you happen to still have the old package in your cache.


I posted this link previously I'm sure:

http://grubbn.org/otheros/showthread.php?tid=11

What does it mean that this process isn't really supported?

& I make it clear in the above linked to page that pacman -Sc is the safest way to go, due to the user keeping a copy of the currently installed packages in cache.



This is only true if you only need a rather narrow selection of software, otherwise you will be compiling quite some stuff from the AUR.

True.



The difference is absolutely insignificant. There are some packages where you would have a real chance to notice the difference in speed between a generic x86 build and i686, for example mencoder/mplayer.
Nearly all distributions provide arch[0]-specific packages for those (yes ubuntu does, too). Arch being somewhat 'faster' is just bull.

Perhaps you are right, though the Arch dev's chose to use the i686 for the speed benefit. The effect that this has in reality & in comparison with otherwise identical systems is something I have not tested.



Obviously, if you compare a full blown Ubuntu + Gnome with dozens of Daemons running to a nearly naked arch with OB it will feel faster.

Obviously if you set Arch up with Gnome & lots of Daemons running it is going to be slower than a more optimised for speed installation of Arch. So what?



But you could get the same effect by just doing a minimal Ubuntu installation and only installing the packages you really want.

So some people have said. Whether it is true or not remains to be seen. Going about it the Arch way seems to be more popular for some reason.



Most people advocating it in this thread have no clue whatsoever.


So you say. ;)

[tjwoosta]

I don't actually think that arch is a very good distro, it is rolling release though and if you need/want bleeding edge packages it's probably quite ok.

what do you mean by bleeding edge, because everything that ends up in the stable repository is considered stable by the devs

if you want bleeding edge you would use the testing repository


What I personally don't like about arch is the retarted 'strip info pages' stuff and that updates tend to randomly break stuff.


i have never had an update break anything in the five months that i have been using arch

on the other hand, when i was using ubuntu, there were many times when i would update and reboot only to find that i could no longer boot ubuntu

i used recovery mode at least four times in the five or six months that i used ubuntu

also what "strip info pages" stuff are you talking about?

any documentation you need is most likely in the wiki, if not its around somewhere



This is only true if you only need a rather narrow selection of software, otherwise you will be compiling quite some stuff from the AUR.

most of the major apps that one would expect are in the repository

but either way, compiling stuff from aur is extreamly easy, even for newcomers, and it takes about 20 seconds if you follow the wiki


Obviously, if you compare a full blown Ubuntu + Gnome with dozens of Daemons running to a nearly naked arch with OB it will feel faster.

i have a dual boot of ubuntu and arch

i setup arch with gnome and compiz and all the same stuff ubuntu has and arch is still faster and uses less ram

[kelvin spratt]

I've used Arch for 2 years the only time i've had any real problem was with snd_pcsp
and that was more my fault as I should of had it blacklisted. Its to easy to try and blame things on the distro instead of holding your hand up.

[will1911a1]

I've used Arch for 2 years the only time i've had any real problem was with snd_pcsp
and that was more my fault as I should of had it blacklisted. Its to easy to try and blame things on the distro instead of holding your hand up.

Truth. The only problems I've had with Arch are the ones I created for myself.

[Omnios]

Hi Guys

As for the faster issue I think there is a large split on this topic in that it will count on what you are running it on. So if you have a really fast desktop with Gnome or KDE you might not see a big difference. Also if you have a slower machine it might make a huge difference.

There are a lot of bottle necks for computers, hard drive read speeds, the bus speeds "bus speeds make a huge difference that I tested a long time ago. two p2- about the same cpu speed but one was 60hz and mine was a 100hz. the 100hz totally blew away the 60hz on load times etc."

So generally if you have slow bus speeds or other bottle necks this is where you may see a difference.

Watched a youtube vid about it and it was smoking fast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5h7wtkg4Bc

[raf_kig]

raf_kig
So if everybody does not have a clue about what they are talking about, what qualification
have you to make such a broad accusation. apart from flaming.
1. I didn't say 'everybody'
2. I know enough to tell when people talk about stuff they don't really understand




Obviously if you set Arch up with Gnome & lots of Daemons running it is going to be slower than a more optimised for speed installation of Arch. So what?

I was trying to point out that many of the posts that praise arch for its speed compared to $distribution don't make sure to only compare identical software configurations.




So some people have said. Whether it is true or not remains to be seen. Going about it the Arch way seems to be more popular for some reason.

Yeah, many people like the ease that comes with the simplicity of arch. They don't miss the advanced features that other environments offer because they didn't bother to understand eg 'the debian way'.
That is something the arch linux approach does pretty well, when people try to learn new stuff too much complexity is often hindering progress.




So you say. ;)
No, that's what they say. They express it by showing their lack of understanding. But this is not meant as a flame, I just wanted to get things a bit into perspective.



what do you mean by bleeding edge, because everything that ends up in the stable repository is considered stable by the devs

There are different definitions of stable. If I am not mistaken the updates for KDE 4.2 showed up in my pacman -Syu (yes, I do use arch :-)) on the evening after the release.
Arch 'stable' is what debian considers unstable/experimental.
Debian stable is what arch considers historic ;-)




i have never had an update break anything in the five months that i have been using arch

I've been using arch for several years, so more time for breakage ;-)




also what "strip info pages" stuff are you talking about?

The arch way ;-)




but either way, compiling stuff from aur is extreamly easy, even for newcomers, and it takes about 20 seconds if you follow the wiki

I don't care if it is easy or not, I care about compile times that may very well exceed several minutes.
If all you need is in the repos and whats missing takes 20 seconds to compile, good for you.
But that doesn't imply that it's like that for everyone.



Its to easy to try and blame things on the distro instead of holding your hand up.
I am proficient enough to distinguish between my faults and the distros faults. And I didn't say others dont mess things up, too. The statement would (more or less) be true for most of the distros out there.

regards

raf_kig

[k2t0f12d]

What I personally don't like about arch is the retarted 'strip info pages' stuff and that updates tend to randomly break stuff.

The word you were looking for there is retarded. It is a condition that those afflicted cannot help, which makes it a pretty lousy pejorative. The Arch default is to discard info pages because that's what the majority of Archers want. They want it to save disk space, or so I was led to believe when I asked. In the man vs info pages school of thought Arch leans toward resembling straight UNIX by embracing the man page. It isn't big enough of a deal to whinge about even though I think they are wrong, too. They did provision settings in configuration of the packaging system that allow users to build and install info pages if they want them, so they are definitely not retarded.


What I find quite interesting about this thread is how people play down the issues that arch definitely has.

Especially people who don't seem to really have a clue what they are talking about.

Everyone I read was pretty straightforward and friendly about what Arch is all about and how its intended to be used. I'd wager most of them can spell retarded and know when not to use it in a sentence.


The difference is absolutely insignificant. There are some packages where you would have a real chance to notice the difference in speed between a generic x86 build and i686, for example mencoder/mplayer.
Nearly all distributions provide arch[0]-specific packages for those (yes ubuntu does, too). Arch being somewhat 'faster' is just bull.
Obviously, if you compare a full blown Ubuntu + Gnome with dozens of Daemons running to a nearly naked arch with OB it will feel faster.
But you could get the same effect by just doing a minimal Ubuntu installation and only installing the packages you really want.

Arch wiki and forums posting go on a bit about this topic. Arch isn't about having the best speed even if and where it does. Arch is about have the best hands-on approach. Others have said it's `DIY', which I disagree with, but it is definitely hands-on. You haven't come right out and said that your assumption of what makes a distribution good is having the most hands-free approach, but the arguments you make about your expectations sure do. Arch can become hands-free only after some hands-on setup, and that's the way we like it. I don't see the point to your criticisms, since Archers don't want to do it the way you think they should, and certainly aren't working with your goals in mind. You could get the same collection of programs, but you can't get the same system when installing minimal Ubuntu and building up, because 1) Ubuntu isn't striving to be hands-on, and 2) they don't do things the Arch way. K.I.S.S.

[raf_kig]

The word you were looking for there is retarded. It is a condition that those afflicted cannot help, which makes it a pretty lousy pejorative.
Thanks for pointing out that mistake, as you might have noticed im not a native english speaker. If that is the only flaw you could find in my post I am pretty glad. :-)



The Arch default is to discard info pages because that's what the majority of Archers want. They want it to save disk space, or so I was led to believe when I asked.

Its a matter of personal preference and I think it is retared to cripple the documentation coming with programs for the sake of disk space when those disk space is so negligible that one wouldn't even notice the difference. And I think it is a contradiction to the arch way of not modifying vendor packages. But whatever, there have been enough discussions about this topic. All i wanted to say that I think the reasoning is flawed and the decision doens't make any sense. In other words, I think it is retarded (im able to learn :-)).



so they are definitely not retarded.
I didn't say they are retarded. Maybe you could read my post again and this time look for the content, not for the spelling mistakes.



Everyone I read was pretty straightforward and friendly about what Arch is all about and how its intended to be used. I'd wager most of them can spell retarded and know when not to use it in a sentence.
You already pointed out my mistake, thanks.



Arch wiki and forums posting go on a bit about this topic. Arch isn't about having the best speed even if and where it does. Arch is about have the best hands-on approach. Others have said it's `DIY', which I disagree with, but it is definitely hands-on.

I know, but many newcomers that want to enlighten others about the existence of arch don't.



You haven't come right out and said that your assumption of what makes a distribution good is having the most hands-free approach,

Of course not. Because there is no single way to do so. Pick the right tool for the job. The diversity is one thing that makes the linux world that powerful.


but the arguments you make about your expectations sure do.

Not at all, if you would mind to really read them you should notice that. I just wanted to draw a bit more balanced picture of arch. If everyone else is praising that sometimes means you have to curse. :-)



[removed rambling about what I seem to want/think in contrast to 'them']

I don't really get your problem, sorry. Parser error?

regards

raf_kig

[handy]

I was trying to point out that many of the posts that praise arch for its speed compared to $distribution don't make sure to only compare identical software configurations.

I think that most Arch users enjoy having only what they installed in their set up, which will lighten the load on their system. Then when they trim & background the daemons, they can lighten the load & speed up the boot process some more.

Arch is about being simple, & not all of us do know about Linux to a great depth, nor do we feel the desire to; with Arch, due to its inherent simplicity it definitely aids in easing the learning process.

I think I can safely say that many Arch users are completely satisfied with the bells & whistles that they have access to & with the ease of tweaking, repairing & installing.

Many of us also wish that all of the other distro's were as easy to work with.

There are of course many very knowledgeable Linux people who prefer to use Arch as well as those of us who are intermediate users.

It all comes down to personal taste.

Me, I like it simple. ;-)

[raf_kig]

Arch is about being simple, & not all of us do know about Linux to a great depth, nor do we feel the desire to; with Arch, due to its inherent simplicity it definitely aids in easing the learning process.

Agreed, thats what I was trying to say, too ;-)




Me, I like it simple. ;-)
So do I. Im just trying to point out that there are many facets of simplicity.

regards

raf_kig

[handy]

So do I. Im just trying to point out that there are many facets of simplicity.

It is true.

Even though we call Arch simple, it is a relative statement, as Arch too is still complicated, it is just that it has been designed to manage those complications in what many of us find to be a more straight forward manner.

[kelvin spratt]

I run Arch with gnome and most of the Gnome bells and whistles I also run Parsix with the same bells and whistles they both use gnome 2.24.3. I also have Ubuntu 8.10 on another hdd.
Parsix is by far the faster of the 3 machines then Arch, then Ubuntu 8.10, all use the same programs, but in terms of feel its Arch all the way.
Ram I have 8gb but usage wise A, uses 250mb P uses 350mb, U uses 550mb, cpu is the same I have a fast rig but on a low powered set-up it is very noticeable. Also note Arch needs no more maintenance than the 2 Debian based machines this more down to setting Arch up correctly 2 years ago, I update on a daily basis and never use testing its that simple.
Arch on my machines just feels comfortable Parsix is very stable and faster. Ubuntu is still very good but just feels sluggish also the wait to get anything fixed is 6 months Arch/parsix is hrs/days as the devs are active on the forums thats the icing on the cake.

[Omnios]

Getting ready to install Arch Linux, so am researching how to install. Read that it works on a Dell XPS 1530 right out of the box. Does not look to complicated in the help files but am going to print them out before I do the install.

Kind of wondering about there recommended partition suggestions as so far I have only done /root /home and /swap. I think a /boot partition would be good, generally going to be a single user set up as of now, though might network if I get a old box for a file server. What partitioning would you recommend.

Plan so far , possibly using another partition format other than ext3 but am happy with ext3 so far. What is the best way to set up a user account again not a net box as of yet. Plan to do install set up the user then xserver and the nv nvidia package so I can use Firefox if needed. What else needs to be set up. Want to get things usable then go from there.

Having net problems kind of worries me but my net works right out of the box with fedora. I have a DSL to router with ethernet from the router.

[thisllub]

Getting ready to install Arch Linux, so am researching how to install. Read that it works on a Dell XPS 1530 right out of the box. Does not look to complicated in the help files but am going to print them out before I do the install.

Kind of wondering about there recommended partition suggestions as so far I have only done /root /home and /swap. I think a /boot partition would be good, generally going to be a single user set up as of now, though might network if I get a old box for a file server. What partitioning would you recommend.

Plan so far , possibly using another partition format other than ext3 but am happy with ext3 so far. What is the best way to set up a user account again not a net box as of yet. Plan to do install set up the user then xserver and the nv nvidia package so I can use Firefox if needed. What else needs to be set up. Want to get things usable then go from there.

Having net problems kind of worries me but my net works right out of the box with fedora. I have a DSL to router with ethernet from the router.

I like a separate /boot as it is more practical for setting up multi boot systems.

nv works but you will get more out of the video card with the nvidia drivers.

[Omnios]

nv works but you will get more out of the video card with the nvidia drivers.

Want to get gui going then set up the the nvidia drivers. Also have nv as a backup if 3d config gets screwy.

[handy]

@Omnios: You probably already know, but I'll say it here again anyway.

You must follow the Beginners Guide (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide), to the letter, for your installation. If you don't you will get into a great deal of trouble.

There is more detailed information in the Official Arch Install Guide (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide), which is well worth referencing for anything you are unsure about.

Also, everything involved with your installation is covered in its own topic in the Arch Wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Table_of_Contents_%28English%29), which is always well worth a search when you require more understanding on whatever topic.

There is a How-To (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:HOWTOs_%28English%29) section in the Arch Wiki which gives great instruction on all kinds of things.

There are also some good help files & some good helpers at the nOOST forum (http://grubbn.org/otheros/forumdisplay.php?fid=2).

All the best with your install. :D

[lancest]

Ok I'm running Arch on this old P4 and -like it alot quite snappy. Good choice here.

(I also installed it on my newer machine with Nvidia and do not quite like the fonts).

Having trouble getting Yaourt going.
Second time around with Arch.
The Yaourt download link in France does not work. (again).

Here you can see an example of Linux elitism against me among a few Arch users. I am the OP.
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=62430

Kind of pisses me off since I am no newbie to Linux in general.

[k2t0f12d]

Here you can see an example of Linux elitism against me among a few Arch users. I am the OP.
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=62430

The reply in post number two gave you a link to information you needed to sort yourself. Post three from that thread gave a bash one-liner that the poster also thought would sort your problem. Subsequent posts gave detailed information about adding yaourt to pacman.conf for easy installation. An administrator explained why a tool like yaourt isn't in the main repo the begin with. Besides which, your original post did not give any specific information about your issue whatsoever, other then that you were having one. In spite of this, the people who responded to you were willing to go out of their way to guess what wasn't working for you and try to help anyway. Pretty considerate of them to do for you and then have you turn around and stab them in the back with the "elitist" dagger on this forum.

[lancest]

Yes I agree with what you say. People certainly did offer help over there. Good, thanks to them. Read closer though. Two people got smart with me. I wouldn't expect people in Ubuntu forums to tell me to to "read up" without questioning anything. I gave enough information and that attitude isn't warranted.

[sujoy]

hmm, so after some members solved the query, someone gave a link to the AUR wiki which explains some stuffs and includes "A short tutorial to installing packages from AUR" and the yaourt wiki too mentions in detail how to install it.

umm, sorry but i fail to see the elitism here. i dont throw links at people unless the answer really is better explained there than i possible could. but if a link compliments the solution, how is it eltist? :confused:

[kk0sse54]

Yes I agree with what you say. People certainly did offer help over there. Good, thanks to them. Read closer though. Two people got smart with me. I wouldn't expect people in Ubuntu forums to tell me to to "read up" without questioning anything. I gave enough information and that attitude isn't warranted.

That's because people in the Arch forum expect you to actually attempt to search for a solution for your problem before posting. There's no need to have several useless threads asking repeatedly the same thing over and over when it's clearly stated in the Arch wiki. Unfortunately searching documentation before posting here in the UF isn't stressed as much as I think it should be thus leading to all kinds of recurring discussions in the Absolute Beginner Talk.

[lancest]

In this case I actually did read the documentation. Maybe not as a well as others but hey the download link for France did not work and still does not. They assumed that I did not read when in fact i did. I think it's simply a mistake to get smart with people when they ask questions- under any circumstances. If you do- you may be making assumptions that may be incorrect. Openness is very important. So people ask questions so what? If you've got a hard bitten attitude then don't bother to answer. The moderator saw that also.

[eldragon]

In this case I actually did read the documentation. Maybe not as a well as others but hey the download link for France did not work and still does not. They assumed that I did not read when in fact i did. I think it's simply a mistake to get smart with people when they ask questions- under any circumstances. If you do- you may be making assumptions that may be incorrect. Openness is very important. So people ask questions so what? If you've got a hard bitten attitude then don't bother to answer. The moderator saw that also.

since you havent gotten around installing yaourt, i'll hint you here.

download and uncompress the tarball from here: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=5863

then enter into the newly created folder, and run makepkg. it should download the sources, verify build and pack ( ijust tried it).

then run


# pacman -U yaourt-0.9.2.5-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz


thats the package i just created while typing this small howto. you dont need an external repo. if you still have problems, PM me with an email address, i'll mail you the finished product, which you can later install with the pacman -U command.


now on the smartassing business. i can see where all the joking and smartassing came from. the wiki is really clear. there are no crazy guides to follow in order to build yaourt. the arch comunity hates doing someone else's homework, so when someone appears asking something thats really well explained in the wiki. these kind of remarks start raining all over the thread. im not saying its a desired attitude, but in a sense, it keeps the forum post at a minimum, and it makes finding posts from people that really have problems much easier. its not like the wiki was some MS KB article you have to decipher with your hex2ascii calculator.

good luck with yaourt ;)

[Skripka]

since you havent gotten around installing yaourt, i'll hint you here.

download and uncompress the tarball from here: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=5863

then enter into the newly created folder, and run makepkg. it should download the sources, verify build and pack ( ijust tried it).

then run


# pacman -U yaourt-0.9.2.5-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz


thats the package i just created while typing this small howto. you dont need an external repo. if you still have problems, PM me with an email address, i'll mail you the finished product, which you can later install with the pacman -U command.


now on the smartassing business. i can see where all the joking and smartassing came from. the wiki is really clear. there are no crazy guides to follow in order to build yaourt. the arch comunity hates doing someone else's homework, so when someone appears asking something thats really well explained in the wiki. these kind of remarks start raining all over the thread. im not saying its a desired attitude, but in a sense, it keeps the forum post at a minimum, and it makes finding posts from people that really have problems much easier. its not like the wiki was some MS KB article you have to decipher with your hex2ascii calculator.

good luck with yaourt ;)


In all honesty-I never got the repo to work either on my Arch on this box-I just grabbed the files off AUR and did it manually.

[Omnios]

As for the Arch forum not being as friendly.

Posting a few days now and they seem friendly to me.

[scottuss]

I'll say as someone who switched from Ubuntu to Arch (and thus moved mostly over to the Arch forums) that I prefer the Arch ones.

OK so you are forgiven if you post something stupid or obvious on the Ubuntu forum, where it might not be acceptable to do so on the Arch one, therefore giving the illusion that the Arch forum is less friendly.

However, one advantage I have found of the Arch forums is that because it is not a distro for beginners, there are less people "attempting" to help and more people actually doing so. For example post a question on the Ubuntu forum and you will get maybe 20 replies, most of which are people having a guess and not really having a clue what they are talking about. On the Arch forum you may get 1 or 2 replies, and 99% of the time it will be a link to a wiki article or other forum post. And guess what? That link will 99% of the time solve your problem.

I'd rather have a forum that's appears to be abrupt and "unfriendly" but truly helpful in getting my problems solved than a friendly one. For support posts at least anyway.

When I want some banter or fun, I pop back over here ;)

[mips]

I'll say as someone who switched from Ubuntu to Arch (and thus moved mostly over to the Arch forums) that I prefer the Arch ones.

OK so you are forgiven if you post something stupid or obvious on the Ubuntu forum, where it might not be acceptable to do so on the Arch one, therefore giving the illusion that the Arch forum is less friendly.

However, one advantage I have found of the Arch forums is that because it is not a distro for beginners, there are less people "attempting" to help and more people actually doing so. For example post a question on the Ubuntu forum and you will get maybe 20 replies, most of which are people having a guess and not really having a clue what they are talking about. On the Arch forum you may get 1 or 2 replies, and 99% of the time it will be a link to a wiki article or other forum post. And guess what? That link will 99% of the time solve your problem.

I'd rather have a forum that's appears to be abrupt and "unfriendly" but truly helpful in getting my problems solved than a friendly one. For support posts at least anyway.

When I want some banter or fun, I pop back over here ;)

+1

I could not have said it better myself.

I honestly do not find ubuntuforums a great forum when it comes to technical support but for community (which is fading) I will give it a 8/10 as I have not found a replacement yet.

[handy]

I think you nailed it scottuss.

[lancest]

since you havent gotten around installing yaourt, i'll hint you here.

download and uncompress the tarball from here: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=5863

then enter into the newly created folder, and run makepkg. it should download the sources, verify build and pack ( ijust tried it).

then run


# pacman -U yaourt-0.9.2.5-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz


thats the package i just created while typing this small howto. you dont need an external repo. if you still have problems, PM me with an email address, i'll mail you the finished product, which you can later install with the pacman -U command.


now on the smartassing business. i can see where all the joking and smartassing came from. the wiki is really clear. there are no crazy guides to follow in order to build yaourt. the arch comunity hates doing someone else's homework, so when someone appears asking something thats really well explained in the wiki. these kind of remarks start raining all over the thread. im not saying its a desired attitude, but in a sense, it keeps the forum post at a minimum, and it makes finding posts from people that really have problems much easier. its not like the wiki was some MS KB article you have to decipher with your hex2ascii calculator.

good luck with yaourt ;)
Thanks for the link! I will use it on this Arch enabled P4.
Now I'm trying to decide wether to use Debian 5 or Arch on my new Eeepc.

[kk0sse54]

Thanks for the link! I will use it on this Arch enabled P4.


That's the exact link that was provided to you by the second post from the Arch Forums in your thread and the exact link and instructions provided in the Wiki How To :roll:

Otherwise....

Why is arch linux so..."Good"?
One word, versatility, it's as simple as that. The fact that I can choose between a BSD ports like package system like ABS, install AUR PKGBUILDS via yaourt, or just do regular binary installs through pacman shows the versatility of Arch and how it appeals to a broad range of technical users. It literally is what you make it and nothing else. That being said I'm no Arch fanboy since I prefer Gentoo over it and NetBSD over both of them, but I appreciate the fact that with Arch it's all about user preference and can be turned into any kind of system to suite one's needs.

[eldragon]

That's the exact link that was provided to you by the second post from the Arch Forums in your thread and the exact link and instructions provided in the Wiki How To :roll:


yeah....well... :popcorn:

[Stagnation]

I installed Arch last night on one of the raptors (Ubuntu is on the other). It took me a good 5 hours or so to get it setup but that was because my DSL connection has been getting an average of 80k/s which means that the updates took a while and KDEMOD took a good hour and a half to download.

Arch does seem quick but Ubuntu feels about as fast on my modest system. The main apps that I use (e.g. Firefox and Thunderbird) open up instantly in both Ubuntu and Arch. Bootup seems to be the biggest change and it's only a difference of a few seconds (Arch is on ext4). Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz / 4GB DDR2 / Geforce GTX260 / 2x 74GB Raptors

I really like the way Arch is setup. The text based configuration seems complicated at first but I quickly became comfortable with it. I really find it to be a lot of fun. If my DSL gets back up to speed I could probably do a new install of Arch in a couple of hours and wouldn't even have to look at the newbie guide.

During install I wanted to try KDEMOD but the installation guide doesn't cover the repos they just point you to the website. Since I had printed it out and my Ubuntu entries in GRUB were gone I was kind of stuck. I had a small flash of brilliance and started another console and ran pacman -S lynx. This enabled me to browse the KDEMODE site in text mode and I was able to find the information I needed. Arch gave me some kind of perverted pleasure by forcing me to make use of my brain.

I'm not all that impressed with KDE4. I think I may remove KDEMOD and try XFCE.

So far:

Pros - Pacman, Maintenance, Ease of use (once you're familiar with it), The new distro smell.

Cons - Ease of use (when starting out), Arch's GRUB doesn't detect other OS partitions and add them to menu.lst automagically (easily fixed when you look at it for a few minutes)


BTW: I'm currently free from Windows. I have Steam and Mount & Blade running through Wine and have moved most of my gaming to the Xbox360. Microsoft's own gaming console has removed my need for their OS. :)

[adamlau]

You should have installed aria2 and used the rankmirrors and pacget script first. Upgrading is faaaaast after that.

[Stagnation]

I did use the rankmirrors script. It didn't really help as my 3/768 DSL connection is actually just running close to 1/650. So my normal 350ish k/sec download speed is maxing out at under 100 no matter the server.

Every 3 months or so Verizon throws too many users on a switch and I have to call and get moved to another one. :x

[mips]

I did use the rankmirrors script. It didn't really help as my 3/768 DSL connection is actually just running close to 1/650. So my normal 350ish k/sec download speed is maxing out at under 100 no matter the server.

Every 3 months or so Verizon throws too many users on a switch and I have to call and get moved to another one. :x

Contention ratios suck but that's what life is al about....

[diskotek]

ubuntu made me upgrade sick! i can't stand without upgrading my box... maybe arch can stop me!

[bailout]

I keep thinking of trying Arch on my aao but have a couple of questions.

Firstly, what file system? Should I go for ext4 as it is the latest? Are there any problems with it? (my aao has a normal hd not ssd so no problems with journaling)

Secondly, what partitions? I am used to the ubuntu way of just using one partition for everything but see that the Arch auto gives boot, swap, /, and home as seperate partitions. Is there any real disadvantage with installing arch into just one partition? I will also have Linpus and WinXP on the drive.

thanks

[Eisenwinter]

Most people have a partition for /, and a partition for /home.

I don't know much about the technical aspects of ext4, but people who have used it say it's super fast.

Grub, on it's own, in it's current form, can't boot ext4 - but, there is a patch supplied for it in the Arch installation (of the newest version), which allows Grub to boot ext4 filesystems.

The one disadvantage with installing any system on just one partition, is the potential data loss. It's also easier to distro-hop with a separate /home partition, as all your configuration files and personal files (I assume you keep those at /home) stay there, they're not deleted.

[lancest]

Can only answer that I am using Ext 4 on Arch with this Eeepc 900A (Wiicd) and it's great! The performance is snappy, and better than Eeebuntu for me. Arch auto partitioning works great. I don't run dual systems so can't say about the rest

[Skripka]

Most people have a partition for /, and a partition for /home.

I don't know much about the technical aspects of ext4, but people who have used it say it's super fast.

Grub, on it's own, in it's current form, can't boot ext4 - but, there is a patch supplied for it in the Arch installation (of the newest version), which allows Grub to boot ext4 filesystems.

The one disadvantage with installing any system on just one partition, is the potential data loss. It's also easier to distro-hop with a separate /home partition, as all your configuration files and personal files (I assume you keep those at /home) stay there, they're not deleted.

There have been many reports o'er in the Arch forums, of problems with Ext4 in improper shutdown circumstances.

The gist of it being: With an Ext4 root partition that is not properly shutdown or unmounted-there is a strong tendency for data loss in configuration files-specifically desktop environment config files. For example: I was playing with E17 and was experiencing hard freezes and had to hard reboot--where at E17 lost all it's existing config files and went back to 1st run default. E17 seems especially prone to this-although KDEmod also suffers from it, although not as badly (only some data gets corrupted...rather than a total loss of DE configuration) or as often.

It is fast though...especially with disk checks--which go 5-10X as fast as Ext3.

[Eisenwinter]

I prefer to stick with ext3 for now, until GRUB2 is completed.

[kevdog]

When is the timeline on grub2?

[Eisenwinter]

When is the timeline on grub2?
I have read about it in Wikipedia, and apparently it's been in development since as early as 2002 (!!!)

[Skripka]

When is the timeline on grub2?

I believe the best that could be said about the timeline of their project is "WIR"

[kevdog]

WIR = yea whenever I get around to it someday!

If that is truly the response of the developers, then that is just so sad!

[handy]

I don't know why people are in such a rush for ext4?

Who cares?

Use one of the other so called faster than ext3 file systems if you must, until ext4 is truly stable.

I use JFS, it has been fine for me. I doubt I'd really notice any difference between it at ext3 anyway.

I think that sometimes people make mountains out of mole hills... ;)

[bailout]

Thanks for the replies. I do have doubts over ext4. I saw there is a thread on the jaunty forum about the data loss issue. Isn't jaunty going to use ext4 as default though?

As to the partitions. I always have a seperate fat32 data partition so that it is available to both linux and windows and I am not into distro hopping; Iam hoping that the rolling updates to Arch will reduce the reinstall/major update nature of ubuntu tbh. The main question I had there was what the advantages were of having a seperate boot partition. I have fedora on my aao at the moment and that used a seperate boot partition as default because it uses lvm. I didn't want the lvm so just installed it into one partition.

[asimon]

WIR = yea whenever I get around to it someday!

If that is truly the response of the developers, then that is just so sad!
Why? They probably have little spare time to work on it and no billionaire to sponsor them fulltime. It's the most honest answer they can give. They just dunno when it's ready for the masses as they do very little progress.

If something is sad then that they don't get more help. For distributions grub1 seems to do the job good enough so they don't care much.

[hatten]

i just want a bootloader that can boot from inside a lvm, too bad the grub developers are lazy (as every dev is)

[Shea7993]

Wow okay, reading through all this made me understand... Whenever someone told me about ARCH, it was that its soo powerfull... in terms of hacking lol, aparantly the hackers choice distro, lol, this just shed new light on arch for me, now i understand beter

[GreenDance]

Is Arch like Ubuntu-Minimal-CD?

[RATM_Owns]

Eh... kind of.

Except there are no new releases.

You just install, update whenever you want, and you already have the latest version.

[doorknob60]

Because you build it from scratch with only the applications you want, and that makes it go a lot faster, and it has a great package manager, and probably the best wiki of any Linux distro, and a nice community with the forums and AUR, it's just nice :) And it's rolling release, always keep your stuff up to date :)

[/usr/sbin]

Well, it's praised for it's simplicity. Not simplicity in that it's easy for a beginner but that it provides a bare-bones system that a user builds onto as he/she desires.
When you install Arch you're left with just the most basic CLI-only system that provides the bedrock for the rest of your setup.
It's fast, bleeding-edge, and has a good community.

Is the iso that you download very big? Becasue i am looking for a distro that i can download within my download limit?

[hatten]

It's quite small, the ftp installer is 148 MB, and the core installer is 311 MB. The difference is that with the ftp installer you download exactly the packages you need, while the core got a snapshot of all packages for core. I would suggest the ftp if you've got a low limit, cause with core you have to update your system after install, and that will be some more MB's to download. You will then also need to download X and such, if you want stuff like that, but you could wait with those until next month if you've reached your limit. But you will probably be able to download the iso and a bunch of programs without reaching your limit.

[handy]

I love Arch, it has been the best system I've used since starting on computers in early 1986.

I'm posting this to warn any prospective Arch users who have ATi GPU's to perhaps wait a little while before trying Arch.

ATi's closed drivers have been causing a lot of trouble lately, particularly on Arch, as it uses the latest releases of most everything. & ATi is behind the times when it comes to the current kernel, X.org & other packages that may be associated with the graphics display.

For those that want to use Arch & use an ATi GPU, you will most likely find that the open drivers & the current closed drivers are both unsatisfactory (though it will depend on your GPU as to whether the open drivers will be good enough for 2D or not). If you want to use the closed drivers you are best off using the previous kernel *29 version & the previous catalyst version. As they worked quite well for most GPU's.

If you seriously need to know more go here:

http://aur.archlinux.org/

Search for catalyst & read the comments from the bottom to the top.

[koleoptero]

It's funny when ubuntu seems to be the most popular distro in the internet (see various linux related sites like gnome-look) and gets much praise everywhere else, in the ubuntuforums arch gets more praise than ubuntu.

I don't know if you understand what I mean but it's weird.

[BLTicklemonster]

use and find out why

Love the name, by the way.

[handy]

It's funny when ubuntu seems to be the most popular distro in the internet (see various linux related sites like gnome-look) and gets much praise everywhere else, in the ubuntuforums arch gets more praise than ubuntu.

I don't know if you understand what I mean but it's weird.

Many of us started with Ubuntu, then learned enough about Linux to distro-hop, eventually finding Arch & being blown away by it.

We are not anti-Ubuntu, we are pro-Linux amongst other systems (as Ubuntu is purported to also be), & many Arch users still use Ubuntu as well, &/or just like to support the Linux/BSD/* community here & possibly elsewhere.

[kpkeerthi]

I was using Arch and I switched over to Jaunty when it was released. But I don't think I will stick with Ubuntu. Arch is so tempting and I simply can't resist it.

If you are an experienced Linux user, you'll definitely appreciate Arch's design & its tools. For beginners, I'd recommend Ubuntu/Mint anyday.

[handy]

I agree, Mint is the easiest distro' to set up & use, of those I've tried.

[p0cky84]

because of the control the user has over what she installs. You begin with close to nothing and go from there... you can have very minimalistic and fast system if you go that way, but it takes some understanding of the user's behalf to set it up.
That would be pacman (http://www.archlinux.org/pacman/) you're refering to. Not archlinux.

But the real reason is because archlinux does not have any of the unnecessary crap that follows with almost all the other distributions.
In general it's just a very lightweight system.

Tho, lateley it seems there has been some errors relating to the libreadline module, which causes the system to be completely incompetent (happened to me, I had to boot up a live cd and do
pacman -R /mnt/mounted -Syu several times.)

[kk0sse54]

That would be pacman (http://www.archlinux.org/pacman/) you're refering to. Not archlinux.

:confused:, no that would be archlinux...

[tjwoosta]

It's funny when ubuntu seems to be the most popular distro in the internet (see various linux related sites like gnome-look) and gets much praise everywhere else, in the ubuntuforums arch gets more praise than ubuntu.

I don't know if you understand what I mean but it's weird.

Its not like that at all. Ubuntu is obviously king on UF. Arch threads here are few and far between compared to the amount of threads about how great Ubuntu is. Not to mention that whenever there is an Arch thread it gets bombarded with impulsively angry Ubuntu fans who try to discredit it at every opportunity.

Many Arch users started off using Linux with Ubuntu, which is why we return and hang around the UF community and help new users. We are not here to convert people, only to share our experiences and acquired knowledge.

In my case I started experimenting with other distros after about three months. In about one year I went from Ubuntu, to Debain, to openSUSE, to Fedora, to Mandriva, back to Debain, then Ubuntu again, then Mint, then Elive, OpenGEU, openSUSE again, then Slackware, then finally Arch. I was searching for the perfect distro for me.

Ive been using Arch for about the past year and after experimenting with just about every major distro I feel no desire to switch again. Arch is for me.

Im not saying Arch is for everyone. Im not saying its better then Ubuntu, only different. Arch is just what fits me, and many arch users feel the same way. We are only trying to share our positive experience with others, not put down Ubuntu or stop people from using ubuntu. If you ask me there is no one distro thats perfect for everone, thats why so many distros exist, because different people like different things.

The point is that just because something is more popular, and gets all the spotlight, doesn't necessarily mean its better for everyone. All Im saying is that if your a distro hopper like I was perhaps you could consider giving arch a try next. If your perfectly content with using Ubuntu, then by all means continue using it, there's no reason to switch distros if you already have whats perfect for you.

[handy]

What he said. :)

[Skripka]

What he said. :)

Arch Linux is Sooo good because it is only 45% obsolete. ;)

[jrusso2]

This is too funnny first you all say how easy it is. Then allow a whole day to install, and oh yes have two computers connected to the internet and thats all you need.

[Exershio]

I love Arch and can't see myself switching to another distro at all anytime soon. It's perfect for my needs.

And of course, I started off with Ubuntu as well. :P

[yabbadabbadont]

This is too funnny first you all say how easy it is. Then allow a whole day to install, and oh yes have two computers connected to the internet and thats all you need.

Just because something takes a while, does not mean that it is difficult. Gentoo is the same way. If you can read, comprehend, and follow the instructions in the installation handbook, the process is not very difficult. It can, however, take a while to complete. Especially if you decide to manually configure your kernel and modify the default USE flags.

[Pogeymanz]

This is too funnny first you all say how easy it is. Then allow a whole day to install, and oh yes have two computers connected to the internet and thats all you need.

Nah, it is pretty straight-forward. The beginner's guide is now included on the install CD, so you just follow the guide almost verbatim. No need for two computers.

The first time I installed Arch, it took about three hours to get everything up and running.

These days I can install Arch and have it fully updated in about an hour, without my old configs. With them, it's way shorter.

[Exershio]

This is too funnny first you all say how easy it is. Then allow a whole day to install, and oh yes have two computers connected to the internet and thats all you need.

Time consuming != hard

It's easy in that it does not take a Linux guru to install. However, it takes time to install because what you install is entirely up to you. In fact, it is extremely easy with Arch's Beginner's Guide (on their wiki) that any power user could install it without much difficulty.

The end result is much worth it. A fast system without programs I'll never use, configured to my liking, a rolling release system so you dont really ever need to reformat/reinstall (unless you want to). I'd say installing Arch once is less time consuming then version hopping every 6 months when Ubuntu rolls a new release out the window.

[handy]

Arch Linux is Sooo good because it is only 45% obsolete. ;)

lol, yeh, I saw that.

Actually it has improved since you looked it's now 40%. :) & still 6 weeks more up to date than its closest rival according to Open Source Watershed. :popcorn:

http://oswatershed.org/

[nothingspecial]

whenever there is an Arch thread it gets bombarded with impulsively angry Ubuntu fans who try to discredit it at every opportunity.

That`d be me :D

[koleoptero]

Its not like that at all. Ubuntu is obviously king on UF. Arch threads here are few and far between compared to the amount of threads about how great Ubuntu is. Not to mention that whenever there is an Arch thread it gets bombarded with impulsively angry Ubuntu fans who try to discredit it at every opportunity.

Many Arch users started off using Linux with Ubuntu, which is why we return and hang around the UF community and help new users. We are not here to convert people, only to share our experiences and acquired knowledge.

In my case I started experimenting with other distros after about three months. In about one year I went from Ubuntu, to Debain, to openSUSE, to Fedora, to Mandriva, back to Debain, then Ubuntu again, then Mint, then Elive, OpenGEU, openSUSE again, then Slackware, then finally Arch. I was searching for the perfect distro for me.

Ive been using Arch for about the past year and after experimenting with just about every major distro I feel no desire to switch again. Arch is for me.

Im not saying Arch is for everyone. Im not saying its better then Ubuntu, only different. Arch is just what fits me, and many arch users feel the same way. We are only trying to share our positive experience with others, not put down Ubuntu or stop people from using ubuntu. If you ask me there is no one distro thats perfect for everone, thats why so many distros exist, because different people like different things.

The point is that just because something is more popular, and gets all the spotlight, doesn't necessarily mean its better for everyone. All Im saying is that if your a distro hopper like I was perhaps you could consider giving arch a try next. If your perfectly content with using Ubuntu, then by all means continue using it, there's no reason to switch distros if you already have whats perfect for you.

I have seriously thought about using Arch, but I'm lazy, and I use almost every program I currently have in ubuntu so there's really no reason to switch to a more lightweight distro (except if I get frustrated with gnome again and go to Arch + *box).

I don't have anything against praising what you use and like. It's one of the best ways to find out what's new and good most of the time. Also I don't have anything against Arch.

It's just that, as I said, it seems weird to me that so many users here use Arch. Not that you shouldn't or that you should keep your opinions to yourselves. On the contrary I believe eceryone should speak up their minds. It's what makes these forums so good.

That said, I find Arch and their minimal approach to an OS very tempting for my 4 years old laptop. If I get angry at Gnome and Ubuntu again for any reason I will most probably try out Arch.

EDIT: And about the bashing of Arch from ubuntu fanboys, I haven't seen anything like it, it's sad if it's being done, and I'm totally against it.

[heroidi]

last night i tried to install arch on virtualbox but didn't figure it out how to do it started installing it at 00:00 and didn't end it until 05:00 of the morning till i slept from tiredness but i still wanna install it...

[CJ Master]

last night i tried to install arch on virtualbox but didn't figure it out how to do it started installing it at 00:00 and didn't end it until 05:00 of the morning till i slept from tiredness but i still wanna install it...

Beginners Guide is your friend. (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide) If you are following the Beginners guide then what's getting you stuck?

[Stagnation]

This is too funnny first you all say how easy it is. Then allow a whole day to install, and oh yes have two computers connected to the internet and thats all you need.

I'm not sure most beginner/average Linux users would call it "easy". The Arch Way is that it be "simple" not "easy". There is a difference.

Once you get used to it the simplicity really starts to shine, the configuration starts to make sense, and then it becomes easy.

I guess the "two computers connected to the internet" comment is directed at the somewhat mysterious (to the Arch newbie) installation. I have the beginner's guide printed out and it's been included on the installation media for a while now.

[lancest]

Arch is great for me except it does not come with the little newest Gnome improvements of the Ubuntu desktop- such as the notification system. Anyway why would it since it uses upstream Gnome?
People may actually be using Ubuntu because they prefer the desktop polish.
Camera's work instantly. That isn't the point of Arch anyway though is it.
Probably around Gnome 3 time I will be more interested in Arch again. I would prefer upstream Gnome with OFTB Ubuntu type tweaks.

[jukingeo]

Hello all,

I have been using Ubuntu Studio (Hardy 8.04) for a while now. Initially it gave me problems, but with updates and fixes it is much better now. For the most part I am going to stick with Ubuntu and I have not been distro hopping that much anymore.

I mostly want to do audio/video editing work and even though Ubuntu Studio is geared for this, it does fall short in may places.

I have come across this thread and many others in regards to this "Arch" Linux. Going over to the Arch site and forum, I can see that there is quite a bit of support for Arch. Apparently there is a growing interest in it.

From my readings, I understand that setting up Arch isn't for the faint hearted. However, I would give it a go IF and ONLY IF I could improve my current standings in terms of audio/video production within Linux.

Here is what I would like to do/run:

1) Ardour
2) Audacity
3) Mixxx
4) Muse
5) RoseGarden
6) Jack
7) VLC (A video playlist program & capture)
8) OpenShot
9) K9Copy (DVD ripping program)
10) Cinelerra
11) Blender
13) USB & Firewire capability

This would just be a production machine for the use of making video presentations & music videos. It will not need any wireless hookups or anything for office productivity outside of a web browser and connection (for updates of course).

In terms of hardware, I will need video capture capability and of course a standard sound card (5.1 capability is a plus, but not necessary).

Can Arch be set up to be the ultimate in multi-media production?

Once I find a system that works, I do intend to duplicate the set up on other machines. I mostly will be using older P-III and P4 machines that range from 512meg ram all the way up to 2gig ram & 1 gig to 3 gig processors.

Thank You,

Geo

[bankie]

I don't have experience with content creation in Arch (or any distro for that matter) so I can't give you any specifics.

However, every program you've listed is available through either the AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/index.php) or Community repo. Many of them have a mention on setup in the ArchWiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page).

[eldragon]

I don't have experience with content creation in Arch (or any distro for that matter) so I can't give you any specifics.

However, every program you've listed is available through either the AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/index.php) or Community repo. Many of them have a mention on setup in the ArchWiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page).

and if any of those need a special tweak, it will be dead easy to apply it to the source and rebuild the package.

[jukingeo]

However, every program you've listed is available through either the AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/index.php) or Community repo. Many of them have a mention on setup in the ArchWiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page).

Hmmm, I know OpenShot is only being tested in Ubuntu, so I don't know how that would fair in Arch.

Also I would absolutely need good USB and Firewire support. Up to now, this has been a problem in Linux. I have seen many cases where an extreme amount of 'hoop jumping' is necessary to get USB devices to fully function under Ubuntu. I really am looking for an 'out' in that regard. I would be hoping that with it's custom configurability that Arch wouldn't have these issues.

Geo

[Soley]

So I've been trying out Arch & hanging out on their forums for a while. I've asked some questions, but the problem I've found with Arch has nothing to do with the distro. It's the people in the community. I don't know if I've just run across a few bad apples, but they really can't seem to grasp simple questions people ask.

I dunno. Maybe it's just me.

That being said, Arch is damn fast compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu. That's why I've moved to #! (crunchbang).

[eldragon]

So I've been trying out Arch & hanging out on their forums for a while. I've asked some questions, but the problem I've found with Arch has nothing to do with the distro. It's the people in the community. I don't know if I've just run across a few bad apples, but they really can't seem to grasp simple questions people ask.

I dunno. Maybe it's just me.

That being said, Arch is damn fast compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu. That's why I've moved to #! (crunchbang).

the problem is you are expected to read and search before you ask. and when you ask, you have to supply as much info as you can..

you will get a negative reply usually when stuff is already documented in the wiki...

[Soley]

the problem is you are expected to read and search before you ask. and when you ask, you have to supply as much info as you can..

you will get a negative reply usually when stuff is already documented in the wiki...

And I did. And I supplied as all the info. The responses I got were questions I covered in my original question. I had never connected to a network via command line and while in the wiki it does say you have to add
&& dhcpcd wlan0 after
iwconfig wlan essid "Network". It's phrased in a way that doesn't seem to flow with the way to set it up.

[mdsmedia]

the problem is you are expected to read and search before you ask. and when you ask, you have to supply as much info as you can..

you will get a negative reply usually when stuff is already documented in the wiki...
While this approach doesn't go down terribly well with some users, I learned a heck of a lot in just installing Arch, because I had to research things I didn't understand.

I now have a situation in which my PC clock is displaying UTC, and used to show local time. I have fiddled with the rc.conf file and entered the "date" command in the terminal, and probably messed up the settings, so I have to go back and read and work out where I mucked up, rather than having answers spoon-fed to me. The date is also 1 day fast, so not sure where that went wrong but the system clock is correctly set.

What I guess I'm saying is, the approach that the Arch Forums takes leads to far less noise to signal ratio, so if you google and your answer is in the forums, you're more likely to be able to find it. The ArchWiki is awesome, but not without its flaws. If you don't do some research and homework yourself, you're unlikely to get much help in the forums if you ask something which is already well documented. The retisence to answer "simple questions" forces the user to help themselves before asking for help.

[Icehuck]

And I did. And I supplied as all the info. The responses I got were questions I covered in my original question. I had never connected to a network via command line and while in the wiki it does say you have to add
&& dhcpcd wlan0 after
iwconfig wlan essid "Network". It's phrased in a way that doesn't seem to flow with the way to set it up.

I recommend getting the netcfg scripts to run your wifi for arch. You can then just "sudo netcfg homewifi" and it will connect. You can also have it connect to your wifi while booting up the machine.

[eldragon]

And I did. And I supplied as all the info. The responses I got were questions I covered in my original question. I had never connected to a network via command line and while in the wiki it does say you have to add
&& dhcpcd wlan0 after
iwconfig wlan essid "Network". It's phrased in a way that doesn't seem to flow with the way to set it up.

im not sure if you are looking for support from me...but here it goes..

first run the ifconfig as root
then run the dhcpd command (as root)

see if that works for you..

like someone ese said, you should get the netcfg scripts.

[chris200x9]

off topic but I was just reading this thread and a comment said an arch install isn't for the faint of heart. Why does arch get such a bad wrap?!

1. partition
2. install
3. edit like 3 config files that are pretty straight forward
4. pacman -S xorg nvidia xf86-mouse-input xf86-keyboard-input fluxbox alsa-utils (or something similar)
5. xorg-config (edit as nessacery, which is probally not alot)
7. nano ~/.xinitrc write exec fluxbox
8. alsaconf
9. startx


(this only sets up root user, but arch has the adduser script its pretty straight forward.

[eldragon]

off topic but I was just reading this thread and a comment said an arch install isn't for the faint of heart. Why does arch get such a bad wrap?!

1. partition
2. install
3. edit like 3 config files that are pretty straight forward
4. pacman -S xorg nvidia xf86-mouse-input xf86-keyboard-input fluxbox alsa-utils (or something similar)
5. xorg-config (edit as nessacery, which is probally not alot)
7. nano ~/.xinitrc write exec fluxbox
8. alsaconf
9. startx


(this only sets up root user, but arch has the adduser script its pretty straight forward.

as opposed to "point, click, point click, point click, reboot" its not for the faint of heart

[mdsmedia]

off topic but I was just reading this thread and a comment said an arch install isn't for the faint of heart. Why does arch get such a bad wrap?!

1. partition
2. install
3. edit like 3 config files that are pretty straight forward
4. pacman -S xorg nvidia xf86-mouse-input xf86-keyboard-input fluxbox alsa-utils (or something similar)
5. xorg-config (edit as nessacery, which is probally not alot)
7. nano ~/.xinitrc write exec fluxbox
8. alsaconf
9. startx


(this only sets up root user, but arch has the adduser script its pretty straight forward.
If you're a pretty experienced Linux user, know how to configure those 3 config files, know exactly what you want to install, ....I could go on and on picking apart each of your points...., it's quite simple.

For those of us relatively new to Linux and editing configuration files, it's not for the feint of heart.

I could say that English is given a bad "wrap" too, but you have no problem in mucking it up.

[chris200x9]

as opposed to "point, click, point click, point click, reboot" its not for the faint of heart


If you're a pretty experienced Linux user, know how to configure those 3 config files, know exactly what you want to install, ....I could go on and on picking apart each of your points...., it's quite simple.

For those of us relatively new to Linux and editing configuration files, it's not for the feint of heart.

I could say that English is given a bad "wrap" too, but you have no problem in mucking it up.

i agree with both of you to a certain extent, but saying it's not for the faint of heart and things like that build arch up as something you have to be "l33t" to use which is not the case at all. *Almost* anyone who can read can install and run arch. I encourage linux user's of any skill to at least try it.

[Xanavi]

That`d be me :D

Thanks for the sig link, I was looking for this very thread.

[jukingeo]

off topic but I was just reading this thread and a comment said an arch install isn't for the faint of heart. Why does arch get such a bad wrap?!



That would be me that mentioned something along those lines, however you misread that what I said. I said that I READ that Arch isn't for the faint of heart. I am in no way saying it is. I don't know anything about Arch, but would like to find out more.

I have READ about the initial configuration and some people praise it and others condemn it. I don't know where I would fit in the picture. I would say that I am just getting out of the beginning phases of Linux, but I don't do much work 'under the hood' in the terminal. Yet, the idea of having a bit more control over the system is appealing. I am pretty much technically inclined too and when I was in Windows, I could handle most problems with that OS.

A big problem I am having with Linux distributions in general is getting hardware to talk properly to each other and the OS with Linux. Setting up a more 'custom' set up could alleviate those issues. BUT I could also be opening up a can of worms too.

I don't know...BUT I am always willing to learn :).

Geo

[mdsmedia]

i agree with both of you to a certain extent, but saying it's not for the faint of heart and things like that build arch up as something you have to be "l33t" to use which is not the case at all. *Almost* anyone who can read can install and run arch. I encourage linux user's of any skill to at least try it.
I tend to agree, with some reservation.

I spent a day....maybe 2....off and on, installing Arch, getting around errors, jumping from the Beginners Guide to the Wiki and the Forums, Googling, determined to get Arch installed, because I wanted to. I learned a lot about Arch and Linux, just getting it installed.

As distinct from Ubuntu or Debian, which I think are as simple as it gets in installation, Arch was a fun exercise, and I'm glad I don't have any hair long enough to tear out.....actually that's not fair, because if I really got that anywhere near that frustrated I just walked away and came back later.

I kept getting an error on installation of X (and xfce) and tried to find out how to fix it, only to read a thread on the forum that the error wasn't fatal.."just ignore it"...that wasn't documented in the Beginners Guide or the Wiki.

I tried installing Arch on my new Toshiba laptop which, by default, had a bad partitioning plan. Arch uses cfdisk to partition on installation. cfdisk kept aborting, before I decided to manually partition before running the install disk for the umpteenth time.

I like Arch and its philosophy, but somewhere between your scenario and "not for the faint of heart" lies the truth, I think.

[jukingeo]

I tend to agree, with some reservation.

I kept getting an error on installation of X (and xfce) and tried to find out how to fix it, only to read a thread on the forum that the error wasn't fatal.."just ignore it"...that wasn't documented in the Beginners Guide or the Wiki.

I tried installing Arch on my new Toshiba laptop which, by default, had a bad partitioning plan. Arch uses cfdisk to partition on installation. cfdisk kept aborting, before I decided to manually partition before running the install disk for the umpteenth time.

It is things like that I am worried about. I don't have any hair left to pull! At any rate, I am not too happy about the fact that the Arch community cops an attitude if someone needs a direct answer to a question. At least with Ubuntu, if I have a problem and I need an answer like NOW, I usually get a response quick enough (or at least a friendly response and a link to where I could solve my problem).



I like Arch and its philosophy, but somewhere between your scenario and "not for the faint of heart" lies the truth, I think.

Yup, and I lie somewhere between beginner and novice when it comes to Linux in general.

I think I would try and go for Arch IF and ONLY IF someone could tell me if it could solve my issues in setting up hardware in Linux. If the hardware support is like night and day when compared to Ubuntu, then yeah, I would try it out.

Geo

[mdsmedia]

It is things like that I am worried about. I don't have any hair left to pull! At any rate, I am not too happy about the fact that the Arch community cops an attitude if someone needs a direct answer to a question. At least with Ubuntu, if I have a problem and I need an answer like NOW, I usually get a response quick enough (or at least a friendly response and a link to where I could solve my problem).



Yup, and I lie somewhere between beginner and novice when it comes to Linux in general.

I think I would try and go for Arch IF and ONLY IF someone could tell me if it could solve my issues in setting up hardware in Linux. If the hardware support is like night and day when compared to Ubuntu, then yeah, I would try it out.

Geo
I wouldn't compare Arch and Ubuntu, pure and simple. Arch is a great distro, if that's what you're looking for. Ubuntu is what you're looking for if you want great support from the community. Arch is great if you're willing to put in your own time.

I should say, Arch is great having put in the time on day 1. Ubuntu is great if you just want to install and have support from day 1. If you want Linux, and support...and I mean having your hand held....Arch isn't for you. If you want Linux and you're willing to put in the time, Arch is great.

[tjwoosta]

I use arch, and I love arch, but I would have to agree that the arch community is a bit stuck up. Everyone just assumes that your some idiot and don't know what your doing right off the start.

Sometimes even if you have all the relevant information and you do the research, you will still run into minor problems that you cant find the answer for. If you ask people on arch forums half of the people will respond with sarcastic remarks and obvious solutions that you have already tried and posted about, without ever even reading your posts. Its that kind of behavior that sets a bad name for arch.

[jukingeo]

I use arch, and I love arch, but I would have to agree that the arch community is a bit stuck up. Everyone just assumes that your some idiot and don't know what your doing right off the start.

Sometimes even if you have all the relevant information and you do the research, you will still run into minor problems that you cant find the answer for. If you ask people on arch forums half of the people will respond with sarcastic remarks and obvious solutions that you have already tried and posted about, without ever even reading your posts. Its that kind of behavior that sets a bad name for arch.

This is a problem I had with JackLab. There were a few there that had quite the attitude. On top of that it is a very small supported distribution and only about 4 or 5 people really know what is going on with it. When I had questions it would take days for it to be answered. Sometimes I did get a sarcastic remark here and there. In the end, I said "to h--- with this" and I moved on.

Now when I consider a distribution, I DO look at the support forums first. I check for number of posts and when new questions are raised, how fast is the response time. From what I seen thusfar, it looked positive.

I DO make the practice of searching for information on my own IF and ONLY IF the hosting forum site has a good search engine. For example this forum has an excellent search engine (especially in advanced mode) so I will search existing info first. But I do run into a specific scenario and I have to make a post. That is what I did here. I really have not seen a post in regards to someone using Arch for the purpose of audio/video editing.

I do know that audio and video editing (especially video) is somewhat 'touchy' in Linux. There are issues in hardware setup as well and that is what I was mainly posting about.

Now I don't mind if you don't have the hand-holding like you do here with Ubuntu, but if I seriously get stuck with something and need a quick response, I certainly don't want to get an attitude.

At any rate, I think I would give Arch a shot. I certainly wouldn't put it on my main system though, but being that I DO have extra computers I can put it on another machine. So I DO have that option working out for me.

Geo

[Incitecite]

My experience with Arch has been very good. I've tried Ubuntu several times on my desktop, and have always run into trouble, but Arch I can get to work where Ubuntu does not. It's probably because it's a custom built machine with some strange hardware combinations, so just manually taking care of things just works better than Ubuntu trying to auto-recognize everything.

I can't say enough good things about Arch. For me, as a "power user" or whatever, Arch is better than Ubuntu for a number of reasons. In my opinion, these are the Pros and Cons of Arch:

Pros:

-Works better on strange hardware
-Insanely helpful forums and wiki
-Rolling Release
-The MOST up-to-date repositories
-Arch User Repo
-"Faster" than most other Distros, of course this depends a bit on your configuration
-Get to customize everything to your liking

Cons:
-Ridiculous install process
-Have to customize everything to your liking

As you can see, the double edged sword is that you have to basically build your system up from nothing, which is great once you've finished, but is not necessarily something you may want to do. If you just want a Gnome desktop with Firefox & the rest of your basic apps, there are a lot of distros that can offer you that out of the box. Where Arch shines is when you want to use the more atypical things. It seems almost like it would be a better test bed for window managers and DE's than an end-user system, but if you want the flexibility to easily change your desktop environment it's amazing. Rolling release is also nice. It's easy to see why Arch is a distro that some people take to very strongly and others have no interest in.

Because I always ran into problems with Ubuntu and then went back to Windows, I was very noob at all things linux. It's not true that you'll be overwhelmed if you're not an experienced linux user and you try Arch, all you need to do is be willing to take some time to read the beginner's guide & forums. If I can do it anybody can, so don't let the ridiculous install process put you off. That being said, the install process IS a time consuming and you'll have to do a lot of reading, but it's not so bad once you've gotten the hang of it. It doesn't seem very hard to me now that I've done it several times. The biggest thing for me though is that everything is so up to date. I'm always very annoyed whenever I try to download an app in Ubuntu and find that it's 2 months outdated. I like to have up to date software, so having a very up to date repo is very convenient.

Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu is great, it's the first thing I recommend to friends interested in trying linux. However, if you want a system that has zero unnecessary software, that's fast, extremely flexible, and cutting edge, Arch is the only choice.

That is why Arch Linux is so... "Good."

[gymophett]

it has killer documentation.

+1

[lancest]

I like Arch alot. I'm always thinking of going back to it and still might in the future. I'm a gnome user though and feel that Arch's upstream Gnome does not hold a candle to Ubuntu's in many ways. Yes I like the CLI (Bash shell) but also enjoy good GUI tools. You could make a case that Ubuntu comes with too much preinstalled by default but you could also say opin that upstream Gnome is a little too barebones vanilla- like myself. Ubuntu's themes, GUI tools, fonts, and general desktop care just takes a Linux cloud pc to another level. If you look around you will find a lot of veteran Linux users who use Ubuntu for the same reason- quality OFTB. Also I have not found Arch to be faster than Ubuntu on my machines.
Actually I hope many of the improvements I am seeing in Karmic will reach upstream Gnome so Arch can share in them.

[renkinjutsu]

this thread inspired me.. i had 18GB of unpartitioned space on my harddrive, so i went for it..

it took a loongg while to pacman everything... and the night i installed, my sister was playing counter-strike and i had to hold off on the downloading, so i had to hold off the pacmanaging to another day.

now i have gnome-panel, thunar, and rhythmbox installed and compiled pekwm from source..
all is well except the notification applet for icons doesn't work.. neither does the window list at the bottom panel =[ .. but it doesn't bother me, because my ubuntu is beautiful

[~sHyLoCk~]

Arch was good until I tried gentoo and then slackware and freebsd. Now compared to slack and BSDs, arch seems mediocre. Slackware ftw! yes, I love posting about arch just to see the arch zealots spring into action. :D
I like arch. It is quite nice for a minimal system.

[kevCast]

Arch was good until I tried gentoo and then slackware and freebsd. Now compared to slack and BSDs, arch seems mediocre. Slackware ftw! yes, I love posting about arch just to see the arch zealots spring into action. :D
I like arch. It is quite nice for a minimal system.

Same here. Slackware just beats...everything.

[dragos240]

-Have to customize everything to your liking

That would be a pro :)

[Странник]

Arch is viral :P

[SomeGuyDude]

Three letters: A-U-R.

Yaourt is KING. It's the easiest thing on the planet for installing community-based packages.

[samjh]

Arch is definitely not a distro for everybody. I really like Ubuntu, but switched to Debian Testing, then Arch. I don't like doing 6-monthly system rebuilds or upgrades, and Debian Testing was too unreliable for me.

Pros:
Simple configuration, especially its well-organised and well-documented start-up scripts (this is in stark contrast to Debian-based distros, which have some of the most arcane start-up configuration scripts in the Linux world).
I know exactly what is being run on my system.
Reliable rolling-release upgrades. I haven't suffered a single crash in around three months of use (and some abuse), which included a kernel upgrade.
Excellent documentation and community forums. Responses to questions are extremely quick, and the community wiki are up-to-date and helpful on almost any topic.
Efficient operation.

Cons:
Long installation process. I had little problems during install (except some errors during disk partitioning), but it took around three hours from burning the installation CD to booting up with Gnome.
Post-installation configuration. Because the initial installation is bare-bones, you have to do a fair bit of slog to get printing, scanning, X, and other stuff set up. Reserve at least two hours for this.
Limited number of official packages. Pacman is great, but the Arch official repository is little bit bare. I know that the Arch User Repository has a huge collection of software, but the quality of the packaging tends to vary a lot. Some AUR packages don't even work.

[jukingeo]

As you can see, the double edged sword is that you have to basically build your system up from nothing, which is great once you've finished, but is not necessarily something you may want to do. If you just want a Gnome desktop with Firefox & the rest of your basic apps, there are a lot of distros that can offer you that out of the box. Where Arch shines is when you want to use the more atypical things. It seems almost like it would be a better test bed for window managers and DE's than an end-user system, but if you want the flexibility to easily change your desktop environment it's amazing. Rolling release is also nice. It's easy to see why Arch is a distro that some people take to very strongly and others have no interest in.


Putting it in terms of my scenario, I know that for the most part, just doing everyday work (emailing, web browsing, playing audio video files) that Ubuntu (or put preferred Linux distro here) will usually do the job.

In my case I do want to play around with hardware. I am MOSTLY working with audio and video editing. I am looking to improve on the current situation I have using Ubuntu Studio. Many times I run into trouble is that there are issues with video, sound cards, and to a certain extent even networking between computers.

What I am wondering is if using Arch would significantly improve upon that situation and thus I could end up with a much better 'studio'. If the answer to that would be 'Yes', then I might pull up an old computer and try to set up Arch on it.

I would want to set it up on an 'unused' machine right now because setting it up on my main machine is asking for trouble and I wont do that.

Since it does take a very long time to set up Arch...do you have to do it in one shot, or can you set it up, then take a break and come back to it?

Thanx,

Geo

[samjh]

You can do it in stages. In my three Arch installs, I did it in three stages:
The base installation, which gets you a fully-functional command-line with networking: 30 minutes.
The desktop environment (X, then Gnome, KDE, or whatever you want) + NVidia + some tweaks: 1 hour, mostly choosing and downloading packages.
Applications (mainly: Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, OpenOffice.org) + CUPS + XSane + Flash + additional multimedia codecs: 1 hour, again mostly spent in downloading, but you can save time by installing CUPS and XSane first, then downloading the apps while you configure your printer and scanner.

Those times are current with my level of fluency in the process. The first time I installed Arch, it took longer, because I had to keep reading the Beginner's Guide.

[the8thstar]

I tried both Arch and Chakra (Arch+KDEmod) and didn't like either. Ubuntu has the software I need and my hardware runs fast enough with it that I don't need to tweak the system to no end with another Linux distro.

[jukingeo]

The desktop environment (X, then Gnome, KDE, or whatever you want) + NVidia + some tweaks: 1 hour, mostly choosing and downloading packages.


Ok, let me stop you there for a moment...the "N" word. I don't have an Nvidia video card. I have an ATI video card on the proposed test system. BUT in most cases usually machines I find do have Nvidia cards. So the golden question is, will Arch also work with ATI---accelerated 3D ?

Thanx,
Geo

[kk0sse54]

Ok, let me stop you there for a moment...the "N" word. I don't have an Nvidia video card. I have an ATI video card on the proposed test system. BUT in most cases usually machines I find do have Nvidia cards. So the golden question is, will Arch also work with ATI---accelerated 3D ?

Thanx,
Geo

I have an ati card that I use with the open source drivers perfectly fine in arch with 3D support. The proprietary ati driver is also available through the AUR and works great from what I hear.

[samjh]

So the golden question is, will Arch also work with ATI---accelerated 3D ?

As C!oud said, yes, ATI cards also work. Arch officially supports only the open-source driver for ATI cards. ATI's proprietary Catalyst driver can be found in the Arch User Repository (AUR).

See: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI

[jukingeo]

I have an ati card that I use with the open source drivers perfectly fine in arch with 3D support. The proprietary ati driver is also available through the AUR and works great from what I hear.


As C!oud said, yes, ATI cards also work. Arch officially supports only the open-source driver for ATI cards. ATI's proprietary Catalyst driver can be found in the Arch User Repository (AUR).

See: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI

I am using the open source driver as well. The driver IS set for accelerated graphics and for the longest time I thought I had 3D support. But I am finding that for applications that request 3D accelerated graphics, the OpenGL tab is NOT available. So It would appear that I don't have 3D support.

Normally in the past I heard that the proprietary drivers for ATI leave much to be desired. I will check that one out through AUR (what is that anyway). IF and ONLY IF it will not screw up my system.

Thanx,
Geo

[SomeGuyDude]

It bears repeating:

1) I don't want GNOME/KDE/whatever by default. I want to decide what goes on my system. Having to download/burn a new ISO if I want to just go straight XFCE on a new install is a PITA.

2) Rolling release is nice. No worry about "will everything break in the next version?"

3) The AUR is godly.

4) Seriously, I haven't had to fix anything since an Xorg break almost a year ago.

[Tibuda]

It bears repeating:

1) I don't want GNOME/KDE/whatever by default. I want to decide what goes on my system. Having to download/burn a new ISO if I want to just go straight XFCE on a new install is a PITA.

2) Rolling release is nice. No worry about "will everything break in the next version?"

3) The AUR is godly.

4) Seriously, I haven't had to fix anything since an Xorg break almost a year ago.

All your points are valid, except the first. There's a Ubuntu minimal CD that only install a terminal system. I think the only app in Ubuntu minimal not installed by default in Arch is sudo, as Ubuntu don't have a root account. EDIT: and apt-get instead of pacman.

[jukingeo]

Ok, next question,

In terms of repositories, what does Arch have access to? In other words could I run Jack, Ardour, Cinelerra, Audacity...etc?

Thanx,

Geo

[Dharmachakra]

Ok, next question,

In terms of repositories, what does Arch have access to? In other words could I run Jack, Ardour, Cinelerra, Audacity...etc?

Thanx,

Geo

Cinelerra is in the 'Community' repository, the others are in 'Extra'. You can search the repositories from the Arch website in case you're wondering about other packages.

[snowpine]

Ok, next question,

In terms of repositories, what does Arch have access to? In other words could I run Jack, Ardour, Cinelerra, Audacity...etc?

Thanx,

Geo

No, those packages are not part of Arch; you would have to compile from source (which you can download from the app's home page). Arch is very "minimalistic" and provides only the basic command line interface.

[kk0sse54]

No, those packages are not part of Arch; you would have to compile from source (which you can download from the app's home page). Arch is very "minimalistic" and provides only the basic command line interface.

Where are you getting that from?! That's totally not true. I suggest you have a look at http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q= :roll:

[snowpine]

Where are you getting that from?! That's totally not true. I suggest you have a look at http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q= :roll:

Woah, cool! Last time I tried to install Arch, all I got was a command line prompt; I couldn't even see the wobbly windows. Glad they fixed that problem since last time... I will have to give it another try. ;)

[SomeGuyDude]

All your points are valid, except the first. There's a Ubuntu minimal CD that only install a terminal system. I think the only app in Ubuntu minimal not installed by default in Arch is sudo, as Ubuntu don't have a root account. EDIT: and apt-get instead of pacman.

Ah yes, I forgot about the minimal install. I don't know a lot about it, but is it as thorough as Arch? Does it give you as much control?

[snowpine]

Ah yes, I forgot about the minimal install. I don't know a lot about it, but is it as thorough as Arch? Does it give you as much control?

It "just works" in the same way a regular Ubuntu install just works. You don't have to mess around with the config files in /etc like you do in Arch. I am a big fan of both, for different reasons. :)

[SomeGuyDude]

It "just works" in the same way a regular Ubuntu install just works. You don't have to mess around with the config files in /etc like you do in Arch. I am a big fan of both, for different reasons. :)

Well that ain't bad either. My main point there was that you can put in whatever YOU want, and nothing else. So I suppose the minimal install works as well.

[snowpine]

Well that ain't bad either. My main point there was that you can put in whatever YOU want, and nothing else. So I suppose the minimal install works as well.

Give it a try in VirtualBox if you're at all curious. :) I've made some fun Ubuntu minimal + lightweight windows manager experiments in the past.

ps if you've ever done a minimal Debian install, it's pretty much the same.

[SomeGuyDude]

Oh I can't give up my precious Arch. I'm too much of an AUR/ABS addict. I don't think I could ever go back to having to add repos and all that stuff again.

[Barrucadu]

Woah, cool! Last time I tried to install Arch, all I got was a command line prompt; I couldn't even see the wobbly windows. Glad they fixed that problem since last time... I will have to give it another try. ;)

It's meant to be like that :P

[jukingeo]

Where are you getting that from?! That's totally not true. I suggest you have a look at http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q= :roll:

NICE! Looks like it has quite a bit! It looks like the well known stuff is there, Jack, Ardour, Cinelerra, Gimp, but some stuff I use such as VLC (VideoLAN Player), is not there. I guess something like this would have to be compiled then.

I will say though overall, this is interesting me.

Now there was mention that Arch is mostly a terminal based interface, so you run everything from the terminal. Does Arch also have a 'slimline' gui interface as well?

Thanx,
Geo

[SomeGuyDude]

NICE! Looks like it has quite a bit! It looks like the well known stuff is there, Jack, Ardour, Cinelerra, Gimp, but some stuff I use such as VLC (VideoLAN Player), is not there. I guess something like this would have to be compiled then.

Um. You mean THIS VLC?

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&arch=&repo=&q=vlc&last_update=&limit=50

All you had to do was punch in "vlc" in the search box and it showed up. I dunno what you did. :confused:

Plus, anything you can't find, hit up the AUR: http://aur.archlinux.org/

[RiceMonster]

Now there was mention that Arch is mostly a terminal based interface, so you run everything from the terminal. Does Arch also have a 'slimline' gui interface as well?

It starts off with just a terminal interface, but then you can add GNOME, KDE, Xfce or whatever you want. Remember, you have to set everything up yourself. If that's not what you want to do, then Arch won't suit you.

[Tibuda]

Ah yes, I forgot about the minimal install. I don't know a lot about it, but is it as thorough as Arch? Does it give you as much control?

Apt installs recommended (not required) packages by default, but if you use the -R (or --without-recommends) option you have more control over what is installed.

[kelvin spratt]

Originally Posted by jukingeo http://ubuntuforums.org/images/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8055636#post8055636)
Now there was mention that Arch is mostly a terminal based interface, so you run everything from the terminal. Does Arch also have a 'slimline' gui interface as well?

Yes it does if thats what you want t Shamam, is the gui package manager,
To do updates you should always use, # pacman -Syu. most other things its your choice if you want to install a gui if available or use command line.

[jukingeo]

It starts off with just a terminal interface, but then you can add GNOME, KDE, Xfce or whatever you want. Remember, you have to set everything up yourself. If that's not what you want to do, then Arch won't suit you.


Oh, Ok, sounds good.

I don't mind working at something to get it going PROVIDED that clear instructions are given. What I can't stand is when I take the time to read an installation procedure and then it doesn't work right. For example last night I tried to load up qjoypad (a joystick to keypress utility) and I followed the the installation instructions to the letter and it didn't work. I got an error right away. In another prior instance I wanted to set up a 'proven' ALSA sound device and I followed the procedure on the ALSA site to install the item and low and behold, it didn't work. I bought the item off Ebay especially because it was said to work. The instructions were very poor and so was the support by the driver's creator. So that is one thing that does tick me off with Linux, is that for some things, there is a lack of straightforward instructions.

If Arch has excellent documentation and support, then yeah, I don't mind doing the work. However, I just DONT want to sit for weeks on end trying to get a sound card to work with Jack to no avail, if you know what I mean.

Thanx,
Geo