picpak
December 10th, 2006, 06:36 PM
Looks like Arch is the distro Ubuntu experts 'graduate' to. I wanted to switch for a while, but it was a post in the Feisty forums extolling its virtues that pushed me over the edge.
First, let me explain why I did it. After more than enough crashes with Feisty and a broken Internet, I decided to go back to Edgy. However, the Internet wouldn't even connect during a reinstall. I was ready to spend a week with a crippled computer until I could get the XP CDs off my sister, but then I looked behind the router and found my cable light burned out. ](*,) Oops.
I switched the cables around, installed Xubuntu, and all was well. However...I felt it was *too* easy. I needed a challenge. I'm not Gentoo material yet, so I opted for Arch.
The installation was easy, with a copy of the Installation Guide available. Partitioning was done with cfdisk, the only partitioner I ever understood. I nuked my Ubuntu install, because I had no idea how well the /home partition would cooperate with each other (for instance, Arch puts its program files in /opt).
The installation went very well. If the Installation Guide told me anything, I was on my way to a workable kernel. ...I wasn't. After tons of GRUB errors and kernel panics, I searched the forums for a backup kernel, a la Ubuntu. I found it, put it in my /boot/grub/menu.lst, and used that (until a few days ago, when I realized to switch initrd26.img to kernel26.img in /boot/grub/menu.lst).
Keep in mind, the default Arch install only installs enough to get a kernel and a login screen. It makes Ubuntu's server install look bloated. After two days in a console and learning more about links2 then ever before, I got myself a workable Xfce4 and Xorg. Just like Ubuntu, extra repositories are needed to get more programs (in this case, Xfce4's svn version). I generated my xorg.conf with hwd -xa (hwd, of course, wasn't installed by default), but this only gave me a lousy vesa driver. After even more searching, I found the obscure name of my driver: xf86-video-i810. How obvious.
After all the setup, though, it's a breeze. You can install almost anything through pacman -S <packagename>, and if it's not in there, it's probably in AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/) (the exceptions being Audacity 1.3.2 and localepurge).
Now, after a *lot* of reading through their forums and their wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page) (their wiki is your friend...seriously), I've got it feeling just like Ubuntu. The hype about the speed in i686 is overrated, but it is noticable with Java applications.
And now, the obligatory screenshot:
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v37/picpak/th_2006-12-10-113031_832x624_scrot.png (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v37/picpak/2006-12-10-113031_832x624_scrot.png)
In case you're wondering, that pink dog is the 'picpak' in question. I created him when I was little, the background was a little plain, I threw him in. I guess you could call it a 'Picmac'.
And there you have it!
First, let me explain why I did it. After more than enough crashes with Feisty and a broken Internet, I decided to go back to Edgy. However, the Internet wouldn't even connect during a reinstall. I was ready to spend a week with a crippled computer until I could get the XP CDs off my sister, but then I looked behind the router and found my cable light burned out. ](*,) Oops.
I switched the cables around, installed Xubuntu, and all was well. However...I felt it was *too* easy. I needed a challenge. I'm not Gentoo material yet, so I opted for Arch.
The installation was easy, with a copy of the Installation Guide available. Partitioning was done with cfdisk, the only partitioner I ever understood. I nuked my Ubuntu install, because I had no idea how well the /home partition would cooperate with each other (for instance, Arch puts its program files in /opt).
The installation went very well. If the Installation Guide told me anything, I was on my way to a workable kernel. ...I wasn't. After tons of GRUB errors and kernel panics, I searched the forums for a backup kernel, a la Ubuntu. I found it, put it in my /boot/grub/menu.lst, and used that (until a few days ago, when I realized to switch initrd26.img to kernel26.img in /boot/grub/menu.lst).
Keep in mind, the default Arch install only installs enough to get a kernel and a login screen. It makes Ubuntu's server install look bloated. After two days in a console and learning more about links2 then ever before, I got myself a workable Xfce4 and Xorg. Just like Ubuntu, extra repositories are needed to get more programs (in this case, Xfce4's svn version). I generated my xorg.conf with hwd -xa (hwd, of course, wasn't installed by default), but this only gave me a lousy vesa driver. After even more searching, I found the obscure name of my driver: xf86-video-i810. How obvious.
After all the setup, though, it's a breeze. You can install almost anything through pacman -S <packagename>, and if it's not in there, it's probably in AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/) (the exceptions being Audacity 1.3.2 and localepurge).
Now, after a *lot* of reading through their forums and their wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page) (their wiki is your friend...seriously), I've got it feeling just like Ubuntu. The hype about the speed in i686 is overrated, but it is noticable with Java applications.
And now, the obligatory screenshot:
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v37/picpak/th_2006-12-10-113031_832x624_scrot.png (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v37/picpak/2006-12-10-113031_832x624_scrot.png)
In case you're wondering, that pink dog is the 'picpak' in question. I created him when I was little, the background was a little plain, I threw him in. I guess you could call it a 'Picmac'.
And there you have it!