Arch Linux: shining sun behind rainy clouds

[geniuz]

This thread is meant as reply to http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...nder-arch.html
by Manchunian.

Like I said in that thread, I just had to try Arch Linux. And here I am, posting this thread from Arch. But I must say, I've been thru the closest thing to hell to get here...

First off the install, I'm not completely stupid so I printed parts of their beginners guide, although I'm quite familiar with a text based install.
So I intented to start partitioning my harddisk, I wanted to delete all of my partitions to start intirely clean...don't worry I backed up my important data on a couple of dvd's.

And that's where it went wrong first time: cfdisk couldn't start because some "overlapping partitions" or something. So I had to burn myself a gparted live disc from where I deleted all my partitions: no way back now...

So with an empty and good as new harddisk I fired up the Arch FTP ISO again. This time partitioning went splendid, no errors nothing, just perfect !

So next thing up selecting the packages, I first just selected everything, because I wanted to play safe...WRONG MOVE !
Soon as I selected everything and tried to install (that's where the packages are being dowloaded from a local ftp server) it just died on me.

The output told me abs was not in the sync database, I thought "hrm prolly a bug, let try again", well no luck...
Took me some time to remember I saw abs in the package and figured deselecting it might solve the problem...and it did.

Now package downloading went just fine, although I had to go thru it twice because an ftp install requires the "pacman -Sy pacman" command to get all packages downloaded and installed".

After that thank god it ended...system configuration went fine following their guide and installing the bootloader did too.

Right now I've been using Arch for about a day and I must say it is lightning fast and very easy. Specially combining pacman and yaourt (which gives you easy access to the AUR). Setting xorg, sound and stuff up is pretty straightforward IF you RTFM. Only little problem I encountered was setting up my printer...took me a while to figure out I had to manually add cups to my /etc/rc.conf.

I think I can honestly say I will make Arch my productive OS. Mainly because of it's ease and velocity, setting up Debian took me quite longer than setting up Arch. I mean I've got Arch running in less than 2 hours, including xorg, sound, network and just other basic PC stuff...

So if you want my opinion: Arch is perfect, once you know how to set it up...

[oz]

lol... Sorry to hear that it wasn't right for you. Arch is definitely not meant for all users. It's almost perfect for me and has been for over 3 years now. It was the only distro that ever stopped my long running distro-hopping habit.

The devs do make it clear up front that it's not meant for everyone and that they have no intention of trying to make it for everyone. That in itself is one of the things that makes it different. Try it again some day in the future when you feel experimental and perhaps things will go better.

Good luck with whatever distro(s) you run.

[geniuz]

I think you didn't read my post properly, I said I absolutely love Arch...it's just that they could clear some thing up better...like maybe CLEARLY pointing out to deselect abs, and also they could make the installer just skipping unavailable packages instead of freezing and not download anything beyond that point.

I'm quite experienced so I figured it out by examining the output...my point is new users will be scared off big time if something like that would have happened I guess...

[oz]

Oops... you are correct! I misread it because I keyed in on the hellish parts.

Glad it's working out for you.

[Jonathan183]

I also have just installed Arch ... went for the 64bit install on my laptop. My hard drive was already parititioned so I didn't use the cfdisk bit at all. I went for the core install which went fairly well ... it took me longer to RTFM than install . I had to force a module install as part of the update (gpm) ... it usually takes me a bit longer than that to break gentoo's emerge .

Now I have gnome, fluxbox, Openbox and Xfce installed. I would have tried the kdemod but the 64bit version isn't working just yet ... I tried the work round from the bug report but that didn't work either.

I like the rolling updates idea ... I'll see how I get on with Arch a bit longer term. I'll wait a few weeks and try the 32 bit version on my desktop.

[multios]

Glad you got it installed and are enjoying it. I've used it for a couple of years and on my newer machines, it rocks
Older machines have Slackware.
All in all, for me life is good with Arch, Slackware, OpenBSD, and some systems with PCLinuxOS.