Arch Linux and automating network

[spencerf]

Hey everyone, well I just installed arch linux on a spare partition to give it a try I figured I would start installing different distro's to try them out and to practice my linux skills. Well the install was fairly straight forward and extremely fast. I currently am a gentoo user for about a year now so I will use that as an example for my question.

in gentoo I do rc-update add net.eth0 default
what do I do in Arch.
I've taken a look at /etc/rf.conf is this where I would put this.

Second question is it called net.eth0 or something else?

that's it for now thanx.

[oz]

Yeah, it's all pretty straight forward in Arch.

You don't need the rc-update feature of Gentoo. Just vim to rc.conf and put all your network stuff in there, do your hosts file, setup resolv.conf, and make sure your modem module is loading/loaded. You can check out the Arch wiki as there's a network configuration howto posted there.

[spencerf]

cool.
thanks for the fast reply.

yeah I briefly browsed the rc.conf file will have to look more into it. I have internet working its just not starting automatically been doing the ifconfig eth1 up dhcpcd route.

[oz]

I love Gentoo, but the updates/upgrades are simply too time intensive for me, so Arch gives me everything I want from a Linux distro. In fact, it's the only distro that's ever kept me onboard and using it for more than a year.

[bryansmith]

Yay another Archer! One more down...

As for the eth0, are you using dhcp? If so, make the network section look like:

lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
eth0="dhcp"
INTERFACES=(lo eth0)
ROUTES=(!gateway)

Bryan

[spencerf]

yeah I edited rc.conf and everything went smooth. So far I really like it. Pacman is incredibly fast and fetching things and install time is so freakin fast that I couldn't believe I installed and downloaded kde in less than 20 minutes. On gentoo that would have taken hours upon hours. That's part of the reason I use fluxbox now on my gentoo box. But I still love gentoo because of the configurability and support that's out there and it really make me learn linux and once stuff is installed it works great. But arch is cool and I will probably install something else in the next week or so on my other spare partition to try it out.

one question though. If I want to compile my own kernel is it just like gentoo.
make menuconfig
cp arch/i386/boot/bzimage /boot/kernel-name

do I then have to edit grub and keep the initrd line?

[oz]

Pacman is incredibly fast and fetching things and install time is so freakin fast that I couldn't believe I installed and downloaded kde in less than 20 minutes. On gentoo that would have taken hours upon hours.

one question though. If I want to compile my own kernel is it just like gentoo.
make menuconfig
cp arch/i386/boot/bzimage /boot/kernel-name

do I then have to edit grub and keep the initrd line?

Yeah, that's exactly what I was referring to about Gentoo being overly time intensive.

Regarding kernels, I can't answer because I quit compiling my own kernels just over a year ago. Arches stock kernel has always worked quite well for me, so I use it and don't have to edit anything before rebooting. Just "pacman -S kernel26" and I'm good to go.

[bryansmith]

I think what you want for a custom kernel is something called abs. It is a ports like system for Arch. I could be wrong but I am sure that is what you might be looking for. - http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS

Bryan

[spencerf]

No I mean I want to go into the kernel and then take out all the stuff I don't need and add anything that I do need that is not already enabled.

for example I don't need all the nics enabled just the one that I have

also I want video for linux enabled.

so can I just manually edit kernel and then make && make modules_install
then cp over to boot

[bryansmith]

Sorry, can't help you there. I am like ozar, very happy with the stock kernel. I suggest using the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net, #archlinux). They also have forums.

If you can't find a solution, you could always roll your own .

Bryan