Arch Linux

2009-04-16
, , , , , ,

Linux distributions >
See also Linux distributions based on Arch Linux

(on Wikipedia)
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=arch
https://archlinux.org/

Appears to have a good philosophy. In reality it's over-limited to the point of making life convenient for the developers at the expense of inconveniencing the users.

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Table of Contents [hide]

systemd ∞

(systemd)

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2011-07-07 - (version not recorded) ∞

  • text spills off the screen
  • bad structure and formatting
  • shit-for-brains install guide

  • should just have a 'setup' user that runs /arch/setup on login, or have that mentioned in the fucking login message!

    • but noo.. not modifying things is part of their philosophy.

  • repartition for a separate /boot

    • and to fix hdd alignment / cfdisk
  • installed devel, did not change any of the default apps to be installed

  • Boots into a worthless rescue system with no hint on how to install the rest of the system. Fail. Very Gentoo.

2010-11-10 - 2010.5 ∞

  • Gorgeous CD bootup menu
  • Properly shows [BUSY] and [DONE] for items as it boots up - and in colour. Very nice. Of course I want that stuff on the left side and not the right. I've only seen one distro that does that and I can't even remember what that is.
  • High resolution textmode by default.
  • Why force the user to type paths to launch the installer/etc? Just make a symlink to the installer and a .sh to the manual right in the ~/ of root and arch.

  • Slackware-esque textmode installer

    • Not a GUI LiveCD. =(
  • Numlock/console is off by default
  • Fucking console beeps
  • The packages list is all grouped into one list.
  • Editing the mirrorlist has no help within it. I'm not sure what the consequences of uncommenting multiple items would be. Do I need to manually sort them for my preference?
  • I can opt to not install a bootloader! Yay!
  • I skipped the bootloader install because I wanted to install LILO, but then I realised that I don't have easy access to my instructions and they would be different with this setup anyways. That's when I learned that there's no simple way to install just the bootloader under Arch. I had to go through the whole installer. Ugh. Yes I could use GRUB directly, but honestly people.. fuck that.
  • I want LILO!
  • After my second software installation, it bailed on mounting /mnt/dev .. I had to reboot and retry, which worked.
  • Ooh, it let me edit the GRUB config, very nice. It added Windows into the boot menu too. 1280x1024 works!
  • Installed, booted up.. now what? I found some help on the wiki. This is a bit hilarious since a person is dropped to a console with a barely-functional system and even installing a browser is a bit non-obvious. Yep, Arch isn't made to be easy.
  • pacman is the commandline package manager.

  • /etc/pacman.conf - turns out I didn't need to bother with this- rankmirrors for uncommented /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist - but python does not exist!

sh
pacman -Syy
pacman -S curl
pacman -Syu
pacman -S xorg
  • lspci - find my chipset, then run Xorg -configure
  • This motherboard has a crappy ATI 4S880 - radeon HD4200
  • xf86-video-vesa will work as a default. It turns out to be a dependency, so it's included.
  • pacman -S xf86-input-keyboard xf86-input-mouse
  • startx worked with no configuration or any of this keyboard/mouse stuff. But when X is running, I cannot see the raw console anymore.
  • pacman -S openbox obconf
  • I miss being able to download 4 packages at once (and from different mirrors) the way Unity Linux's smart does.
  • Firefox is unusually slow starting up! Probably because of my shoddy video driver selection. X is also slow to start up.
  • I couldn't really exit X. The control-alt-backspace stuff was removed by default. Why, I have no clue.
  • xf86-video-ati
  • mesa
  • xf86-video-radeonhd doesn't exist!
  • ttf-dejavu ttf-msfonts
  • xterm looks good with truetype fonts, set to tiny. Right-controlclick to get the menu.

  • Pacman GUI Frontends has a link to shaman, which is a 404.

Wow, no official GUI frontend?! FAIL.

2009-04-19 - core-2009.02 ∞

  • Nice auto-prepare feature.
  • The install isn't so automated. I have to 'continue' after a while, and choose my editor and such.
  • The install is very very lengthy under VirtualBox.
  • I don't know what I did to make it rebuild the initcpio images. =/

  • Only has GRUB and not LILO. =(

    • It's nice, and shows a configuration file to edit before doing the install. Hey, this configuration file looks almost human. Nice.
  • Rebooted into it. Seemed to work except I had no users. Sigh. Booting back into the LiveCD.
  • The installer couldn't help me, so I mounted my finished partition, chrooted into it and set root and a user. I hope I guessed the proper groups to use.
  • No X to begin with, and I could barely figure out package management. Needed to get into the website for help.

  • Turns out that networking didn't get installed. Sigh.

    • Udev wasn't installed?
    • docs

Giving up.

2009-04-16 - core-2009.02 ∞

I like Arch Linux. It gives me happy feelings knowing it exists.

I wanted to install it and check it out.

  • Their website doesn't explain the difference between the different downloads. Thanks guys.
  • Nice bootup.
  • Installing requires a swap partition, no problem.. I have a craptastic 8MB one just for situations like this.
  • No description for packages. Very Slackware.
  • Mediocre Slackware-esque installer. Not surprising. Not a big deal either.
  • Installer has some text-wrapping issues. =/

  • Uh, it made me set up my own fstab?! That's strange.

Ok. So.

  1. I chose sda1.
  2. It installed to sda1.
  3. It succeeded.
  4. I rebooted into sda1.

  5. I got Pardus.

lolwut.

No, seriously. I didn't misunderstand the installer one bit. I didn't choose some other partition to install to or boot into. The Arch installer took a long time and did lots of stuff. It was finished, and said I could reboot. It installed.

Maybe I need to take a break from playing with distributions.

Or maybe I need to sacrifice a chicken or an albino goat or something.

Last updated 2021-02-16 at 11:11:21

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