Going to try out Arch Linux

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 2:20 pm

Judland wrote:I don't know what sort of ordeal it is to get KDE installed on a Gentoo or Slackware system, but it couldn't have been more easier than with Arch last night.

With Gentoo, a base install takes about 2.5 hours to get you a command prompt. Installing KDE with all it dependencies took about 20 hours! This is with my 2.4 ghz machine over a pretty quick cable modem. Was there an increase in speed faster than Debian or Fedora? Miniscule. KDE on Kanotix is quicker and that install took about 20 minutes. Slackware comes with KDE as the default desktop. Slackware also takes about 20-30 mintues to install. IMHO Gentoo is not worth it. That's just my opinion. Try it out yourself and see if you disagree. Just make sure you have a weekend to spend on it.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 7:38 pm

Holy crap! I came across this tip on the Arch Wiki that mentions replacing hotplug with the Arch-centric hwd application for auto detection.

After doing this, my boot sequence time went from the standard 60 - 100 seconds (which I usually got from most every distro I've tried) down to 32 seconds! That's right from the time I select Arch to boot, at the Grub menu, to the appearance of X and KDM!

The first time, it booted so fast, I couldn't believe it. So I rebooted and counted this time.

Thirty two seconds. On a PII, no less.

Remarkable.

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:58 pm

Sounds like an interesting distro. Like I said I will try it out as soon as I can. Definitely post some updates. Especially in regards to installing and upgrading apps.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 1:26 pm

My Arch system is coming along quite well (don't know if anyone's reading my blog about it or not).

Now I'm at the point where I can start adding and playing with different applications and fiddle with network settings and such.

One thing I learned over the weekend is how to build/contribute packages for Arch's pacman package manager.

Seems as though you can build custom install scripts (called PKGBUILDs) using source tarball files. Once you build the scirpt, you can submit it to the Arch AUR repository.

Then, if someone wishes to install that package on their own system, they simply download your script, run it, and it makes an install package for your system from the source tarball. You then use pacman to install the package you just built (dependancies and all).

Once I got the concept, it was quite easy to do.

If a package becomes popular enough, the Arch maintainers then take your script and build a complete package for the offical Arch repositories.

What a great way for anyone to contribute to the development of Arch.

Now, don't get me wrong. Kanotix is great and for people with limited or no computer hacking skills, it's the perfect OS.

However, I'm really enjoying what I'm learning about Linux with Arch. And if you want to feel part of a community, then Arch is second to none, in my experience.

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 1:48 pm

Judland wrote:Now, don't get me wrong. Kanotix is great and for people with limited or no computer hacking skills, it's the perfect OS.

Yeah, that pretty much describes me

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 3:46 pm

Me too. But right now I feel like I'm at the point where I want to learn "why" as well as "how".

Kanotix is great for "how"... I'm finding both the "how" and "why" questions easier to answer with Arch.