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Okay -- I got antsy and installed arch on one of my test drives (read I popped a drive onto the IDE cable of the never-booted XP box we keep around for some unknown reason. My wife has a few things she needs winders for). The install was actually cake once I figured out that I'd need to write down the order of my partitions so I could go back later and change the devfs entries to regular /dev entries. I would have to say, though, that that part of the install was unnecessarily clumsy.

Once I got a base install up and running, I upgraded to noodle (0.7.1), installed KDE, and got ready to rock and roll. So far, I can say it's very snappy -- much faster than (k)ubuntu. Much more bare bones, too. I haven't installed all the modules I need, and I'm betting that's going to be little to no fun, but it boots to X just fine. I imagine installing arch on a lappy and getting everything working would be a fair amount of work.

First impressions:
It's going to take some time to get used to pacman -- I'm far too used to yum and apt-get. It's a nice, well thought out tool though.
I'm not certain that I really like the /etc layout -- is this "learning linux?" It's no big deal, but I can't imagine starting on a box setup like this, and then moving to an RHEL shop. The culture shock would be overwhelming.
Fast, fast, fast. Really fast.
I'm a little concerned about the breakage I hear mentioned several places on the net. If there is going to be common breakage, what's the advantage over, say, debian sid? "Simplicity?"

So far I like it, and I'm planning on installing it on my *real* testing box for at least a while to see what shakes loose.

That's great and congratulations on your installation! My apologies for not being much help to you. I haven't had the motivation I was hoping for this weekend to do a re-install.

My issue with modprobe was with my sound card, but was able to figure it out. And, I guess, that's the "mantra" of Arch, I suppose; figuring things out and doing some of your own scripting. It's clearly not for the timid computer users.

Personally, that why I wanted to give Arch a try. I felt ready to start diving a little deeper into Linux and learning more about what makes a Linux desktop tick. This was partially due to the recent issues with Debian/Sid.

I guess I look at it like: if I built a car with my own two hands, at least I'd have an idea as to where to look when problems arose.

As you've mentioned, I find that my old PII test machine performs much quicker, even with KDE and SuperKaramba applets running on it. And, although being very sparse after initial installation, I also only have the apps that I ultimately decide as being necessary.

I must try and devote some time to it over the next couple of days.

No problem, man. I think the only problems I had last time I tried to install were translating what I'd just done in cfdisk to their somewhat esoteric devfs mounting program. All I really remember is that it kept saying that it couldn't install the base packages for some reason. The install how-to was OK, but someone really needs to spend a weekend reformatting it. The info is rock solid (though sparse in areas) but the formatting makes it (well, for me at least) very difficult to parse.

Looks like I'm too dumb to figure out ABS -- I read two fairly lengthy how-tos, and am still scratching my head. I can compile source just fine - just install ed lsdvd (which works great) and katapult (which doesn't do anything but crash). Trying to figure out deps, etc. for pkgbuild is beyond me at this point though

For now, I'm sticking with building AURs... much easier for me to comprehend and to use. You can also submit your AURs to the community repository for others to benefit from.

If your AUR becomes popular enough, then the Arch maintainers will turn it into an official ABS package.

I'd suggest "getting dirty" with AURs first, then work up to ABS.

As I understand it, the only reason to build packages this way is so they're maintainable by packman rather than removing the binary by hand and recompiling when the new version of <whatever> comes out, correct? How is AUR different from ABS? I'll poke around in the forums some tonight. Thanks for the heads up!

Yup, that's exactly it. The big advantage for me is that I understand AURs better and can build them myself without any difficulties.

This also leads to more community involvement, resulting in more AUR packages ready for downloading, some of them being those more rarer packages that haven't made it into the ABS repositories.

Snarkout, I know you're giving ArchLinux a try, as I am, but what's your current "main distro" at the moment?

I think I'll really be giving Arch the old "college try" and spend more time working on it, cause tonight I downloaded the latest RC of the new Kanotix and I've failed in being able to install it on my test PC. I get to a certain % into the install, then the system freezes.

I've tried four times now. It's a new installer that they got for it, but I just wish they stuck with the old one. It's always works beautifully for me on the older releases, but now the upgrading process from the older to the newest packages is the killer for me. Not impossible, but quite the bunch of hoops that have to be jumped through.

I'm hoping, what ever the problem is, they get it fixed by the time the official release arrives.

I don't know... with the last run of issues with SID and KDE, the routine upgrading of my Debian system makes me wonder now what I'm in for at the end of every run.

The only upgrades that have been performing without a hitch is with Arch and Pacman.

Right now, my workstation and my laptop are both running Kubuntu breezy. I have Arch on my "testing box." I like a lot of things about kubuntu, but my experience with it has been that many core apps on it are far more crash-prone than they have been on most other linux distros I've run. I've submitted several bug reports, and most of them are still sitting in "UNCOMFIRMED" limbo.

So far, I have been extremely pleased with arch -- basically no crashing, etc. I also personally like their update policy a lot more than the current popular 6 month reinstallfest most distros seem to expect the user to endure. It does seem like a good bit of work is still required of the user when Arch decides to change something though -- read the 2.6.14 kernel upgrade post for an idea of what I'm talking about.

Also, IME so far, some of the packages aren't really put together completely (ie - deps are "met" but sometimes with a bad version of the lib - lsdvd in dvd::rip for instance. I needed to dl and compile the correct version. this may be a part of it being completely bleeding edge, I don't know). I'm also not at all at home with the init system in arch -- it's a lot closer to BSD than linux IMO. This isn't really a bad thing, but I'm not sure it's a good thing either. AUR, ABS, and even pacman will take me a while to learn, I'm sure.

So, I'd have to say I'm undecided. I really like debian and "debian polishers" because of the huge repositories of available stuff. I'm hoping that Dapper is a marked improvement over Breezy and Hoary since I'm constantly fighting bugs currently, and am seeing very few bugfix updates (or any updates, really) come down the pipe. On the plus side I don't really have to worry about my box up and crashing because a coreutil update or anything, so I endure minor bugs. I liked fedora a lot, too, but got tired of fooling with 3rd party repos, which are (IMO) a necessity for running it as a distro. Kanotix would be a lot more attractive if it had a bare-bones install option. I don't mind a desktop and some basic apps, but I really don't need everything and the kitchen sink on my box from the get-go. Also, I'm a bit hesitant to use a distro that's essentially debian sid with a few other repos and some pinning done.

All that being said, like you, I want to get closer to the guts of linux at this point -- I've been using it for a long time, but never really learned the nitty gritty. IMO, arch and the arch community would be an asset in that quest -- it's certainly a well thought out distro. I'm just not entirely certain that I have the time or patience to take that plunge on my main system just yet.