Recent round of Arch updates = possible breakage.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:10 am

All of you archers who don't keep your ears to the ground, be careful when updating your arch boxes - the combo of 2.6.19 and nvidia seems to be a killer. The biggest issue I ran into when upgrading kernel26beyond is that I use ata_piix, and the new pata hooks in the 2.6.19 kernel rearranged all of my partitions, namewise, so I kept getting panics on boot. There is a quick one liner you can add to grub to work around these issues, though. There are also many reports of the most recent nvidia drivers causing bizarre color and sync issues. I haven't done the full upgrade yet, so I can't confirm nor deny.

Just a heads up - check the archlinux.org page for more info.

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 10:45 am

I was seriously thinking of putting Arch back on my laptop and I hear this. I'm in the process or trying out several distros for my laptop including: Mandriva, Arch, Sabayon, Ubuntu, Suse 10.2.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:05 am

Well, all this means is that things change and you have to be ready to react to them, especially if you use arch. None of these are arch-specific problems - these are changes in the kernel and nvidia driver. The first report I saw of the nvidia issue was actually a fedora user reporting the bug. The drawback of the rolling release system is that these changes are really never transparent to the user. On the other hand, I don't have to reinstall every 6 months, either.

All this being said, I put kubuntu back on my lappy a while ago. Arch ran beautifully on it, but I ended up with my dick in my hand 3 times in a row during major network issues at work, and decided I'd opt for easy over exactly what I wanted.

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:14 am

Arch was the only distro to let me do suspend to ram on POS laptop. All other distros completely hang when trying to wake up.

Linc · Post by **Linc** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 12:40 pm

Patrick wrote:Arch was the only distro to let me do suspend to ram on POS laptop. All other distros completely hang when trying to wake up.

Everything still running fine on my systems here, but they are all still running 2.6.18-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT. I haven't upgraded anything in the last couple days.

In Arches defense, though, this is what happens when you are running a bleeding edge distro, and like was previously mentioned, this isn't Arch code that's breaking. Just give it a couple more days and everything will be fixed again.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 4:01 pm

Patrick wrote:Arch was the only distro to let me do suspend to ram on POS laptop. All other distros completely hang when trying to wake up.

Were you using the stock kernel, or beyond, or one of the others? The stock kernel, IIRC, uses swsuspend while beyound uses suspend2.

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 4:11 pm

Linc wrote:In Arches defense, though, this is what happens when you are running a bleeding edge distro, and like was previously mentioned, this isn't Arch code that's breaking. Just give it a couple more days and everything will be fixed again.

Am I the only one who finds Linc's comments amusing? Go back and listen to the episode where Linc busts our balls about Arch breaking.

greggh · Post by **greggh** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 4:24 pm

Patrick wrote:
Linc wrote:In Arches defense, though, this is what happens when you are running a bleeding edge distro, and like was previously mentioned, this isn't Arch code that's breaking. Just give it a couple more days and everything will be fixed again.
Am I the only one who finds Linc's comments amusing? Go back and listen to the episode where Linc busts our balls about Arch breaking.

The way I remember it, Linc was pissed specifically at the stupid install routine that Arch uses. I think he wanted to slap whoever it was with the Arch project that developed that install routine. I have to agree with Linc on that too. I've tried to install Arch a while back, and I had trouble with the install as well. For those looking for a new distro I highly recomend Debian Etch. The Net install is super easy, it runs leaner and faster than Ubuntu, and it aint brown.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 10:54 pm

greggh wrote: For those looking for a new distro I highly recomend Debian Etch. The Net install is super easy, it runs leaner and faster than Ubuntu, and it aint brown.

I would just like to second this one. I have recently installed Debian Etch on a crusty old Celeron 500mhz with 192megs of RAM. I wanted it for a CLI machine that I could use to practice using CLI programs and learning the CLI better. I tried Gnome however, and I was shocked. Gnome was fast, stable, and beautiful. I was surprised how usable it was on such an old machine. The net install was a thing of beauty too. Now with my 14" monochrome monitor hooked up, and booting into text mode, I'm having fun and feeling Retro.

hellonorman · Post by **hellonorman** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 1:47 pm

Patrick wrote:I was seriously thinking of putting Arch back on my laptop and I hear this. I'm in the process or trying out several distros for my laptop including: Mandriva, Arch, Sabayon, Ubuntu, Suse 10.2.

I just booted the sabayon3.2 live dvd. WOW!!!!!!!

I'll tell ya what. Gentoo may be a pain in the ass to set up but once it is it runs like no other. If sabayon takes the pain out of the setup and releases often enough to make upgrading to their precompiled stuff viable it may be the distro for me.

Pat I would be interested to hear if your notebook functions fully with the live dvd

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 3:25 pm

Where did the name come from, I wonder.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 5:03 pm

hellonorman wrote:I just booted the sabayon3.2 live dvd. WOW!!!!!!!

I'll tell ya what. Gentoo may be a pain in the ass to set up but once it is it runs like no other. If sabayon takes the pain out of the setup and releases often enough to make upgrading to their precompiled stuff viable it may be the distro for me.

Pat I would be interested to hear if your notebook functions fully with the live dvd

Yeah I have been running Sabayon since last weekend and I love it. It has been the only Distro that has gotten every single peice of my hardware detected out of the box with the binary nvidia drivers and looks awesome. (plus AIGLX/GLX + Beryl

)
I got more info about it on my blog: http://cptnobvious999.blogspot.com (shameless plug

)

Snarkout wrote:Where did the name come from, I wonder.

"Sabayon is an Italian dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, a sweet liquor (usually Marsala wine), and sometimes cream or whole eggs. It is a very light custard, which has been whipped to incorporate a large amount of air."
Thats what it says at the top of http://www.sabayonlinux.org

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:41 pm

Yeah, I know what sabayon is, but it's a weird name for a distro. Or it seems like it to me at least.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:50 pm

Snarkout wrote:Yeah, I know what sabayon is, but it's a weird name for a distro. Or it seems like it to me at least.

All the good one's were taken

I guess it is named that because when KDE fires up it looks delicious

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Wed Dec 13, 2006 9:31 am

I thought Sabayon was Gnome app. It's an admin tool to create custom Gconf configs to roll out across multiple desktops.

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/sabayon
I don't know which was here first, but I heard of the app long before I heard of Sabayon Linux. I guess that's because I follow Gnome development.