Update on ArchLinux .... sort of

[Judland]

Been learning and liking Arch a lot. And in my learning, I came across this distro called Underground Desktop ( http://www.ludos.org/ ), which the developers have decided to use Arch 0.71 as a base rather than Debian SID.

So, out of simple curiosity, I decided to download UD and see what it was all about.

Quite simply, it's an auto-installer of the latest version of Arch with KDE 3.5 and some more of the common applications you'd find on today's more popular distros.

It installs kernel 2.6.14 and handles the setup of Udev (a recent sore spot for some Archers), hwd hardware detection, and Xorg. It uses Lilo as it's boot loader, and at the moment you cannot specify otherwise - or specify a partition layout that differs from the default (basically everything stored on / ).

However, the major advantage I see is for the person who doesn't want to spend a lot of time doing the manual installing and configuring that Arch itself forces upon you. When the install of UD is done and you've rebooted, you're taken right to the KDM login manager.

Also, UD remains an ArchLinux system, with all of the Arch config files in their proper places and the Pacman package manager at the ready.

UD's install of KDE 3.5 seems a bit slower on my PII than the version I recently installed on the pure ArchLinux, but it's still not too bad.

UD may be a way for the less technical desktop users to get the stability and configurability of Arch without having to touch the command line too much.

I'd be interested to see UD after it comes out of beta.

[dann]

Interesting. I dropped arch on a PIII last night and man was it smooth. The only problem was with the boot loader, I went with grub to begin with and while everything looked properly configured, it took three times to install it and then I also had to set my root partition with the boot flag (never had to do that before on a Linux distro).

Post installation I upgraded grub with pacman and after that it would not boot properly. I had to manually pass the rood device - /dev/hda2 because no other configuration of root was taking:

/dev/discs/disc0/part2
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc

Grub-install keeps giving errors. Now I am going with Lilo but I am hesitant to reboot, not that I need to anyway.

I have to get off my butt and make this holiday dvd, but after that I may be switching over to Arch on my main system.

[Judland]

I seem to recall something about that whole /disc0 issue.... that is, having to make sure you changed it to the more familiar /hda configuration.

I think it's on the Arch Wiki somewhere
http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/ ... guide.html

Perhaps this issue is why Underground uses Lilo rather than Grub

From the Wiki...

GRUB is the default bootloader for Arch Linux. You should check and modify this file to accomodate your boot setup if you want to use GRUB, otherwise read on about the LILO configuration.

Configuring GRUB is quite easy, the biggest hurdle is that it uses yet another device naming scheme different from DevFS and /dev; Your hard disks as a whole are referred to as (hd0), (hd1), etc., sequentially numbered in order of appearance on the IDE/SCSI bus, just like the disc0, disc1, etc. subdirectories in DevFS. The partitions of a disk are referred to with (hd0,0), (hd0,1) and so on, with 0 meaning the first partition. A few conversion examples are included in the default menu.lst to aid your understanding.
Once you grasped the concept of device naming, all you need to do is to choose a nice title for your boot section(s), supply the correct partition device as a parameter to the root option to have it mounted as / on bootup, and create a kernel line that includes the partition and path where the kernel is located as well as any boot parameters. You should be fine with the defaults, just check whether the partition information is correct in the root and kernel line.

[Chess]

Dann,

I ran into the same problems. The fix for both the grub error and the /disc0 issue (a udev issue) is discussed in this other wiki entry and the solutions listed worked fine for me:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Qui ... _by_Catcus

Chess

[ddennedy]

BTW, the issue you ran into with Arch and udev is not really anything to do with udev or Arch at the lower level. The root of the issue is that the new 2.6 kernel has dropped support for devfs, and Arch was using devfs names for everything. As the kernel has changed things a lot from 2.4 to 2.6 and now within the 2.6 series with little tendency towards backward compatibility, the ripple effect is quite difficult to manage .