Contributed by: Farcry
My cutting-edge adventure with Arch Linux
The beginning of my adventure
2008-03-01:
My Mepis 7.0 systems are now nice and stable, doing just about everything I want of them. But the temptation of cutting-edge software versions was too much to bear, and I've dabbled recently with Sidux, Debian Testing, and Arch Linux. Finally, as a project over the last week I decided to try and set up an Arch system seriously, with the aim of replicating at least the functionality of my Mepis 7.0 systems.
So what's the attraction of Arch, especially over Debian? A minimalistic “keep it fast and simple” philosophy, with a rolling release of very recent, though substantially tested, packages. Arch is pretty scary at first: a tiny (160MB) installation CD, no live CD, no GUI installation procedure, no GUI package manager, and the bulk of the system is installed by downloading packages, including eg. KDE —whew!
However, once you overcome the initial anxiety about whether you will ever end up with a graphical desktop, fairly quickly you realize that Arch has some great documentation and some attractively simple approaches to configuration. The official repositories have just about everything I'd ever need, and the ArchLinux User-community Repository (AUR) can provide the rest. Anyway, a few evenings' work later and my project has paid off splendidly: Arch is zooming along, functioning just as well as Mepis, but distinctly snappier at performing some things and with cutting-edge (though not bleeding-edge) versions of most programs. Most packages were installed by the Pacman package manager in a similar way to using the Debian apt-get command, and about a dozen others were installed via the Arch PKGBUILD compilation route without much hassle.
All in all, I'm immensely impressed, and the Wiki for Arch is great; the forums are good too, but perhaps a bit more terse and less chatty than Mepislovers. I've now got two great distros to choose from, both excelling at what they do, but with wonderfully different philosophies to implementing Linux.
Do try Arch if you're encouraged by this adventure and have a little time to spare (you'll need a broadband connection though). Linux certainly is fun!
Extra notes on some apps:
For Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird, I just used the Mozilla binaries for Arch as I do for Mepis 7. I just prefer to keep them updated easily myself in ~/bin rather than waiting/relying on official packages to hit the repos. These static builds are portable anyway, so there's little difficulty in using them.
Before you begin your adventure:
2008-03-05 @SilverBear and others tempted to try Arch:
I forgot to mention that you'll have to know the Pacman package manager inside out to get best results. The following are essential references:
I even printed off the last two pages because I was referencing them so much!
Initially, make sure you keep all the packages which are downloaded to
/var/cache/pacman/pkg.
To downgrade a package you'll need that previous whatever.pkg.tar.gz stored here. Of course you can move the files to (say) an archive CD later, “just in case”. This is what I needed to do when my laptop choked on the buggy 2.6.24 kernel, which isn't happy with the Via C3 processor.
My first few weeks as “an Archer”
2008-03-25:
I've been running Arch seriously on 6 different machines (including a laptop) for several weeks now (see this thread), in parallel with Mepis 7.0, and it's gone really well. I would say the highlights for me of running Arch are:
- Constantly rolling release means you can always run very recent versions of packages.
- Very fast performance - the fastest Linux I have ever experienced.
- Build a system as simple or complex as you want; as updated as you want; and there's no restriction on the desktop you choose.
- Simpler startup scripts and configuration than Debian.
- Very wide selection of packages - I've missed almost nothing cf. Debian repos.
- The package manager Pacman works fast and well once you get the hang of it.
- The package building system ABS is straightforward and flexible.
- Great documentation and a lot of skilled developers and contributors.
Trial and error
I did have a couple of false starts, and decided eventually to go for the vanilla KDE rather than the tweaked KDEMOD desktop. But once you get a basic system built, it gets easier and easier to develop as time goes on.
In response to one person's comment that occasional posts he'd read about “problems” with Arch left him feeling unwilling to bother trying an installation:
I haven't seen anything to justify this comment, so I don't really understand it. Arch isn't perfect (and Debian certainly isn't either), but it's exceedingly good as what it sets out to do - KISS! But Arch is not for folk with:
- a limited grasp of how Linux works
- no desire to edit configuration files
- no desire to use the command line
- only a dialup connection
- a low degree of patience
- “a live CD fetish”
More to come. . .
Internet Explorer?