My thoughts (and yours too!) about Arch (I'm in love already!)

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 04:16:00

Hello all! I suppose I would be called a newbie to Arch, but certainly not to Linux. I've been running Gentoo for five months. If I were running, say, Ubuntu for five months, I would probably still be considered a newbie, but five months of Gentoo has made me pretty proficient at Linux.

I (if you haven't guessed yet) am a Gentoo user , and it seems like there are a lot of Gentoo users who go to Arch. That's how I heard about it, through the Gentoo forums. I am currently looking for backups in case Gentoo comes crashing to the ground. I was perfectly content in my little bubble of happy compiling until I learned about the unrest inside of the Gentoo community. I never realized that things were in such bad shape... like a downward spiral. The result cannot be good. I feel like I'm on a sinking ship and am praying for my life here. I've seen a lot of threads at the forums lately like "If Drobbins fork Gentoo, will you follow him?" and "Will you stay with Gentoo if the Foundation is handed over to a 3rd party?" I find these a little unsettling! I understand that the Foundation is a terrible state right now, and the founder's attempt to get it back has failed, so now I don't things are going to head up. So I've started to face facts, that I better have some backup plans so that I'm not starting over from square 1 when this all burns to the ground (hopefully if, not when, because I like Gentoo and really don't want to have to give it up). Now I admit that I don't like EVERYTHING about Gentoo, but I like almost everything, and Arch seems to be like Gentoo in many respects.

Some of my personal desires in a distro:
1.Bleeding edge with rolling updates (and thus no need to ever reinstall the distribution)
2. A large repository for the package manager
3. Not a newbie distro... a distro for those who like the command line and to do things themselves
4. Good community
5. Customizable
6. The ability to choose between a stable and unstable package on a per-package basis
7. Install from source
Arch seems to satisfy 1,3, 4, and 5 correct? And pretty well satisfies 2, though I can see its package manager is not as big as Gentoo (though bigger than like Slackware).
I guess for the most part it doesn't satisfy 6 and 7 though, right? I realize that AUR is source-based, but on the whole, Arch is binary, so I'm referring to the overall tendency of the distribution.

Is there the ability to choose between stable and unstable packages though, to be as bleeding-edge as possible? (I'm thinking no but thought I'd ask)

Many other distributions such as Ubuntu probably wouldn't meet my needs at all. They seem to have a great repository and community, but I just don't want a GUI-based distro. The truth is, I want to feel like my computer needs me. It's my baby. XDDDD Okay, that's pretty sad, especially because it's a Pentium II (I can't WAIT to get my new laptop!!!!!!!!!!!), but I appreciate my Gentoo box way more than our Windows box upstairs, a lot of that having to do with the work I had to put into it to get it working correctly, and all that I had to learn. It makes me appreciate it a lot more, and it makes me a lot better at solving problems. (If it ain't broken, why not break it so you can fix it? XD)I don't want a distro that does everything for me; I won't feel needed anymore. Plus, I'm addicted to the command line. I have a window manager, sure (Thunar with Xfce), but I mostly still use the command line to view my files. Sometimes I don't even start up X (I never start it up by default) and am just as efficient as when I have it open. I insist on knowing how to do everything manually... when I wanted to make keyboard shortcuts for X, I chose to use xbindkeys rather than use the GUI with Xfce, so I could do it manually and still have it working if I ever switched desktop managers. I manually edit pretty much ALL my config files and, like I said, I am just as efficient without the GUI as I am with it. I can't go five minutes in GUI without having a virtual terminal open. So I think, in these respects, Arch would meed my needs quite well, just as Gentoo does now. I have deiced to try out Arch now anyway, regardless of the state of Gentoo, because you know, i might just like Arch better. I know a lot of Gentoo users have said they've gone to Arch. I'm trying to get my friend Evan to let me use his 8 gb hdd to try it on, because my current 6 gig drive for Gentoo is like... 99 percent full (I swear, I'm not kidding, I have 100 mg left, I REALLY have to prune XD), so once I get it, I'm going to install Arch (after unhooking my /home hard drive because I only have two slots for hard drives, and they're both already filled! I will probably end up moving the /home directory onto that 8 gig drive anyway. I realize it's hard to share things between distros, but I will at least be able to have a place to put files for both distros in the same place and would probably end up symlinking some same location to my desktop for both distros

Okay, now I'm just ranting. Back to point! I'm definitely going to try out Arch, and so far I like what I see. I even recommended it to a friend who is also thinking of leaving Gentoo (for Ubuntu, so he can support his amd64 processor). I pointed out Arch64 and he's considering it. I don't think he'd like Ubuntu any more than I. He originally used Slack and only switched to Gentoo because Slack really doesn't have a good package manager. I think he'd like Arch as well.

I've also done research on other distributions someone like me might like (especially coming from Gentoo).

This is my current list:
Arch Linux
Frugalware (based on Arch, right?)
Zen Walk
Vector Linux
CRUX (I'm leaning away from this one, as of now)
Lunar
Source Mage
Sorcerer
FreeBSD (but I've decided not to go with FreeBSD, as much as I like installing from source, because their philosophy of stability over currentness (like not having flash 9 because it's not "stable") just doesn't fly with me.. Linux is better for me, I think)
LFS.. okay, not really, but if I ever have a weekend when I'm REALLY bored.........

I've used Slack before but I would prefer to have a package manager, so I'm steering away from that direction, as much as I liked Slack.

Have I missed any other distros people in this sort of mindset like us might like? ^_^

My primary focus right now is Arch, and it's definitely my first preference as far as switching goes.

I think my biggest problem with Arch is that I REALLY like to compile everything from source (or at least, have Portage do it for me :-p), so I"d miss that. Especially USE flags. However, Source Mge/Lunar/Sorcerer don't sound as good as Arch, and FreeBSD just... isn't my thing. Their package manger seems great, it's their overall philosophy I disagree with.

This post really isn't asking for help with anything, but isn't that fine? This is just the Arch Linux General Forums, right? I just wanna talk about Arch as compared to other distros. I've wiki-ed it some, but I just think it's a fun thing to discuss.

So what things do you guys like better about Arch, and what things do you like better about Gentoo, or maybe about some other good distros?

I can't wait to try out Arch; I'm so excited! No Xubuntu for me! ^___________^ (Gnome and ESPECIALLY KDE would lag far too much for this computer)
-Megan M-

Sigi · 2008-01-24 04:39:32

violagirl23 wrote:

Some of my personal desires in a distro:
1.Bleeding edge with rolling updates (and thus no need to ever reinstall the distribution)
2. A large repository for the package manager
3. Not a newbie distro... a distro for those who like the command line and to do things themselves
4. Good community
5. Customizable
6. The ability to choose between a stable and unstable package on a per-package basis
7. Install from source
Arch seems to satisfy 1,3, 4, and 5 correct? And pretty well satisfies 2, though I can see its package manager is not as big as Gentoo (though bigger than like Slackware).
I guess for the most part it doesn't satisfy 6 and 7 though, right? I realize that AUR is source-based, but on the whole, Arch is binary, so I'm referring to the overall tendency of the distribution.

Hi and welcome to the Arch Forums, nice to see you around

Honestly, I haven't (yet) read your whole post. Just some thoughts so far:
You're correct with points 1,3,4, and 5.
Point 2: The Repositories have a reasonable size and fit the needs of most "everyday" tasks.
Point 6: The choice between stable/unstable is usually made by the choice of the used (enabled) repository. Pacman offers functions to keep certain packages at their version. (man /etc/pacman.conf)
7. You HAVE to have a look at PKGBUILDs, abs & AUR. You'll love them all

Best regards Sigi

edit: I now read though the whole post (I was juts going to write article )

violagirl23 wrote:

This post really isn't asking for help with anything, but isn't that fine? This is just the Arch Linux General Forums, right? I just wanna talk about Arch as compared to other distros. I've wiki-ed it some, but I just think it's a fun thing to discuss.

Its absolutely fine to discuss everything here!

I just saw that you're aware of the AUR/abs. Nevermind me pointing you to the wiki.

Last edited by Sigi (2008-01-24 04:50:15)

brebs · 2008-01-24 04:40:35

Compiling *everything* is really over-rated, for the vast majority of Gentoo users (as an ex-user myself). It just means that weird problems are really hard to diagnose, because everyone's running their own particular mix of versions. And some apps can have nasty "issues" when they are compiled with a USE-flag-induced weird combination of options that the app's devs never bothered to test.

Pacman can install a package in the time that Portage is still reading its configuration files and preparing /var/tmp/portage, never mind the time it takes to compile. Who wants to deal with compilation errors? They're just tedious. Plus there's always the risk that a library has a problem that revdep-rebuild hasn't noticed.

If ya want to see a list of things wrong with Gentoo, here's mine

Arch is a breath of fresh air after Gentoo, and the AUR should contain practically everything you want. If it doesn't, write a PKGBUILD and add it - they're easier to write than ebuilds, because all those badly-documented eclasses don't have to be scrutinized, and the multiple testing for every possible *combination* of USE flags is not needed - just build the app with *sensible* options, and Arch users can customize it themselves if they want.

Last edited by brebs (2008-01-24 04:42:41)

Agent69 · 2008-01-24 04:54:25

I personally don't desire to compile everything, but so long as I have the option when I need it I am happy.

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 05:17:11

Okay, I can definitely agree with you that there are definitely many pains that come with compiling everything from source. Okay, look at me, I run a Pentium II! It takes SOOOOOOOOOOOO long. But something always just felt *right* about it. I can see the point of using binaries, though. I guess my main like of it is the ease of deciding what features you want to install via USE flags. I realize that this is possible to choose features in Arch too, but that it is a little more complex to do... I kind of like my USE flags and would miss them. However, if Arch satisfies almost all my needs, the advantages of it (like binaries being faster) could very possibly outweigh my need for USE flags in the first place. I guess I'll just have to wait and see!
Oh and I SO agree on the weird problems. It's impossible for me to emerge -vauND world without coming back to see it has stopped because of a compile error, which I then have to track down and fix. @_@ I have spent SO much time maintaining my box that sometimes I DO want to slam my head against a wall... so if Arch isn't like that at all, I'd DEFINITELY love that!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I remember all my compiles failing because of the doc use flag... and in the beginning getting circular dependency errors because of the debug use flag... it's like @_@
Yeah, the AUR seems nice. For -ex Gentoo users, is it kind of like overlays? In particular, the Sunrise overlay? I use that and I like it a lot, since I can get more packages not in the official Portage tree yet.
If anyone feels like answering, what are some good differences to note between Arch and Frugalware? In particular, are there big differences in the number of packages between the two? And what are the approximate number of packages each has? (for Arch, at least, with AND without AUR, so I can get an idea). Oddly enough, me crawling the web hasn't produced many helpful results for me on this issue.
Yeah, I can see Arch perhaps becoming a breath of fresh air for me. And the community seems a little more friendly than Gentoo, probably because it is smaller, but not *too* small. Gentoo lately just seems too... unfriendly to me. A lot of flaming because of all these leadership issues.
Hm.... I think I'm just gonna have to go get that hard drive tomorrow... I can't wait anymore! You guys got me all excited!
PS: Btw, am I the only one that had trouble registering for this board? When it asked what distro this board was about, I typed Arch Linux, and then it flamed me and told me I was a bot and to leave, and I was like -_-; I guess I had to type Archlinux, but to me that is counter-intuitive. What would be wrong with it accepting both answers? XDDDDDDDDD Oh well, I figured it out eventually, at least. :-p

Last edited by violagirl23 (2008-01-24 05:21:13)

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 05:26:29

Oh no!!!!!!!!!!! I never thought about it before, but I just realized that I might be running i586.. I seem to remember something about that when setting up Gentoo...
*cries*
What a way to crush my dreams. Maybe I'll have to wait till I get my laptop now to get Arch, and that's not for a few months!
*sigh*
Well, I'll have to check if it's i586 or i686... curse old computers!!!!!!!!!!!
>.<

Xilon · 2008-01-24 05:32:23

ABS is a good compromise for compiling stuff from source. It's not really automated (though yaourt -Sb helps - look into that), but it does a good job for when you actually need to add/remove features and such. IF you want to compile for optimisation, don't. It's just pointless that way, and although I haven't actually used gentoo before, many people have said that Arch is faster. Also the amount of space that gets taken up by unnecessary dependencies is insignificant (though maybe not as much when you only have 6gb). Currently I have an install with 2 chroots, and my root is still only 3.5G. I don't think the compilation time and effort put into using USE flags is worth saving that tiny little bit of space, but that's just me.

6. The ability to choose between a stable and unstable package on a per-package basis

I don't really like the way pacman handles this, tbh. But you can work around it a bit, though I'm not sure how well that works out since I don't use the testing repository. Pacman looks at the repos defined in the config file and installs the package from the repo in which it occurs first, so if you have testing before the core/extra repos, it will prefer the testing repo. You could put the testing repo after those repos and then explicitely install packages with pacman -S testing/package. I have read that this isn't advisable though. Also the core/extra repos are bleeding edge enough that you don't really need the testing repo.

2. A large repository for the package manager

Combined with AUR, I very rarely need to make a PKGBUILD for an application myself, and when I do I put it on AUR for everyone else to enjoy.

brebs · 2008-01-24 05:38:06

Yes, the AUR is basically an overlay - we manually wget zipfiles into /var/abs/local/ instead of /usr/local/portage/

It's also easy to recompile the packages that Arch provides, by copying a PKGBUILD into /var/abs/local/, editing it and running "makepkg" - for the purpose of e.g. removing my only dependency on mysql.

Frugalware forums seem dead compared to Arch's (which seem dead compared to Gentoo's).

You should be OK - see i686.

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 05:50:07

Well, I technically have 14 gigs... I have the 6 gig and a 4 gig which has /usr/portage (the portage tree probably takes up so much space it would outweigh any space saved through USE flags XD) and /var/tmp, since that can get huge while compiling and I don't have space on the 6 gig for the fluctuations in space... I had to install the binary for OpenOffice just because the temporary space required to compile it was bigger than the space I had on my hard drive!!!!and I actually have so little space left I am permanently using a ext3 formatted flash drive as my ~/Desktop (it's in my fstab and everything XD!) This gives me 4 extra gigs for all my stuff.
But anyway, just you people answering this thread so nicely confirms my feelings about the Arch community. I can easily see a thread like this simply being ignored on the Gentoo forums, or just merged with other threads. >.<
Actually, to be honest, most pakcages I am running unstable on Gentoo had to do with compile errors and such, or some feature not working correctly in the older version. The only ones that I just wanted to run unstable are.. lemme check my /etc/portage/package.keywords... Skype and Pidgin. And possibly Mplayer too, I was thinking of. Everything else was either because of problems or of it being in the Sunrise overlay (everything in there is masked as unstable since it's not an official part of the Portage tree).
How easy is it to get an older version of a package? I ask because I want Flash 9.0.48.0-r1, NOT 9.0.115.0. The newer one made my Firefox commit suicide and just close with an error when I viewed certain pages (youtube, etc. was fine, but even going to www.adobe.com made it crash *irony*). Gentoo forum users told me that then newer one was unmasked because of a security flaw found in the older one, but for me, I'd rather take my chances with the hole than have firefox crash every five minutes!!!! Is there any way to specify not to update a package either, for when you do a world update (or whatever they are called in Arch)? This also has to do with Flash... I'll give the newer one a try... maybe it was just a Gentoo issue... but if not, I'm DEFINITELY downgrading!
I like how easy it seems for Arch users to add packages to AUR so they are available to others... this is harder to do on Gentoo, despite that everything is source-based. It's most like there is a wall between the users and the developers that cannot be broken easily. This seems like a good way to let users have a little fun in the developer's world without *being* one.
One last question while I'm here.. my other friend who I sugested Arch to... I just want to confirm that Arch would support his CPU. He said to me:
"Oh, and my CPU arch is amd64 / x86-64 / emt64-t
thechnically its em64t since its an intel CPU but i am running a k8 optimized system (because I used to have a opteron)"
^_^
PS: Your forums may be smaller than those of Gentoo, but that is not necessarily a disadvantage. There is like a perfect size, I think. You can be too small OR too big... with bigger forums, it is so much easier for a thread to just get buried if no one can answer it right away, even though someone else might be able to but will never see it because it's already buried. This happened to me in the Ubuntu forums. I obviously do not run Ubuntu but posted a question there regarding mtpfs with a particular MP3 player, because I figured the forums were large enough that I'd get at least a few people with the same mp3 player and they could tell me their experiences with the program. HA! Instead, I just got 0 replies and it was simply buried. With forums, bigger isn't *always* better, imo.
PPS: What is your policy on patching the source code? For example, GTK+ recently deprecated a few features that TiLP(1 and 2) depends on. The source code will now not compile. I made a patch for it to fix it (I was supposed to submit that ebuild two days ago... grah, I really should do it tomorrow!), for otherwise it just gives errors. If it is TiLp2 you have in the repository, it is literally as simple as adding one line in the source code (and is the fix the developer himself recommended), but Gentoo did not even notice and kept the source code in the tree the same even though it would no longer compile! @_@ This kind of ticked me off, personally, which is why I have to submit that patch tomorrow! ha ha

Last edited by violagirl23 (2008-01-24 06:00:10)

Xilon · 2008-01-24 06:21:24

violagirl23 wrote:

How easy is it to get an older version of a package?

Depends whether you want to go the binary way or the source way. Since you run gentoo I suppose you wouldn't mind the source way, in which case it's just a matter of getting the package from ABS, changing the pkgver variable to whatever you want and recompiling. This isn't always easy due to dependencies and such, but it may be easier/faster than the binary way. To downgrade using a binary package you need to find the older version of that binary, since pacman has no support of different version of packages. For more information check the wiki.

violagirl23 wrote:

Is there any way to specify not to update a package either, for when you do a world update (or whatever they are called in Arch)?

Yes, just add an IgnorePkg = package into /etc/pacman.conf

violagirl23 wrote:

One last question while I'm here.. my other friend who I sugested Arch to... I just want to confirm that Arch would support his CPU. He said to me:
"Oh, and my CPU arch is amd64 / x86-64 / emt64-t thechnically its em64t since its an intel CPU but i am running a k8 optimized system (because I used to have a opteron)"

I don't see why not. I'm running Arch (64bit) on an AMD64 3200+. The only problem is with older computers that aren't i686, though for i586 there is a separate project.

Last edited by Xilon (2008-01-24 06:24:21)

brebs · 2008-01-24 06:27:10

package.keywords has no equivalent or meaning in Arch - it's basically implied for every package

See replacement pkg for flash crash - although it's 64-bit-only, so might not help. Old packages aren't available, which sounds really bad, but isn't a problem because the difference in PKGBUILD is probably just a change to the version, and also lots of other users will experience the bug, and get fixing it on the forums or bugzilla.

USE flags are handled by having a replacement package with a similar name, e.g. for pretty fonts (Ubuntu have come up with better font-rendering patches of what was originally the Gentoo Xeffects overlay).

Gentoo's "amd64" is same as Arch's "x86_64". Not multilib, but can run e.g. wine by installing bin32/lib32 packages from AUR.

Arch packages contain more patches than Gentoo I reckon, e.g. see kernel. Submit the patch to bugzilla.

Xilon · 2008-01-24 06:32:09

brebs wrote:

See replacement pkg for flash crash - although it's 64-bit-only, so might not help. Old packages aren't available, which sounds really bad, but isn't a problem because the difference in PKGBUILD is probably just a change to the version, and also lots of other users will experience the bug, and get fixing it on the forums or bugzilla.

If you can't find the older binary package in one of the "archive" mirrors, you can always look at the CVS history to see exactly what was changed (for official packages).

brebs wrote:

Arch packages contain more patches than Gentoo I reckon, e.g. see kernel. Submit the patch to bugzilla.

That's not fair, the kernel has an exceptionally large amount of patches in comparison to other packages. Also, almost all of these patches are security related or bug fixes. I say almost because I'm not certain that all of them are. There are also various patches to support some hardware like the mactel patchset (thanks to which Arch can run on my Macbook).

violagirl23 wrote:

PPS: What is your policy on patching the source code? For example, GTK+ recently deprecated a few features that TiLP(1 and 2) depends on. The source code will now not compile. I made a patch for it to fix it (I was supposed to submit that ebuild two days ago... grah, I really should do it tomorrow!), for otherwise it just gives errors. If it is TiLp2 you have in the repository, it is literally as simple as adding one line in the source code (and is the fix the developer himself recommended), but Gentoo did not even notice and kept the source code in the tree the same even though it would no longer compile! @_@ This kind of ticked me off, personally, which is why I have to submit that patch tomorrow! ha ha

I'm not sure that there is a policy. In general Arch is quite vanilla, especially in terms of branding, but if the code doesn't compile then I'm sure they would accept your patch. It is uncertain whether submitting the patch to the package maintainer rather than upstream would be faster, Arch is very bleeding edge .

Last edited by Xilon (2008-01-24 06:40:50)

brebs · 2008-01-24 06:45:57

Xilon wrote:

almost all of these patches are security related or bug fixes

Exactly. Which is good. What I said was *complimenting* Arch.

Xilon · 2008-01-24 06:47:08

brebs wrote:

Xilon wrote:
almost all of these patches are security related or bug fixes
Exactly. Which is good. What I said was *complimenting* Arch.

Sorry, I was just thinking of that whole argument where the kernel26 package was accused of being bloated, or something along those lines.

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 07:12:06

brebs wrote:

USE flags are handled by having a replacement package with a similar name, e.g. for pretty fonts (Ubuntu have come up with better font-rendering patches of what was originally the Gentoo Xeffects overlay).

Well, that's interesting. ^_^ I'll have to look into that. You've given me a lot of insight into the differences between the two. I definitely like what I see of Arch so far..
So as far as a comparison between Arch and Frugalware... I did notice it says Frugalware has better multi-lingual support. What does this mean? Is it hard to configure Asian languages under Arch? Because I use Japanese, and Chinese daily, so I need for it to not be *too* hard to use, after all, and work in my programs (display correctly, get input correctly, etc. This is important to me and I will have to go to a different distro if programs would not display these characters correctly )

Xilon · 2008-01-24 07:24:12

Arch is just linux, so it shouldn't be any harder than on any other distro. I remember setting up scim once, just for fun, and it worked well.

Basn · 2008-01-24 08:02:12

i migrated to arch after trying gentoo, my friends say that gentoo is mutch better etc... ive gone back to gentoo to try it, but i keep coming back cause i just love pacman. It just works, i dont have to look at the compile every time cause it certanly will break something.
And pacman is so mutch faster than portage witch is so f*ckin slow.

I think you will enjoy arch as all of the rest of us do.

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 08:14:26

Haha, well Portage kind of *has* to be slow. It IS installing from source, after all. Now, if they manged to make the source compile SO fast it was as fast as a binary, we should all give them lots of money and stare at them in awe...
Okay, maybe not, but that sure would be some feat!
Hey, my friends all say that Ubuntu is much better, but that doesn't mean I'm using it, does it? XD One of them even went as far to say that only weird people don't use Ubuntu, that it's Linux for humans, so people who don't use Ubuntu are non-human or something, or just really weird. And I glared at him and remained determined to stay stet in my ways of manually editing my config files and merrily rejoicing.
XDDDDDDDD

wolfden · 2008-01-24 08:26:35

I'm a gentoo user since 2004 and have been using sabayon linux for last year and half or so. I can definitely say that the hype you are hearing about Gentoo is sinking is nothing new. Gentoo will survive and portage is very active. The community has never really been a friendly place. There is a lot of egos between devs and users that conflict.

I had installed arch linux a year ago and used it for a bit, but the timing wasn't right for me. I now have arch setup and running beautifully. I'll be keeping my gentoo stuff and running arch at the same time. Arch will be my escape to peace hopefully.

Last edited by wolfden (2008-01-24 08:33:29)

wolfden · 2008-01-24 08:29:31

Basn wrote:

i migrated to arch after trying gentoo, my friends say that gentoo is mutch better etc... ive gone back to gentoo to try it, but i keep coming back cause i just love pacman. It just works, i dont have to look at the compile every time cause it certanly will break something.
And pacman is so mutch faster than portage witch is so f*ckin slow.
I think you will enjoy arch as all of the rest of us do.

I don't have problems with compiling and portage. Yea sure, from time to time things go haywire, but is usually fixed in a timely manner. Every distro runs into this, even pacman.

Basn · 2008-01-24 08:35:29

violagirl23 wrote:

Haha, well Portage kind of *has* to be slow. It IS installing from source, after all.

i dont mean the actual compileing, just searching takes longer than actualy installing the package with pacman.

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 08:45:53

wolfden wrote:

I'm a gentoo user since 2004 and have been using sabayon linux for last year and half or so. I can definitely say that the hype you are hearing about Gentoo is sinking is nothing new. Gentoo will survive and portage is very active. The community has never really been a friendly place. There is a lot of egos between devs and users that conflict.

Well, my friend (now just out of college and in a job as a programmer) has been using Gentoo for around 4 years now and told me this recently. He has been very loyal to the distribution and would only consider leaving it if he really felt it necessary-in this case, if the support went "down the tubes," so to speak. That's why I started to get worried. Hopefully you are wrong and all remains well. ^_^

And Basn, since I've never used pacman I can't make a comparison yet, but what do you mean? Just trying to figure out what the package is called? Because I never had a problem with trusting my intuition and doing a quick eix <package name> to back up my guess, and then emerge -va <package name>. Is pacman that efficient that you don't have to know what something is called to install it? O_o That would be nice, I suppose, but I wonder if I'm misunderstanding you.

Basn · 2008-01-24 08:50:23

ofcourse you can guess, but sometimes it does not work for example

basn@dualen ~ $ sudo pacman -Ss centericq
extra/centerim 4.22.1-2
Fork of CenterICQ - A text mode menu- and window-driven IM interface
basn@dualen ~ $ sudo pacman -S centericq
error: 'centericq': not found in sync db
basn@dualen ~ $

it can be handy but not needed and if i did the same portage would been hell of slow imo.

wolfden · 2008-01-24 09:08:28

Basn wrote:

violagirl23 wrote:
Haha, well Portage kind of *has* to be slow. It IS installing from source, after all.
i dont mean the actual compileing, just searching takes longer than actualy installing the package with pacman.

yea portage isn't that fastest tool, eix is the prefered seach tool.

emerge foo <-- the calculating dependencies is slow tho

I found a .bashrc script on the forum here for an alias

alias pacs="pacsearch"
pacsearch () {
       echo -e "$(pacman -Ss $@ | sed \
       -e 's#core/.*#\\033[1;31m&\\033[0;37m#g' \
       -e 's#extra/.*#\\033[0;32m&\\033[0;37m#g' \
       -e 's#community/.*#\\033[1;35m&\\033[0;37m#g' \
       -e 's#^.*/.* [0-9].*#\\033[0;36m&\\033[0;37m#g' )"
}

pacs foo <--- pretty nice

Last edited by wolfden (2008-01-24 09:09:04)

violagirl23 · 2008-01-24 09:14:08

Basn: Actually, eix does it the exact same way.

megini sci-calculators # eix centericq
No matches found.
megini sci-calculators # eix -S centericq
* net-im/centerim
Available versions: ~4.22.2 {aim bidi crypt gadu icq irc jabber jpeg lj msn nls otr rss ssl yahoo}
Homepage: http://www.centerim.org/
Description: CenterIM is a fork of CenterICQ - a ncurses ICQ/Yahoo!/AIM/IRC/MSN/Jabber/GaduGadu/RSS/LiveJournal Client

eix centericq will bring up nothing, but eix -S will tell it to search the description as well (the -s flag is implied so you don't have to type it).
And adding the -c flag will also make it compact, so it takes out the homepage and displays like so:

megini sci-calculators # eix -Sc centericq
[N] net-im/centerim (~4.22.2 {aim bidi crypt gadu icq irc jabber jpeg lj msn nls otr rss ssl yahoo}): CenterIM is a fork of CenterICQ - a ncurses ICQ/Yahoo!/AIM/IRC/MSN/Jabber/GaduGadu/RSS/LiveJournal Client

So perhaps I'm not understanding your concern here. I'm sorry. >.<

Last edited by violagirl23 (2008-01-24 09:18:29)

Arch Linux

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My thoughts (and yours too!) about Arch (I'm in love already!)

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