48 Hours of Arch (again)

2handband · 2011-01-25 01:47:39

Here's the text of a blog posting I did yesterday. I posted the link earlier, and was imformed by a mod that this was not the appropriate way to do it and I should just copy/paste the text here instead. So here it is, and I apologize for the indiscretion:

It's a huge leap from farting around on a VM to actually installing and using something new as a primary desktop OS, especially the way I use computers. My computer usage is complex and multi-faceted; I do multi-channel recording, web development, bash shell scripting, document creation using desktop publishing tools, and all of the usual day-to-day web browsing and emailing that everyone else does... all from a single desktop machine. I make full use of KDE's desktop activities in an attempt to keep my computing life somewhat organized, and do a lot of personalizing and tweaking. Here's a report of my first couple of days using Arch on the desktop.

The installation was as straightforward as it gets. As always I preserved my /home directory so as to avoid having to transfer all of my data or redo all of my desktop and app configurations. Arch does an extremely minimal install by default... absolutely nothing non-essential is installed! I like this model; with a fresh install of Arch I have a basic platform from which I can build any computer I can imagine. At the end of the installation process the Arch installer offers the user the opportunity to edit some system configuration files to his or her liking. This feature would probably be a bit off-putting for noobs, but for an experienced user it's extraordinarily cool!

The first thing I did was to run updates. Once that's done your basic platform is now a very up-to-date basic platform, in keeping with the Arch rolling release model. My next move was to install the stuff I needed in order to launch a KDE desktop. I had to install xorg, hal, phonon-xine and the KDE metapackage. I decided to install the KDE 4.6 RC2 package that was available in the KDE-unstable repository (I'd been running KDE 4.6 RC2 on this box with Alien Bob's Slackware packages already, so it made sense). I also had to add the hal and udev daemons to the /etc/rc.conf file... Arch never does stuff like that automatically; the only non-essential daemons that start at boot time are the ones I specify. I like it. I went ahead and installed the proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers while I was at it; why screw around? Once I had all that stuff taken care of I created my regular user account, making sure to add my user to all the appropriate groups. Finally I rebooted my box and switched over to runlevel five (multi-user graphical mode).

It wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Because I'd saved my /home partition I figured I'd be logging right into my familiar old desktop, but it wasn't quite that simple. Turns out Arch uses a .kde4 directory for KDE config files instead of .kde. Since I had no such directory it created one and launched me into a default KDE desktop. Fortunately it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the problem was, and all I had to do was drop back into a terminal, get rid of the directory that KDE had just created for me, and rename my old .kde folder .kde4. I then logged back in and voila! Problem solved.

Well, almost. It still took some time to get my workspace back into order. I use a weather widget called YAWP and a window decoration program called Dekorator, neither of which are part of the standard KDE bundle. They weren't in the official repos either, but fortunately Arch packages for both were available from the unofficial AUR repo. Downloading and installing them was kind of similar to getting Slackware packages from Slackbuilds.org, except the process is a bit more automated and the Pacman package manager handles the dependencies for you. It turned out I had to install a few other workspace essentials as well; the plugin package for Konqueror is not a part of the default KDE bundle and had to be installed, as did Ktorrent and a few other things. That stuff was all available from the official repos. Some configuration details also had to be handled. Once all those things were taken care of the look and feel of my desktop was indistiguishable from what it had been with Slackware... a testament to both distros' commitment to providing unaltered, vanilla packages.

Then I set about installing software. Lots of software! Despite the fairly well-rounded software bundle the Slackware full install offers I'd had a ton of extra stuff installed, and my needs were compounded by the Arch minimal install approach. I installed VLC, Kaffeine, and Amarok for multi-media fun (and I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that Arch comes with no codecs installed at all!), Koffice and Scribus for document creation, qemu-kvm for virtualization, Digikam for photo management, the Gcompris educational game suite for my 3-year-old daughter, Jack, Ardour, Jamin, Audacity, Soundkonverter, and a slew of associated plugins for recording... and some other stuff, too. Some of that software had configuration associated with it; quemu-kvm requires kernel modules to be loaded at boot time, and realtime privileges had to be configured for Jack.

All of that sounds like a lot, but in truth it didn't take all that long. For one thing I'm an experienced Linux user who knows what he's doing and what he wants, and for another I had the excellent Arch Wiki to help me along when my unfamiliarity with the Arch way of doing things momentarily bogged me down. Really, that's one superb piece of documentation... I didn't have to ask a single question at the Arch forums. In any event, I had the whole thing up and running in about half a day... and I wasn't exactly devoting my full attention to it.

The rest of the time I've spent using my computer. In the last 24 hours or so I have:

1)recorded a demo using Jack/Ardour, and converted it to MP3 for web upload (no, it's not up yet)

2)Run a pre-existing Window 7 VM using quemu-kvm. I didn't do anything with it; I just wanted to make sure that it worked.

3)Used Scribus to create a brochure to send out to venues that will hopefully pay me money to play my guitar.

4)Printed said brochures.

5)Watched a movie using Kaffeine (I'm not feeling well).

6)Composed this blog posting.

7)Listened to lots of music using Amarok.

In short, Arch Linux is 100% functional on my desktop, and I'm doing all of the same things with it that I was doing with Slackware two days ago. So far it's been fast and stable, and it seems every time I turn around there's a newer version of some package or another available for download; I think this rolling release thing is going to be a lot of fun. I also kind of like the leaness of the system; there's nothing on this machine that doesn't contribute directly to it's use on my desktop. So far so good, and I'll keep you posted.

Inxsible · 2011-01-25 01:49:22

welcome to Arch

ngoonee · 2011-01-25 01:53:55

As Inxsible said, welcome to Arch. Always interesting to have people doing linux-related audio work here, perhaps you'd have heard of archaudio? No idea what their current status is, but they do get mentioned on the LAU once in a while.

2handband · 2011-01-25 02:17:48

ngoonee wrote:

As Inxsible said, welcome to Arch. Always interesting to have people doing linux-related audio work here, perhaps you'd have heard of archaudio? No idea what their current status is, but they do get mentioned on the LAU once in a while.

No I hadn't heard of it, thanks! Just dropped in over at their webpage; looks intriguing.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-01-25 01:47:39

48 Hours of Arch (again)

#2 2011-01-25 01:49:22

Re: 48 Hours of Arch (again)

#3 2011-01-25 01:53:55

Re: 48 Hours of Arch (again)

#4 2011-01-25 02:17:48

Re: 48 Hours of Arch (again)

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