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#1 2011-06-12 10:25:09

olliegab
Member
Registered: 2011-05-27
Posts: 19

So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

I've used Linux just under three years now (mainly Ubuntu) so I am still very much a newbie. After reading a magazine article about Arch - which statet that, although not a distro for beginners, it was a good starting point for people who want to learn what Linux is really about - I took the plunge and installed it on a (secondary) machine.
Following the very instructive Beginner's Guide I now have a functioning system on which I can to the basic stuff. I installed xfce as my desktop environment and so far I haven't had any serious meltdowns!
However, I soon realised that I will need to install a lot of stuff, like plug-ins for the browser (for sound, video etc) and my question is; where is the best place to take the next steps? How do I know what I need, for instance? How to I search for stuff when I don't know what they are called?
For example, I wanted to read an pdf-file but didn't have the right app to do it. I searched for adobe, adobe-reader, adobereader, etc but found nothing. I know there are other pdf-readers, of course, but what are they called? Or how do I find out how to toggle between different keyboard layouts? Little things like that...In short! What's my next step in the Arch learning process?

Best regards
Ollie

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#2 2011-06-12 10:42:52

BaconPie
Member
Registered: 2010-08-11
Posts: 209

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

Googling what you want with the the keywords "Arch Linux" or just sometimes just "arch" will get you pages from the Arch Linux Wiki pages. They generally have information on doing everything. Failing that, google around non-related to Arch and finally, ask on the forums.

PDF is an open standard now and you don't need help from Adobe to read them. xpdf (usually installed with X) is a PDF reader that you may already have installed. But it's pretty ugly. I use evince which is a gtk application and it's nice and pretty lightweight (and therefore quick).

Here are some things to get you started:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … plications
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ge … mendations

Last edited by BaconPie (2011-06-12 10:45:48)

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#3 2011-06-12 11:09:16

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

[karol@black ~]$ pacman -Ss pdf
extra/cups-pdf 2.5.1-1 [0,01 MB]
    PDF printer for cups
extra/gv 3.7.2-1 [0,16 MB]
    A program to view PostScript and PDF documents
extra/itext 5.0.4-1 [1,44 MB]
    Java Library for creating and manipulating PDFs on the fly
extra/libreoffice-extension-pdfimport 3.4.0-2 [0,36 MB] (libreoffice-extensions)
    This extension allows you to import and modify PDF documents
extra/poppler 0.16.5-1 [0,70 MB] [installed]
    PDF rendering library based on xpdf 3.0
extra/poppler-data 0.4.4-1 [1,41 MB] [installed]
    Encoding data for the poppler PDF rendering library
extra/potrace 1.9-2 [0,07 MB]
    Utility for tracing a bitmap. Input: PBM, PGM, PPM, or BMP. Output: EPS, PostScript, PDF, SVG, Xfig,
    Gimppath, or PGM.
extra/pstoedit 3.50-4 [0,37 MB]
    Translates PostScript and PDF graphics into other vector formats
extra/texlive-bin 2010.1-8 [13,35 MB]
    TeX Live binaries
extra/xpdf 3.02_pl6-1 [0,37 MB]
    A viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files
extra/xpdf-arabic 20030216-3 [0,00 MB]
    Adds support for Arabic fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-chinese-simplified 20040427-5 [0,30 MB]
    Adds support for simplified Chinese fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-chinese-traditional 20040727-5 [0,30 MB]
    Adds support for traditional Chinese fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-cyrillic 20030628-3 [0,00 MB]
    Adds support for Cyrillic fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-greek 20030728-4 [0,00 MB]
    Adds support for Greek fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-hebrew 20030216-4 [0,00 MB]
    Adds support for Hebrew fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-japanese 20040727-5 [0,22 MB]
    Adds support for Japanese fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-korean 20050707-4 [0,18 MB]
    Adds support for Korean fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-latin2 20021022-3 [0,00 MB]
    Adds support for Latin2 fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-thai 20020116-3 [0,00 MB]
    Adds support for Thai fonts to xpdf
extra/xpdf-turkish 20020410-3 [0,00 MB]
    Adds support for Turkish fonts to xpdf
community/apvlv 0.1.1-1 [0,16 MB] [installed]
    A PDF Viewer which behaves like Vim
community/dblatex 0.3-3 [0,94 MB]
    DocBook (XML and SGML) to DVI, PDF, PostScript converter using latex.
community/epdfview 0.1.8-1 [0,09 MB]
    A free lightweight PDF document viewer.
community/gambas2-gb-pdf 2.23.1-1 [0,01 MB] (gambas2)
    Gambas2 PDF component
community/gambas3-gb-pdf 2.99.1-3 [0,01 MB] (gambas3)
    Gambas3 PDF component
community/htmldoc 1.8.27-5 [3,03 MB]
    Produce PDF or Postscript from HTML documents including TOCs and Indices
community/impressive 0.10.3-1 [0,13 MB]
    A fancy PDF presentation program (previously known as KeyJNote).
community/mupdf 0.8.165-1 [2,70 MB]
    lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C
community/pdf2djvu 0.7.7-1 [0,10 MB]
    Creates DjVu files from PDF files
community/pdf2svg 0.2.1-5 [0,00 MB]
    A pdf to svg convertor
community/pdfedit 0.4.5-1 [1,66 MB]
    Full featured editor for manipulating PDF documents
community/pdftrans 1.2-7 [0,01 MB]
    A utility to add metadata, protect, and encrypt PDF documents
community/podofo 0.9.1-1 [0,66 MB]
    A C++ library to work with the PDF file format
community/python-pychart 1.39-5 [0,37 MB]
    Python library for creating Encapsulated Postscript, PDF, PNG, or SVG charts.
community/python-pypdf 1.13-1 [0,05 MB]
    A Pure-Python library built as a PDF toolkit
community/python-pyx 0.10-5 [0,28 MB]
    Python library for the creation of PostScript and PDF files
community/python-reportlab 2.5-1 [1,83 MB]
    A proven industry-strength PDF generating solution
community/wkhtmltopdf 0.9.9-1 [0,07 MB]
    Simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt
community/x-docs-pdf 20100416-1 [69,82 MB]
    X documentation
community/zathura 0.0.8.3-1 [0,03 MB]
    a PDF viewer
archlinuxfr/acroread 9.4.2-1 [43,38 MB]
    Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files
archlinuxfr/acroread-fra 9.4.2-1 [47,07 MB]
    Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files (French)
archlinuxfr/guipdftk 0.33-1 [0,42 MB]
    GUI for PDFTK
archlinuxfr/livret 0.2-2 [1,75 MB]
    Booklet is a small freeware program written in Java for creating small books from a PDF document. Drops
    from a source PDF file containing two files the fronts and backs ready to be printed and stapled.
archlinuxfr/pdftk 1.44-3 [0,64 MB]
    Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents
archlinuxfr/stapler 2b-2 [0,00 MB]
    A small utility making use of the pypdf library to provide a (somewhat) lighter alternative to pdftk
herecura-stable-any/pdfminer 20110515-1 [0,16 MB]
    python utils to extract, analyze text data of PDF files.
herecura-stable/pdf2html 1.4-4 [0,02 MB]
    Converts pdf files to html files.
andrwe/apvlv-svn 338-1 [0,19 MB]
    A pdf viewer which behaves like Vim.
andrwe/pdf_presenter_console 1.1.1-3 [0,01 MB]
    Presentation viewer for PDF files including Keyjnote like multi-monitor support.

Many of the above are not pdf readers (but you _can_ find acroread - Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files).
Read about https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … positories to know where you can get some of this stuff from.

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#4 2011-06-12 12:32:31

tesjo
Member
Registered: 2007-11-30
Posts: 164

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=111878
This is also a good thread to find app recommendations, and then make your opinion known

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#5 2011-06-12 12:51:41

olliegab
Member
Registered: 2011-05-27
Posts: 19

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

Thanks very  much for  that!
There's plenty there to keep me occupied for a while! smile

Ollie

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#6 2011-06-12 13:00:29

hokasch
Member
Registered: 2007-09-23
Posts: 1,461

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

Googling "function/tool + linux", optionaly add "gtk" or "qt" will do, nearly everything is available either in the repos or AUR. Anyway, some more lists:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … plications

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Li … #PDF_Tools

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#7 2011-06-12 16:06:04

ConnorBehan
Package Maintainer (PM)
From: Long Island NY
Registered: 2007-07-05
Posts: 1,359
Website

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

BaconPie wrote:

PDF is an open standard now and you don't need help from Adobe to read them.

The vast majority of them work in open source viewers. But technically, the full PDF standard has *still* not been implemented by a single open source program.

I guess everyone has already suggested that you use the Arch wiki. Might I suggest wikipedia as well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software? It also has "list of" pages for other types of programs... media players, office suites, raster graphics, vector graphics, etc. And they are nicely sorted according to what OSs the programs are available for and what their main features are.


6EA3 F3F3 B908 2632 A9CB E931 D53A 0445 B47A 0DAB
Great things come in tar.xz packages.

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#8 2011-06-12 16:21:29

George.Harmony
Member
From: Off The Wire
Registered: 2010-04-30
Posts: 97

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

One more hint. I install my system as my needs dictate. Until I need it I don't install it.

When I do identify a need I use the lightweight page first then the common application page. Both in the wiki. (Both linked above by hokasch.)

There is also the General Recommendations page which goes over keyboard, mouse, the core utilities, benchmarking etc. I usually read all of this and apply what I need.

I often also just go to the wiki and click on random page and read the ones that interest me. I have learned so many interesting things doing this. It is truly ridiculous how much information is in there when you start digging around. I suggest everyone doing this if you haven't yet. You will be amazed the articles that come up.


Desktop:  Compiz Stand Alone w/ Cairo Dock.
Laptop:    Pekwm w/ Tint2
Jukebox:   MPD w/ cli
Gateway: Vuurmuur w/dialog

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#9 2011-06-12 17:05:58

ANOKNUSA
Member
Registered: 2010-10-22
Posts: 2,141

Re: So where to now? Right after the very first stumbling steps?

I second George.Harmony's opinion.  Personally, I like to tinker a lot, so I install various crap I don't need when I hear about something that sounds useful or fun.  Generally speaking, though, it's good to focus on one thing that you need--setting up your printer, choosing a backup program, learning the basics of your DE/WM--and spend a couple hours sorting things out.  Research, trial-and-error and (after the first two) asking for help on the forums will help you learn your way around Arch and Linux in general.

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