Arch Linux

aikidoist72

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2005-04-15

Posts: 63

Understanding Arch better

I have been experimenting with Slackware and FreeBSD to get a deeper  understanding linux, UNIX, ending in the hopeful result of understanding Archlinux better.

   I really enjoy the polished feel of Slackware.  Does anyone know if a system similar to ABS exists for Slackware????

I would say my comparison of Arch to Slackware and FreeBSD puts Arch up there with these two.  I await Archlinux's future with anticipation.  Damn good distro.  Pat yourselves on the back guys

Cheers

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Doing nothing
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And the flowers bloom
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iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: Understanding Arch better

The only thing I know of similar to ABS for Slack is checkinstall and I personally like ABS better.

-Anders

Member

From: Denmark

Registered: 2004-03-12

Posts: 19

Re: Understanding Arch better

You might want to have a look at www.rubix-os.org
It's a slackware-like distro that uses Pacman and makepkg to keep the system up to date.

aikidoist72

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2005-04-15

Posts: 63

Re: Understanding Arch better

Thanks guys for the replies,

I will have a closer look at rubix as it sounds interesting.  I must admit slapt-get is getting there with regards to usability but nowhere near Pacman. 

Cheers

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Sitting quietly
Doing nothing
The grass grows
And the flowers bloom
All by themselves

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Understanding Arch better

aikidoist72: do you notice any performance differences as far as slack v arch goes? I haven't used slackware in a few years, but it is i386 compiled... from a human interaction point of view, it's hard to notice performance differences due to the speed at which the computer works, and they speed your eyes/hands work at.... I could never tell much of a difference unless I ran "time"

That said, people coming to arch from other distros always say "it's so fast"

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Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: Understanding Arch better

You might want to have a look at www.rubix-os.org
It's a slackware-like distro that uses Pacman and makepkg to keep the system up to date.

That is kinda interesting... supposed to run on i486+... a good place to direct those people looking for a 586 port of Arch, eh? Its not Arch, its supposedly slack, but they use pacman, sooooooo...

I've always thought the only thing that's ever really different between distros is the package manager. Yeah, system config varies, but the real difference is the package manager.

Dusty

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archdaemon

Member

Registered: 2005-01-27

Posts: 83

Re: Understanding Arch better

aikidoist72: do you notice any performance differences as far as slack v arch goes? I haven't used slackware in a few years, but it is i386 compiled... from a human interaction point of view, it's hard to notice performance differences due to the speed at which the computer works, and they speed your eyes/hands work at.... I could never tell much of a difference unless I ran "time"

That said, people coming to arch from other distros always say "it's so fast"

You weren't addressing me but just to pitch in - Slack is optimized for i686 while being compatible with i486. It dropped 386 awhile ago. As far as performance, the two distros do something with hotplug such that Slackware takes longer at that point. The rest of the boot and, more importantly, actual operation, is possibly benchmarkable (isn't everything?) but there's little user-noticeable difference. I only notice three speed classes amongst distros. Nothing is faster than a minimal self-compiled distro a la LFS. Then comes Slack, Arch, Gentoo, and the like as being *almost* that fast. Then comes Mandrake, Suse, and the like as the slow ones. That's about it.

...I've always thought the only thing that's ever really different between distros is the package manager. Yeah, system config varies, but the real difference is the package manager.

Dusty

Well, Slackware has an entirely different organizational structure in that Patrick takes the source, patches it just enough to make it build and be safe, and turns it out. It tends to rely on the tried and true and doesn't experiment for its own sake. So it defaults to lilo and the 2.4 kernel and and so on. At the same time, it *offers* 2.6 and probably grub. As another bit of convention, Slackware's package files are in /var/log/packages rather than the current officially ordained /var/lib, which is where Arch's pacman stuff goes. And Slack's philosophy tends to say 'If it *can* be done in plaintext and as a shellscript, it *should* be.' And, perhaps because I'm not a big IRC guy, it seems 'quieter'. Less user/community/dev interaction. But it's very stable. Even -current but obviously the released versions. The buck stops with Patrick and he knows everything going on with the system. On the downside, it's harder for Joe User to feel as involved.

It seems Arch has several developers and a quasi-official community development process - with Slack there's Slackware packages and 3rd-party packages. Period. With Arch there are the many different levels grades and sorts of repositories. It's possible for different people to not know what other people are up to, much like the large distributions. Arch seems much more experimental and more willing to be unstable. Arch has the rolling release process - not too different but sort of inverted from Slack's release and -current. And it obviously coded pacman as something other than a batch o'scripts.

And Slackware does not come with pam because Pat hates it. Or Gnome because it's a build nightmare, as the Arch maintainers would probably agree. On down to little things like old-style logging vs. syslog-ng. And there's a flavor to each, down to the most trivial things - Arch has some cute colorful init scripts and the like and has a certain scripting style - a little flashier down to the loops. Slack doesn't do color, does a standard penguin logo instead of a Slack logo, has straight-shooting scripting. And this kind of 'colors' the whole of both distros, bringing Arch closer to Gentoo in ways.

Perhaps the most extreme difference I notice is that Slack ships *lots* of documentation and it's easy to mirror the entire source tree and know exactly what's going on and the Changelog is sometimes quite informative. (For more Arch/Slack attitude differences, check out the recent ChangeLog note on groff. ) Arch ships exactly *zero* documentation, mirroring everything would be extremely difficult and I never know why I'm upgrading anything except that the number's bigger. Arch doesn't just cut out docs in the sense of plain READMEs, either. All kinds of useful auxilary scripts and examples and icons and alternates and whatnot tend to get lost in the packaging process.

Basically, I think Slack has the edge in simplicity and reliability and Arch has the edge in automation and ease. I think, for the simplicity and documentation and manual nature of it, Slack would be the better learning experience.

But Slack, Arch, Gentoo (and maybe FreeBSD) are in a league of their own, in my book. Those I like - the rest not so much.

jerem

Member

From: France

Registered: 2005-01-15

Posts: 310

Re: Understanding Arch better

In Arch you have PKGBUILDs, in Slack you have Slackbuilds.

The CDs 3 and 4 contain full source(original source code in tar.bz2 or tar.gz )  with their corresponding Slackbuild to build the program automatically and create a package.

It's kinda what you're lookin for.