The Official Hello Everyone Thread

wphred · 2012-11-04 12:49:22

Hello out there.

I installed Arch on my laptop a couple of days ago and I think I'm going to like it.

Bill Gates and company have long been gone, and now Ubuntu is too. I've been a unix user (note, user not sys admin) for almost 20 years. I like its efficiency. Windows and Ubuntu both seem bloated to me (although I had no real problems with Ubuntu), and I like the control of what goes on my machine that Arch promises. Right off the bat I like how you can easily find the dependencies for an application on the package page.

I'm not kidding myself when I say there is a steep learning curve ahead. My biggest challenge will be remembering things. I'm over 60 and my memory isn't what it used to be. But I'm very stubborn and will keep chipping away at this. Being a unix user for all of those years gives me a familiarity with command structure, and I know a fair number of commands common to linux. I've written shell scripts for repetitive tasks and some very basic programs, but have not been actively involved in running a system. So I'm a newbie when it comes to its administration.

This will be fun.

One question: Any thoughts or opinions on a good linux book for administrators? I'm old school and like books, even with all of the electronic media out there. I'll underline, write in the margins and make references to pages in my Moleskine, etc. It will be my security blanket until I outgrow it.

thisoldman · 2012-11-04 13:48:16

Welcome, wphred,

wphred wrote:

... and my memory isn't what it used to be...
One question: Any thoughts or opinions on a good linux book for administrators? I'm old school and like books, even with all of the electronic media out there. I'll underline, write in the margins and make references to pages in my Moleskine, etc. It will be my security blanket until I outgrow it.

Myself, I still have a mind like a steel, ...uh, whatchamacallit.

I can't wholeheartedly recommend any books – print editions of books are quickly outdated or irrelevant. Some people have recommended UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition), but I thought the book was overpriced, not as useful as its cost would have one imagine.

Trap! I have a mind like a steel trap! Rusted shut and worn, but a trap nonetheless.

MatejLach · 2012-11-04 14:01:14

wphred wrote:

Hello out there.
I installed Arch on my laptop a couple of days ago and I think I'm going to like it.
Bill Gates and company have long been gone, and now Ubuntu is too. I've been a unix user (note, user not sys admin) for almost 20 years. I like its efficiency. Windows and Ubuntu both seem bloated to me (although I had no real problems with Ubuntu), and I like the control of what goes on my machine that Arch promises. Right off the bat I like how you can easily find the dependencies for an application on the package page.
I'm not kidding myself when I say there is a steep learning curve ahead. My biggest challenge will be remembering things. I'm over 60 and my memory isn't what it used to be. But I'm very stubborn and will keep chipping away at this. Being a unix user for all of those years gives me a familiarity with command structure, and I know a fair number of commands common to linux. I've written shell scripts for repetitive tasks and some very basic programs, but have not been actively involved in running a system. So I'm a newbie when it comes to its administration.
This will be fun.
One question: Any thoughts or opinions on a good linux book for administrators? I'm old school and like books, even with all of the electronic media out there. I'll underline, write in the margins and make references to pages in my Moleskine, etc. It will be my security blanket until I outgrow it.

Nice to see that even at your age you're still interested in computing and especially Arch.
Happy ride!

I'll recomend:

- Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible, Second Edition (its not just about shell scripting, but about Linux automation and administration in general)
- UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition)
- Linux Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition
- Absolute FreeBSD: The Complete Guide to FreeBSD, 2nd Edition (it's not about Linux, but it will give you a good grasp of some of the original UNIX concepts and it will enable you to be able to administer almost any UNIX-like system in general)
- RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide (this focuses on RHEL, but it is a very good "real-life" Linux administration training book

skyivben · 2012-11-05 04:02:35

Hi all:
I'm newer for Arch Linux.

nazuk · 2012-11-05 18:04:09

Hello everyone,

I'm new to Arch and I am quite intersted in how it works. I use #! on a daily basis.

johni · 2012-11-06 21:30:33

Hi all,

I guess technically I am not a newbie - I've been using arch since around the beginning of the year, and have been posting on the forum. I decided it was finally time to introduce myseld on the hello thread.

I've been using Linux as my primary OS for the last 12 years or so. I began with Slackware, and after a couple years I found the Linux from Scratch (LFS) project. From then until the beginning of this year I had been compiling my own distro based on LFS, but with many customizations. I even wrote my own package manager and build system for it. As I got older, maintaining my own distro became just too painful and time-consuming, so I went out looking for something as close to the way I did things, and found Arch. I was actually very suprised to see how similar a lot of things were. My build system shared a lot of common ideas as the makepkg/PKGBUILD on arch (sourcing in scriptlets with defined functions), and while I had no dependency support in my package manager, pacman was not too foreign either.

I am now fully intergrated into the arch way of doing things, and I love the rolling packages and the aur. I think the arch wiki and forums are full of great information and help. I love that fact that I can easily build or customize packages, and finally feel right at home.

MatejLach · 2012-11-06 22:57:02

@johni - Wow, getting into LFS myself, but only as a learning experience.

Swashy · 2012-11-07 15:56:04

Hey everyone, I wish to get into the Linux experience with Arch. I have a limited, and very frustrating past with Linux, first with Ubuntu. I struggled to get it up and running the way I liked it on my rig, and when an update broke my install, everyone called me an idiot.

I want to learn how to actually use linux instead of throwing copied lines into terminal. Hopefully I'll be able to actually install Arch eventually and get past my natural incompetence with computers.... working on a virtual box now!

kinleyd · 2012-11-07 16:06:28

I missed this thread when I joined the forum. I'm a new user of Arch (a few months) coming from some years of Ubuntu and many years of Windows before that (yeah, Windows 1.0 up to XP). My first system was an Apple ][ clone (which was followed by PC-XT clones running MS-DOS).

Anyways, greetings to all Archers here. It's a fantastic distro and I'm having a blast. :)

Last edited by kinleyd (2012-11-07 16:08:09)

YJ Lee · 2012-11-07 16:25:32

Hi fellow humans.

Newbie reporting! I'm YJ Lee from Malaysia, recent engineering graduate. Been using Windows all my life until... First contact with Linux more than 2 years ago, a tentative poke at a CentOS cluster via Putty for running fluid flow simulations. Since then, have adopted Ubuntu, then OpenSUSE as primary OS. Started to dislike how the system was cluttered with programs that (i) I have no idea what they do and (ii) are never used, so went off looking for a faster, more lightweight distro.

Tired out Slackware. Really liked the concept, but hunting dependencies while trying to install various stuff was ultimately too time consuming. Have also tried CentOS 6 and finally crawled back to OpenSUSE until...

Destiny! Stumbled upon Archlinux and realized that we share the same birthday, March 11.

Got a bit of culture shock installing Archlinux (okayyy.... now, partition, mount, install base and base-devel package and... done. WHAT?), but really liked the way how Archlinux works. Now my system is up and running pretty okay (with some issues and glitches such as not being able to hibernate and XFCE not being able to mount drives automatically...) but I'm happy with it. Now I really can't stand to boot my Windows partition when I need to do printing and scanning... (which, for some reasons, couldn't work properly under my Linux system. Yet)

Looking forward to (hopefully) get to know the system better and start contributing back to the community! Thanks to the community and developers for such a great distro.

masteryod · 2012-11-07 18:41:14

YJ Lee wrote:

Hi fellow humans.

I hope you meant green goblins from muddy planet as well. You can spot here crazy lifeforms, beware!

Get back on topic: Hi and welcome.

YJ Lee wrote:

[...]XFCE not being able to mount drives automatically

See this, and/or udev rules, there's a lot of threads about auto-mouting, it's not big of a deal - it's just disabled by default for security reasons.
About hibernation I might be bumpy ride so search wiki and forums for it, nowadays it should just work. Do you have swap partition/file configured/mounted?
Configuring printing and scanning can look a little weird and unnatural at first but everything you need to know is in our wiki (as always). Good luck.

johni · 2012-11-07 18:56:50

MatejLach wrote:

@johni - Wow, getting into LFS myself, but only as a learning experience.

It certainly was a learning experience and I credit it for giving me a much better understanding of how a Linux system works all the way down to the initial boot scripts. Also building packages, fixing compile problems, etc. It was a good experience and I think everyone should experiment with it at least once.

kryta · 2012-11-07 21:55:43

Hello everyone

I had installed Arch in my computer 2 or 3 years ago and I'm very happy for that. Well, now is the moment to register in this forum and community.

See you.

Last edited by kryta (2012-11-07 21:56:07)

kinleyd · 2012-11-08 03:59:31

kryta wrote:

I had installed Arch in my computer 2 or 3 years ago and I'm very happy for that. Well, now is the moment to register in this forum and community.

Heh. That's quite a number of years testing Arch before registering. :)

haoren · 2012-11-08 06:05:53

Hello peeps, wazzzzzaaaaaaaappp

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the short people roam
Where it's green and immense
And the heat is intense
It's lunatic, but hey, it's home

Another newbie from Asia is here. Been stalking the forum around for quite a while since moved to Arch last year after got sick of Ubuntu "weird"ness. And finally decided to registered myself today

YJ Lee · 2012-11-08 07:49:57

masteryod wrote:

Get back on topic: Hi and welcome.
YJ Lee wrote:
[...]XFCE not being able to mount drives automatically
See this, and/or udev rules, there's a lot of threads about auto-mouting, it's not big of a deal - it's just disabled by default for security reasons.
About hibernation I might be bumpy ride so search wiki and forums for it, nowadays it should just work. Do you have swap partition/file configured/mounted?
Configuring printing and scanning can look a little weird and unnatural at first but everything you need to know is in our wiki (as always). Good luck.

Ahah, turns out that my swap partition hasn't been mounted... and I still got some way to go to understand udev. But in the meantime, for mounting I just made do with a launcher that launches a udisks command... works okay.
Thanks for the reply! Nice to be greeted with technical help immediately after signing up! Will continue tinkering in my free time.

kryta · 2012-11-08 10:20:08

kinleyd wrote:

kryta wrote:
I had installed Arch in my computer 2 or 3 years ago and I'm very happy for that. Well, now is the moment to register in this forum and community.
Heh. That's quite a number of years testing Arch before registering.

Yes

See you.

haoren wrote:

Hello peeps, wazzzzzaaaaaaaappp
Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the short people roam
Where it's green and immense
And the heat is intense
It's lunatic, but hey, it's home
Another newbie from Asia is here. Been stalking the forum around for quite a while since moved to Arch last year after got sick of Ubuntu "weird"ness. And finally decided to registered myself today wink

Hello haoren.

For me Arch is the best distro rolling release in this moment so you have been a good decision.

See you.

mashen · 2012-11-08 11:04:19

I come and go, but always get back coz Arch is easy to config when you're a neat freak and care to tune every single unimportant detail of my system to my liking.

Xeitgeist · 2012-11-08 14:26:15

mashen wrote:

I come and go, but always get back coz Arch is easy to config when you're a neat freak and care to tune every single unimportant detail of my system to my liking.

Hah, same with me. I'm very obsessed with keeping my system lean and Arch is just the best - no contest.

isacdaavid · 2012-11-08 18:33:34

MatejLach wrote:

@johni - Wow, getting into LFS myself, but only as a learning experience.

That quotation on your signature is simply awesome.

mittfh · 2012-11-09 19:28:03

/me steps in, takes a look around, gives a timid wave...

It's a bit busier in here than the Mageia forums

I started my Linux experience with Mandriva 2008.1 with GNOME 2, jumped DE to Xfce when GNOME 3 was on the horizon, jumped distro to Mageia when it came out and was largely satisfied with Mageia 1. Mageia 2, on the other hand, was increasingly problematic and the forums offered little to no help if you had a non-standard install (e.g. using Xfce + ALSA). I was also getting frustrated with Thunar being no match for Nautilus. So after searching around for an alternative (that wasn't based on Ubuntu - which often seems to get mistaken for the only distro in existence - hey, I'm a rebel!), saw Arch, saw it had MATE support (bonus!) and the rolling nature (so not having to sit around 9 months waiting for updates to some software or alternatively installing manually), so thought I'd give it a go.

After giving my printer some exercise with the installation / beginner's guides and one false start with the USB boot (dd-ing the image to sdd1 rather than sdd), I'm up and running with MATE, ALSA, Compiz - the excellent Wiki being a great help with initial teething issues!

Now I've just got to work out why all sound is only coming through the rear channels and not the front (yes, you read that right - is that a strange problem or is that a strange problem?!) - but that's a question to be examined in another board!
[EDIT] Played around in the ncurses alsamixer and somehow fixed it. That's good

Last edited by mittfh (2012-11-09 20:27:46)

Simpller · 2012-11-09 23:15:08

Hi.

My name is Markus and i'm from Finland i'm informatio technology student. My english isn't very good because it's not my native language.

I've been using linux about 3 years. i have tried Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora etc. but one day i found Archlinux and after that i havent even consider to change to another distro. I have tried almost every desktop enviroment and window manager and differend configs and i finaly found the perfect settings for me

dantesparda · 2012-11-10 03:22:02

Aha~ Finaly I'm here!
Hello everyone, I'm Yu Shuxing ,a normal student, from China. I'm a newbie to Arch as well as linux. You may call me Dante. (I love this nickname)

I had been dreaming to install Arch since one year ago but didn't act for being afraid of something I didn't know.
And now I'm saying hello to you with my Arch. I made it just now!

Mostly I use computer to code.
Working on linux is really enjoyable.

saz · 2012-11-10 15:50:02

Hi everyone!

I actually joined the forums in 2008, and was already using Arch for a while at the time.

Back in 2009 I had a problem with my ethernet connection, and there was really no working around it, so I posted in these forums for help, and I got some... well... not so instructive answers, because truth be told, ethernet connection 101: plug the thing into the thing + dhcpcd, and you're good to go! So users started treating me like I had no idea what I was doing (or so I felt), and I got a little fed up and basically wrote a post saying I was going back to Gentoo and f*** arch community.

So I got banned from the forums, went back to Gentoo, found a couple of months later that the problem was actually due to a kernel bug with nvidia controlled ethernet ports, and moved on with my life.

No way I'd be able to figure out it was a kernel bug, and I doubt many of this forum's users would, I mean, probably took Linus a couple of weeks too. ^^ But for all the reason I might have had at the time, I lost it all when I behaved like a immature spoiled brat.

This summer I got back to Arch (I'm getting too old for Gentoo's compiling time) and tested to see if I had access to the forums again, and I had! I was actually really happy, because all of this time I felt that this issue was "unclosed" because I got banned and never had the chance to apologize to a community that gave me so much at the time. So this is it:

I'M SORRY ARCH COMMUNITY! (sorry for the caps, but if you check the post I'm talking about, you'll understand )

Well back to Arch Linux, and back to the forums. I'm happy, and I hope I get some forgiveness! ^^

Thanks!

Morn · 2012-11-10 16:07:52

Saz, if all the advice you got at the time was that it should just work by plugging the cable in, then clearly you were given bad advice. My advice would have been to boot the long-term support kernel (linux-lts) and see if Ethernet works. Networking and power saving capabilities of the Linux kernel seem to strongly depend on which kernel version you are using and they break and unbreak all the time. Sad but true…

So find a kernel version that works for you and then put "IgnorePkg = linux linux-api-headers" in "/etc/pacman.conf". (I'm using 3.5.6 BTW.) Unfortunately the kernel is the least stable component of Arch right now and that one that is most likely to be broken in my experience with Arch so far. Even the web browsers are pillars of stability by comparison. I haven't yet had to downgrade a single other package except the kernel.

Arch Linux

#2776 2012-11-04 12:49:22

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2777 2012-11-04 13:48:16

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2778 2012-11-04 14:01:14

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2779 2012-11-05 04:02:35

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2780 2012-11-05 18:04:09

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2781 2012-11-06 21:30:33

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2782 2012-11-06 22:57:02

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2783 2012-11-07 15:56:04

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#2784 2012-11-07 16:06:28

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2785 2012-11-07 16:25:32

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2786 2012-11-07 18:41:14

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2787 2012-11-07 18:56:50

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2788 2012-11-07 21:55:43

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2789 2012-11-08 03:59:31

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2790 2012-11-08 06:05:53

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2791 2012-11-08 07:49:57

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2792 2012-11-08 10:20:08

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2793 2012-11-08 11:04:19

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2794 2012-11-08 14:26:15

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2795 2012-11-08 18:33:34

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2796 2012-11-09 19:28:03

Re: The Official Hello Everyone Thread

#2797 2012-11-09 23:15:08

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#2798 2012-11-10 03:22:02

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#2799 2012-11-10 15:50:02

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#2800 2012-11-10 16:07:52

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