Arch Linux

WyoPBS

Member

From: Cheyenne, WY

Registered: 2007-10-05

Posts: 101

Website

Howdy, and some questions

I have been building my own system with Linux From Scratch for five years, but after two weeks of struggling with the latest Gnome I decided I'm gettin' too old for this stuff.  Arch looks like the perfect next step - plenty of control over what gets installed, but no more headaches with source builds.

So anyway, I have a few newbie questions...
Grub was giving me grief (say that three times fast) when it tried to load the root system on /dev/hda6 because it could not find /dev/hda6 - well, yeah, that's because the Arch kernel does some weird translation of ide drives into pseudo-scsi so in the /dev tree it's called /dev/sda6.  I changed menu.lst to load the root from /dev/sda6 and it still wouldn't cooperate... I get some error about kinit: Cannot open root device.

Bear with me, I'm getting to the question eventually... anyhow, I finally gave up and copied my LFS kernel over to /boot and restored the menu.lst from the LFS partition.  My question is, is there any reason not to build and use my own kernel or will this give pacman fits when it looks for updates?

Also, I notice bash is not loading the initial path from /etc/login.defs.  It seems to have hard-coded a path that includes /usr/gnu/bin and the like.  How can I get it to read /etc/login.defs?  For now I'm working around the problem by hard-coding paths in /etc/bashrc.

Finally... what happened to my backspace key?  I'm loading a standard us keyboard, and I don't think I had to do anything special in LFS to make the backspace work, but now I just get funky control characters when I press backspace.

I'm sure I will have more questions when I start installing other packages (had to chroot to my LFS partition to get into firefox and log on here) but so far I'm happy and I have a three-day weekend ahead of me to tweak Arch within an inch of its life.

Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY

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Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Howdy, and some questions

Howdy,

I think there's some bug in the installer on the latest ISO, thus the problems (I wonder how that actually slipped through, it's quite a grave bug after all). sdX notation comes from the in-kernel move to a newer subsystem, called libata (common "architecture" for both IDE and SATA drives). You probably would be alright if you booted using kernel26-fallback.img and then ran "mkinitcpio -k 2.6.22 -g /boot/kernel26.img".

You can safely run your own kernel. That's the beauty of Arch - you can generally do whatever you want to do with it, you just get some nice additions like a package manager, package repositories and a nice community.

Are you referring to $PATH, which is set in /etc/profile and /etc/profile.d, or some other thing?

Never got any problems with a backspace in the console in Arch. Perhaps some $TERM issues.

Enjoy your stay in the Arch world.