First impressions

scorpyn · 2008-01-31 18:49:42

So...

I installed Arch64 on my computer a few days ago. It's not fully configured etc yet (due to lack of time), but these are my impressions so far :

* Installer seemed to work pretty flawlessly, and all of it made sense. It may not seem important, but considering some of the weird install related problems I've had with other distros such as ubuntu, gentoo and debian I think it's pretty good that I didn't encounter any issue at all during the installation process.

* After installing, I was left at a bash shell without links or lynx, and with the installation docs lacking info on pacman -S and pacman -Ss. It was getting late at the time, so I looked it up from another computer the next day, so for me it wasn't much of an issue. (Also, ssh worked, so I was able to ssh to my server and use links etc from there.)

* svorak was not available by default, making me feel a bit handicapped. Again, not much of an issue, but having it available from start would have made me feel less handicapped since I'm having some problems using my home keyboard with the qwerty layout.

* Installation of the nvidia drivers was pretty straightforward, but it seems to ignore the "sync to vblank" setting since glxgears is getting almost 18000 fps.

That's as far as I've gotten so far. I'm going to try to get sound working and then I'm planning to try to use the os for a bit to get to learn it a bit before reinstalling again with encrypted partitions.

Conclusion : Some minor issues, but so far it seems to be one of the better distros I've tried and I'll probably keep using it

Misfit138 · 2008-01-31 19:15:52

You may have had even fewer issues, if you had started here: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide

Welcome to Arch!

Last edited by Misfit138 (2008-01-31 19:16:22)

scorpyn · 2008-01-31 19:25:39

Thanks, but that's not much of a help when you don't have access to a web browser

Dheart · 2008-01-31 20:07:55

Use man pacman to get familiar with the package manager
Also I suggest you (after you configure pacman) to install links (faster than lynx (although I presume you have DE since you run glxgears (or was it under xterm?)
Anyway glad you like arch Wellcome... (and also by far Arch has the best community of all distros... considering I've been to Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Knoppix and I've also browsed a little the gentoo forums I think I have quite a few to compare from)

scorpyn · 2008-01-31 20:48:14

pacman seems to be a pretty good program actually, I like it a lot so far The only "problem" I've had with it so far was that I thought it didn't have a search function at first.

I tried to use man pacman, but it didn't work and after some investigation it turned out that I had entered sv_se.utf8 instead of sv_SE.UTF-8 as the locale, which (naturally) didn't work out properly (later I decided to change it to en_US.UTF-8, because for some reason I'm too used to english in the os to be comfortable with my native language.)

If lynx is noticeably slower on my machine, then it has to be rather crappy since my machine is using an intel Q6600 cpu. So I don't think it actually matters that much (I also have a 100/10 mbit connection, so it shouldn't take too long to load the sites either.)

I've installed x.org (and gnome) so I'm running glxgears under that. (I assume that DE = Desktop Environment? I'm getting a bit confused here, because afaik xterm isn't available unless you have X installed.)

(Btw, I noticed that I was unclear about what I meant about svorak. It was not included with the distribution at all, so I had to add it manually from http://aoeu.info)

Last edited by scorpyn (2008-01-31 20:52:01)

Dheart · 2008-01-31 21:19:17

You should suggest the devs to add it
Yes DE is Desktop Environment.
Have phun using arch And don's hesitate to ask

Frood · 2008-02-01 00:35:24

I also had the same problem with pacman in the beginning(about one month ago). I had no web browser on my system and of course i hadn't printed the beginners guide(or read it well enough it turned out ).

So I looked up the manual page for pacman and saw that -A for add would add a package to my system...

Fortunately Arch comes with an ssh-client installed so I could log in on a remote computer and use links to find out that install == syncronize.

Perhaps either the man-page or pacman -h could say something about typical usage at the top?

ProzacR · 2008-02-01 16:07:19

Moving links to base would be good idea.

Misfit138 · 2008-02-01 16:29:26

ProzacR wrote:

Moving links to base would be good idea.

I wholeheartedly agree. Where can we suggest this? Maybe I'll start another thread if no one else does.

Last edited by Misfit138 (2008-02-01 16:31:17)

scorpyn · 2008-02-01 18:50:43

I suppose the reason why svorak isn't in the distribution by default is because it's actually not standardized, so there are at least 2 variations of it (altough there is one that seems to be more common than the others). Anyway, I suppose it'd be better to add it to whatever package the rest of the keyboard layouts come with (and thereby adding it to pretty much all distributions at the same time). I mean it should be part of a package, shouldn't it?

links in base would be very nice, I agree

phrakture · 2008-02-01 18:52:50

Misfit138 wrote:

ProzacR wrote:
Moving links to base would be good idea.
I wholeheartedly agree. Where can we suggest this? Maybe I'll start another thread if no one else does.

Add an FR to the bug tracker? Everyone click the little "Vote" link too

Misfit138 · 2008-02-01 20:26:09

phrakture wrote:

Misfit138 wrote:
ProzacR wrote:
Moving links to base would be good idea.
I wholeheartedly agree. Where can we suggest this? Maybe I'll start another thread if no one else does.
Add an FR to the bug tracker? Everyone click the little "Vote" link too

Done! Thnx, phrak.

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9432

blackmariah · 2008-02-03 01:34:21

I just installed archlinux on 1/30. The lack of bloat is refreshing. I can see room for a little spit and polish on the installer, but overall, I like what I see to date.

So far the things I look for are there:
* Active user base
* Adherance to OSS principles
* Flexibility
* Useful documentation

I really like the fact that there isn't a focus on the GUI for the distro. It's there if you want it, but this distro doesn't seem to be running the "Windows Replacement" race. I enjoy that. I can see the need for a push in the Gnu/Linux community for a true desktop OS, but don't enjoy the trolls and troglodytes that that movement brings with it.

Over all utilitarian, accessible, and good ol' OS fun.

synthead · 2008-02-03 01:44:51

Glad you're enjoying Arch I love this distro, it has taught me so much about Linux and my computer. I appreciate my system a whole lot more with it. My favorite part about Arch is that it's pretty technical, but only in the linuxy/unixy areas. So you don't really need to learn a whole lot other than the package manager to understand this distro as a distro, the rest is just learning about plain ol Linux.

HyperBaton · 2008-02-03 17:20:20

pacman seems to be a pretty good program actually, I like it a lot so far smile The only "problem" I've had with it so far was that I thought it didn't have a search function at first.

Install "yaourt", extremely useful pacman front-end.

scorpyn · 2008-02-09 21:53:26

HyperBaton wrote:

pacman seems to be a pretty good program actually, I like it a lot so far smile The only "problem" I've had with it so far was that I thought it didn't have a search function at first.
Install "yaourt", extremely useful pacman front-end.

Yes, it seems good... but I don't understand why someone made a new package for that instead of adding the new stuff to pacman instead...

fwojciec · 2008-02-09 21:59:31

scorpyn wrote:

HyperBaton wrote:
pacman seems to be a pretty good program actually, I like it a lot so far smile The only "problem" I've had with it so far was that I thought it didn't have a search function at first.
Install "yaourt", extremely useful pacman front-end.
Yes, it seems good... but I don't understand why someone made a new package for that instead of adding the new stuff to pacman instead...

Not everybody needs the functionality, not everybody wants it, some people might prefer it implemented in a different way... The way it's done right now is the most flexible solution -- plus, if you started adding to pacman all the possible things that could be added to it, it would soon cease to be minimalistic, lightweight and focused on what it should be focused on.

Last edited by fwojciec (2008-02-09 22:00:21)

scorpyn · 2008-02-10 15:18:39

fwojciec wrote:

scorpyn wrote:
HyperBaton wrote:
Install "yaourt", extremely useful pacman front-end.
Yes, it seems good... but I don't understand why someone made a new package for that instead of adding the new stuff to pacman instead...
Not everybody needs the functionality, not everybody wants it, some people might prefer it implemented in a different way... The way it's done right now is the most flexible solution -- plus, if you started adding to pacman all the possible things that could be added to it, it would soon cease to be minimalistic, lightweight and focused on what it should be focused on.

So... something like "it's not what the original developers wanted"?

Makes sense.

bgc1954 · 2008-02-10 15:44:17

Hi all.
To pacman or gui seems to be more of a personal thing to me. I've been a big fan of Debian for many years but now all three of my home computers are running Arch -- an old T21 IBM laptop, an AMD 32 bit machine and an AMD 64 bit machine. In Debian I always preferred apt-get over Synaptic so pacman is much more comfortable to me and I find there is a much simpler learning curve with pacman -- just try out yast, urpmi, yum, etc. And you are totally right, much less bloat in Arch. You only get what you want. Other distros spend so much time trying to please, they tend to add everything but the kitchen sink to try and satisfy everyone. Enjoy Arch, I sure have.

scorpyn · 2008-02-10 21:11:55

bgc1954 wrote:

...Enjoy Arch, I sure have.

Me too so far (Although arch didn't seem to enjoy my dvd burner, I got swamped with error logs... so it's probably broken)

I'm seriously considering to switch to arch on my server as well. I just need to figure out how good the via padlock support is first, because the cpu is kinda slow so if that part isn't working then I'll just have to switch back to gentoo (Also, I'm not sure if dm-crypt is using the padlock features or not... I'm sure it can be done with loop-aes, but arch doesn't support loop-aes out of the box so I'd have to do lots of manual tweaking for that to work properly.)

I have to do something about the server soon though, because the hdd where the os is installed is about to die according to smart

I tried using azureus, but it showed the same problems as I've seen in other distros : It simply didn't work. In the previous cases the cause was that the jre was too old, but I haven't bothered checking if this is the case with arch as well because I don't need azureus anyway (on the rare occasions that I need a torrent client I kinda prefer rtorrent anyway).

Arch Linux

#1 2008-01-31 18:49:42

First impressions

#2 2008-01-31 19:15:52

Re: First impressions

#3 2008-01-31 19:25:39

Re: First impressions

#4 2008-01-31 20:07:55

Re: First impressions

#5 2008-01-31 20:48:14

Re: First impressions

#6 2008-01-31 21:19:17

Re: First impressions

#7 2008-02-01 00:35:24

Re: First impressions

#8 2008-02-01 16:07:19

Re: First impressions

#9 2008-02-01 16:29:26

Re: First impressions

#10 2008-02-01 18:50:43

Re: First impressions

#11 2008-02-01 18:52:50

Re: First impressions

#12 2008-02-01 20:26:09

Re: First impressions

#13 2008-02-03 01:34:21

Re: First impressions

#14 2008-02-03 01:44:51

Re: First impressions

#15 2008-02-03 17:20:20

Re: First impressions

#16 2008-02-09 21:53:26

Re: First impressions

#17 2008-02-09 21:59:31

Re: First impressions

#18 2008-02-10 15:18:39

Re: First impressions

#19 2008-02-10 15:44:17

Re: First impressions

#20 2008-02-10 21:11:55

Re: First impressions

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