Arch Linux

lang2

Member

Registered: 2006-02-10

Posts: 383

Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Hello all,

Recently (last 2, 3 month) I've been pondering about leaving Arch for something else. Swithching from Slackware to Arch two years ago, I had my happiest Linux experience with it. However, in the last while, I've discovered more than a dozen annoyance that made me more and more determint on this. I'm posting this as a) rant, b) possible last call for reason to revert my decision. So here it goes.

- Stability: Arch just hadn't been very stable for me. First I thought it was the fglrx driver. So I switched to the Open source version. Indeed it worked better but still not perfect.
- Media playback: "mplayer -xv" doesn't work and I couldn't find a solution. I know for sure that if I had an nVidia card this would work out of the box but......
- Audio in: I use skype to making calls. But my RealTek HD audio chip just couldn't get any recording working. I could hear my own voice through the microphone but skype doens't hear anything. I know it is problem my incompetence and there is a way to get it working. Believe I did try. The reason I switched away from Slack was because I wanted to stop installing everything from source: it is a waste of my time - this is similar.
- Customized kernel: the last Arch simply refuse to build a kernel from source code. I know there is the ABS way but I wanted to be able to compile any kernel I want, with any option I want, easily. I've tried Fedora 6, Fedora 8, Ubuntu 7.10, RHEL 4, they all worked without any effort, if any at all. I understand it is an gcc version issue. Does it mean nobody does kernel development with Arch???

Those are the main things I guess. You can easily say that I'm incompetent and should sharpen my skills a bit and I totally accept. In fact, The Arch community is so great and that's the reason I dare to post this. So any input is welcomed, be it criticise or help....... Let me have them.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,066

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

refuse to build a kernel from source code

That's intentional. Contrary to what "KISS" means, and other distros

The gcc 4.3 issue is separate, and gone with kernel 2.6.25

Last edited by brebs (2008-04-28 23:17:17)

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Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,167

Website

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Have you seen this: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ker … rom_Source

Very simple, works great. Just use kermel.org sources, makepkg, and install with pacman.

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peets

Member

From: Montreal

Registered: 2007-01-11

Posts: 936

Website

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

What distros are you currently looking at?

wuischke

Member

From: Suisse Romande

Registered: 2007-01-06

Posts: 630

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Mh...some of your issues seem not to be related to Arch, but to Linux in general. Do these things work for you with other distros?

lang2

Member

Registered: 2006-02-10

Posts: 383

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Mh...some of your issues seem not to be related to Arch, but to Linux in general. Do these things work for you with other distros?

Yes. Sadly this is true. Linux has gone a long way for hardware support but it still isn't quite there....... But not all of my issues are Linux issues. I probably will try Fedora and Ubuntu ( in that order ) to see how they handle things. Anyways, thanks for all the input.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,604

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

refuse to build a kernel from source code

That's intentional. Contrary to what "KISS" means, and other distros

In the interests of accuracy, I would like to point out that brebs is mistaken here, and that his mistake has been explained to him in another thread.

lang2

Member

Registered: 2006-02-10

Posts: 383

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

I suppose it would interesting for an Arch user if I report my current luck with the other distros. Well, the situation is: NO LUCK! With the two candidates above (Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 8.04), neither of them even install! Ubuntu boot into a screen with background and mouse pointer and crash with garbage on the screen. Fedora (Live CD) went further and did login into the default user, but would either crash during partioning or throw and python exception during installation. This is frustrating. Perhaps it is my hardware? Granted it is not exactly old (AMD 680G). But it is not new either. Fedora did install fine on an older PC (AMD 3000,  nforce2 + 6200). Ubuntu crashed trying to install on that PC. Is it just me? It must be because there are loads of happy Ubuntu users out there............. I don't know what to say. I suppose the good thing is that neither installer had a chance to mess with my PC so it is still work with the current setup but I've lost target going forward.

floke

Member

Registered: 2007-09-04

Posts: 266

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Both Mandriva and Pardus have excellent ootb hardware support - maybe worth giving them a shot? The only downside with Pardus is that a lot of the documentation is Turkish - but there's plenty of English language support. I really enjoyed the time I had with it.

11010010110

Member

Registered: 2008-01-14

Posts: 284

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Try Gentoo. Its like Arch but it can be quite stable if you install it a default stage 3 install without tweaking

I use Arch and Gentoo together on my boxes. They allways break (I use a lot of unstable / use flags / etc) but I just like to tinker with it

Many problems with Arch are fixed with pacman -Syu (updating buggy stuff)

neotuli

Lazy Developer

From: San Francisco, CA

Registered: 2004-07-06

Posts: 1,201

Website

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

I agree with you. I think you should read my thread on the same topic [1].

[1] http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=47847

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MONODA

Member

Registered: 2008-02-09

Posts: 256

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

i think you should try debian lenny (testing) or sidux (which is the installable version of Debian sid) both are great and rolling release. Try them out, you will be impressed with them.
PS. if you suggest to install debian, I suggest only installing the base system and then building up from there, like arch.

vennen

Member

From: Russian Federation

Registered: 2008-03-27

Posts: 72

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Funny, isnt it a will of human to make a choice?

If someone dont satisfied with Arch he would been able to use another distro or proprietary OSes

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

Hello all,

Recently (last 2, 3 month) I've been pondering about leaving Arch for something else. Swithching from Slackware to Arch two years ago, I had my happiest Linux experience with it. However, in the last while, I've discovered more than a dozen annoyance that made me more and more determint on this. I'm posting this as a) rant, b) possible last call for reason to revert my decision. So here it goes.

- Stability: Arch just hadn't been very stable for me. First I thought it was the fglrx driver. So I switched to the Open source version. Indeed it worked better but still not perfect.
- Media playback: "mplayer -xv" doesn't work and I couldn't find a solution. I know for sure that if I had an nVidia card this would work out of the box but......
- Audio in: I use skype to making calls. But my RealTek HD audio chip just couldn't get any recording working. I could hear my own voice through the microphone but skype doens't hear anything. I know it is problem my incompetence and there is a way to get it working. Believe I did try. The reason I switched away from Slack was because I wanted to stop installing everything from source: it is a waste of my time - this is similar.

Good to see you gave Arch a solid run

Bugs don't fix themselves. report bugs, co-operate with developers and they have a chance of being fixed. Imagine if you were the only person or one of a minority experiencing the bug... (and its not impossible)... it'd never be fixed.

Arch is somewhat unique in this aspect, as it is generally vanilla, bugs are often upstream issues that you'll find in other distros too. And because Arch is vanilla, you can report directly upstream with little trouble.

Cheers!

James

Last edited by iphitus (2008-05-12 09:22:50)

lhtown

Member

Registered: 2008-05-24

Posts: 6

Re: Before I say goodbye to Arch......

From your description, it sounds like the problems you are having with stability and installing other distros could be cause by your laptop overheating. Remember that installing a distro will cause a great deal of strain and overheat a system that is compromised.

Even if your fans are working, it is entirely possible that your heat sink could be clogged up with dirt. Where I live, a lot of computers require an annual cleaning. That is especially true for laptops that use desktop type components with multiple fans.