Is Arch good for me?

birinight · 2008-12-21 04:56:56

Hi there.

While I was loking for a distribution that better fit's my needs, I've depared myself with Arch promisses on the Arch way article, and I've tough this was exactly wath I needed.

I'm very far from being a Linux newbie, but I am of course an arch newbie since I'm still trying to decide if this is the destribuiton that I was looking for,

To give you the pictur I've started with Red Hat, went to Debian, OpenSuse, Gentoo, and finally I'm writing this from one of the 3 LFS systems I've built recentlly(2 LFS and 1 CLFS on a Intel64).

I'm writing this becouse I don't have anything better to do and it's about 4:36am on my country(Portugal), I'm not sleepy.

When I've depared myself with gentoo I tough that gentoo was the distribution that I needed, but soon realized that was not becouse gentoo get out of the standarts very often(like the init system).

While having an LFS system is very good, and I will allways have one for learning purposes, when it's down to functionality it can be an nigthmare becouse you have to figure out every problems and your distribution is unique on the world.

I'm pretty attached to my old Pentium 3 Toshiba Laptop, and while I have 2 recent laptops I still use very often my toshiba laptop.

So what do I want in a distribution:

*I want a destribution that can provide me binarys, but still let me easaly build the most critical applications.

*I want to be able to configure the system with my taste(my taste is usually the standarts). This means that when some binary is installed and configurated by the distribution, I don't wnat to find out my files and config files in places that I don't have a clue were.

*I have diferent gouls for diferent computers, but I want the same distribuiton on all of them, becouse I want to easaly configure all from ssh. My computers usually work together. For example my old pentium 3 LFS that has a light server was compiled with distcc in my Core2 duo 64bit.

*Finally. I want a good comunnity, and that I will evaluate with the answer to this post.

Considering this, the question is: Is Archlinux good for me?

Thank you all.

Super Jamie · 2008-12-21 05:07:43

Whilst I'm only new here, I'd say Arch is exactly what you're looking for.

It's got good binary repositories, with a powerful package manager, and a well-documented automated package build system.
You build a system from the ground-up, so you can have something as heavy or as light as you like.
And I've found the forums here to be very friendly and helpful.

Considering you can get an LFS and Gentoo build going, I'd say you certainly have the smarts for Arch. Have a read of the Beginner's Guide, and Install Documentation, and give it a go!

birinight · 2008-12-21 05:23:02

Thank you for your quick anwser. I'm making room right now for an Arch Partition.

kras1001 · 2008-12-21 05:58:23

Man after install try this:
Pacbuilder
http://code.google.com/p/pacbuilder/
more info
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=48957

AUR
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=17216
download PKGBUILD file
makepkg -s in same dir
pacman -U packge that you just create

simple and beautiful

weasel8 · 2008-12-21 07:20:01

birinight, it's better to just try the distro yourself and play around with it than make (yet another) "Is Arch for me?" thread.

zacs7 · 2008-12-21 08:38:33

birinight wrote:

*I want a destribution that can provide me binarys, but still let me easaly build the most critical applications.

I'm not sure there is any distro that makes it "hard" to build stuff from source, so that's kinda silly.

birinight wrote:

* I want to be able to configure the system with my taste(my taste is usually the standarts). This means that when some binary is installed and configurated by the distribution, I don't wnat to find out my files and config files in places that I don't have a clue were.

birinight wrote:

*I have diferent gouls for diferent computers, but I want the same distribuiton on all of them, becouse I want to easaly configure all from ssh. My computers usually work together. For example my old pentium 3 LFS that has a light server was compiled with distcc in my Core2 duo 64bit.

That's nice... the architecture that Arch is specifically built for is well defined. i686 and x86-64.

birinight wrote:

*Finally. I want a good comunnity, and that I will evaluate with the answer to this post.

And I want someone to do research for me, but that usually doesn't happen.

.:B:. · 2008-12-21 09:32:06

Arch has a package building system explicitly designed to make building new or customising existing packages very easy. The files needed for building official packages are maintained in ABS and you can sync locally on your system, having always the latest stuff. Unsupported packages are put in AUR and various frontends are available to handle that as well.

birinight wrote:

Finally. I want a good comunnity, and that I will evaluate with the answer to this post.

So... Let me get this straight. You want everyone to be friendly to you on this particular thread so you can pick this distro? That's not the way it goes usually. You want a distro, it's not that the distro wants you.

As for the community: it always depends on who you bump in to, but in general Arch has a very friendly community. Weasel8 is right though - the only thing you should do is decide for yourself by trying it out. Personally a community is not what makes me pick a distro; a good concept is, and Arch certainly has that.

windtalker · 2008-12-21 12:45:28

Personally a community is not what makes me pick a distro; a good concept is, and Arch certainly has that.

Amen.

Mr.Elendig · 2008-12-21 13:42:04

birinight wrote:

Hi there.
bhla bhla bhla....

birinight wrote:

*I want a destribution that can provide me binarys, but still let me easaly build the most critical applications.

[x]

birinight wrote:

*I want to be able to configure the system with my taste(my taste is usually the standarts). This means that when some binary is installed and configurated by the distribution, I don't wnat to find out my files and config files in places that I don't have a clue were.

[x] - Note: most of the time, atleast. If you ain't familiar with BSD style init, then you might have to scratch your head for 10 seconds.

birinight wrote:

*I have diferent gouls for diferent computers, but I want the same distribuiton on all of them, becouse I want to easaly configure all from ssh. My computers usually work together. For example my old pentium 3 LFS that has a light server was compiled with distcc in my Core2 duo 64bit.

[x] - Note: Arch is what you make it.

birinight wrote:

*Finally. I want a good comunnity, and that I will evaluate with the answer to this post.

[x] - Note: It's better to judge the community by the bbs, wiki and the irc channel, than just the bbs.

birinight wrote:

Considering this, the question is: Is Archlinux good for me?
Thank you all.

Looks like it to me

windtalker wrote:

Personally a community is not what makes me pick a distro; a good concept is, and Arch certainly has that.
Amen.

A destroyed community was one of the main reasons to why I left Mandrake back in the bad old days.

Last edited by Mr.Elendig (2008-12-21 13:48:29)

.:B:. · 2008-12-21 14:24:33

I'd say it's not the main reason . The IRC channel sometimes isn't the most inviting place if there's no mods around .

It all depends on how much support you need I'd say. If you can fix most stuff yourself it's not as critical. Of course it's still nice to have a place to chill, hang out, and 'be amongst peers'.

windtalker · 2008-12-21 15:13:07

A destroyed community was one of the main reasons to why I left Mandrake back in the bad old days.

I've done that also until I learned asking questions of the community wasn't the only place that had the answers I need at times.
The community doesn't necessarily make the distro, the devs and user/s do.

Note: Arch is what you make it

Agree 100% and goes for any distro one runs.
Don't let someone else pick a distro for you, pick the distro yourself and to hell with what anyone else thinks of the choice.

Of course it's still nice to have a place to chill, hang out, and 'be amongst peers'.

To true.
Along with hanging here I also hang at a forum attached to another distro I run as well as run an advanced site for that same distro.

bavardage · 2008-12-21 18:48:56

B wrote:

I'd say it's not the main reason . The IRC channel sometimes isn't the most inviting place if there's no mods around .
.

Pffft

The IRC channel is much more fun w/o the mods around

birinight · 2008-12-21 21:44:49

I knew this wasn't a good entry and that I was probably sound a little pretensious. I'm sorry for that. I didn't mean to. You guys don't have to prove anything, and especially to me. Any good distribution is good for their users when it acomplish their objectives.

What I've ment was. Is arch good for me, and not is arch good enough to me. I don't want to sound pretensions, but I felt that I have, so I'm sorry.

Of course the best way to find out is to try it for myself, what I am doing right now, but as I said in the my previous post I didn't had nothing better to do at 4:36 am, so I should probably get a life.

What I ment when I said that I wanted a distribution that easily let me build the most critical application, I've ment that I want to be able to build and still keep track of the dependencies the same way. Of course I'm not talking expecificly about building. I was talking about the package manager.

First Impressions:

I've made room for with a 10Gb partition on my old Pentium 3 laptop.
I confess I didn't read the manual. I just burn it up and started put the cd on the tray.

One of the first thing I've liked was the fact that I could edit the configuration files on the installation procedure. Also I liked the conviguration files to be centralized. It makes it simple.

After installing I didn't knew anything about archlinux except that I've eard that it had a good package manager called pacman, so I've called man packman to see how it worked.

It was not dificult to install xorg. As a matter of fact Arch Linux was the first distribution that put glx working almost automatically, in this very old laptop, with a ancient video card, that supports very little acceleration. That's a great start.

The fact that I only have to install what I need is also an advantage. Every package that packman installed I was familirezed with.

Xfce4 looks great from the start. Font config was obviously compiled with support for glitches.

Pacman is the fastest package manager I've ever tried, and even that it doesn't matter on my core2 duo it certainly matter on my old pentium3.

I didn't try the building system, and since the integration of the building system in to the package manager is the main purpose of this thread I will post more latter, but from what I've seen so far I guess it will not be a disappointment.

I'm not saying this to redeem myself, but it seems that Archlinux is exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you all for your strait answers

.:B:. · 2008-12-22 01:27:43

Birinight: no offense taken. I hope you enjoy it and welcome to the forums. With a package manager as awesome as pacman tracking dependencies is a piece of cake - but you'll find out soon enough when you start building your own packages I guess .

bavardage wrote:

B wrote:
I'd say it's not the main reason . The IRC channel sometimes isn't the most inviting place if there's no mods around .
.
Pffft
The IRC channel is much more fun w/o the mods around

Fun doesn't equal getting help. You must have misunderstood something .

mutlu_inek · 2008-12-22 15:15:44

Birinight, one of the greatest things of Arch is pacman/abs and their ease of creating own packages. If you install software on your own, take the time to learn how to write a PKGBUILD (it's really rather easy) with the appropriate dependencies and conflicts and build it with makepkg. This will create pacman packages which can be installed with pacman -U <pkgname>. Such packages can be updated, removed and throw warnings if you have conflicts, missing dependencies, etc. Following this will keep your system clean and you will _never_ have the need to reinstall Linux. Ever.

birinight · 2008-12-22 19:52:12

mutlu_inek wrote:

Birinight, one of the greatest things of Arch is pacman/abs and their ease of creating own packages. If you install software on your own, take the time to learn how to write a PKGBUILD (it's really rather easy) with the appropriate dependencies and conflicts and build it with makepkg. This will create pacman packages which can be installed with pacman -U <pkgname>. Such packages can be updated, removed and throw warnings if you have conflicts, missing dependencies, etc. Following this will keep your system clean and you will _never_ have the need to reinstall Linux. Ever.

Yes. I've tried that already. While building LFS systems I've often made bach scripts to compile the most time consuming and repetitive tasks. While bash scripts are great it has the disadvantage that if you really want to make a compiling bash script to share you have to write a lot, like error catching, etc. It can be a very repetitive task so I've only did bash script to major packages like Xorg proto that uses the exact same to compile each. Everything else, doing a script is actually more work than to compile manually, and since you probably won't share the script, it's rather pointless most of the times.

ABS and makepackage don't have those problems. It has error checking, and it perfectly integrates in to the pacman package manager. Also, knowing that you can share your PKGBUILD is actually a very good motivation to write one.

I must say guys, I'm very impressed with pacman, ABS and makepkg.

I already said this, but pacman is absolutely awesome. It takes the same time to install openoffice both on my Core2 Duo 2,66 with 4 Gigs of ram but with apt-get , and my 667 Mhz Pentium 3 Laptop. I'm talking about 2 computers that have normally a compile time ratio of 10:1. So I guess pacman is about 10 times faster than apt-get.

I'm dumping my Debian partition after Christmas for sure.

PS: I guess now the question is: Am I good enough for Arch.

Last edited by birinight (2008-12-22 20:13:21)

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-21 04:56:56

Is Arch good for me?

#2 2008-12-21 05:07:43

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#3 2008-12-21 05:23:02

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#4 2008-12-21 05:58:23

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#5 2008-12-21 07:20:01

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#6 2008-12-21 08:38:33

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#7 2008-12-21 09:32:06

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#8 2008-12-21 12:45:28

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#9 2008-12-21 13:42:04

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#10 2008-12-21 14:24:33

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#11 2008-12-21 15:13:07

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#12 2008-12-21 18:48:56

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#13 2008-12-21 21:44:49

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#14 2008-12-22 01:27:43

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#15 2008-12-22 15:15:44

Re: Is Arch good for me?

#16 2008-12-22 19:52:12

Re: Is Arch good for me?

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