Newbie install report and questions

renners1 · 2004-11-03 21:06:24

Hi,

I'm a Linux newbie and I'd just like to report my success with Arch 0.7 and ask a couple of questions....

A couple of months ago I decided I wanted to explore the capabilities of Linux, with a view to ditching a more well-known OS!

I installed several distros... all installed well, mostly automatically, with only a few problems. But, none of them worked exactly how I wanted, or I didn't know how to fix the few poblems I had.

I tried...

Suse 9.1 personal... very nice, in fact almost perfect but a bit slow and too "corperate".
Ubuntu... nice but boring
Lorma... Almost perfect but had strange font issues and a clean install used all my PC's free RAM, (512meg) making it slow. I didn't know enough at the time to investigate and fix the cause of this.
Peanut... wouldn't install. For some reason it couldn't see the hard drive (same one I'd used for all other distros!).
Yoper... very fast but buggy. Worst bug was internet connection died every 10 minutes. Reboot would get it back but then it would die again.

Then I came across Arch... seemed interesting because it was 686 optimised for the speed I want, and I could choose exactly what I install. Also, the manual building and configuring would help me learn more about Linux.

So, slightly warily, I embarked on the Arch install a couple of days ago...

I now have a great dual boot (using LILO), Arch, KDE, nvidia, multimedia setup that's working almost perfectly.
Yeah, I made some mistakes, had to do a bit of reading and googling, but I didn't have any show-stopping problems. The whole process was much easier than I expected, and I feel I must criticise the Arch docs for making it seem worse than it is!

Thank-you to the Arch team, this is a great distro!

The only things I have left to do are:

sort out a mouse error I'm getting in kde. The mouse works fine but I get the error in the config panel in kde (I want to speed it up a bit).

Tidy up the fonts. Some of the default fonts are awful, especially in Firefox. I see a lot of people seem to have problems with installing fonts so I'll leave this one until I've learn't more!

Backup.... now that I've got an almost perfect system I want to back it up so that I don't have to do the whole process again in case of a disaster! What's the best why to backup the whole Linux installation, please? I envisage backing up to CD-R or DVD-R (depending on size).

All in all.... I'm one happy Arch user. I've learnt so much more about Linux from Arch, I'm glad I took the plunge! That other OS will only get used for games for now on.

Cheers, Renners

Bzillins8906 · 2004-11-03 21:25:09

I have always used Acronis true image. It is a bootable cd and it supports writing to the DVD as you specified. It can also save the image over the network. Whatever you choose

phrakture · 2004-11-03 21:26:55

congrats man! I have to thank you for looking up the information yourself instead of posting questions in here like "I just did pacman -S xorg and X won't start - it says something about a config file, whats that?"...

As for your questions:
What is the text of the error from KDE? You should actually be able to speed up mouse movement directly in your xorg.conf file if that's more ideal for you (default is fine for me).

There is always a font issue. I don't know why. If you could, I'd like to go through this with you... check here (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XOr … figuration) for some crap I wrote up.... I have personally never had a problem with Firefox fonts - check to see if you had done

pacman -S ttf-ms-fonts

as this usually makes firefox alot prettier...
there are other replacements if you're not up for using fonts from MS...

About backing up - I would just copy your /etc and /home/$USER directory and maybe /var/lib/pacman/local to a CDR - this way you have all your configs... it probably wouldnt be worth it to backup all installed packages... just reinstall them (from the backed up local, or use that as a list of packages to install)

sarah31 · 2004-11-03 21:36:28

well as for backing up i wouldn't backup everything. just personal settings and certain config files. chooose whatever and back it up on a cdrw. i could see running into some issues if you did a full back-up and had to do some sort of restore. in the end what most people want to preserve is personal and system settings that are not default and those are easily backed up on a cdrw.

i3839 · 2004-11-03 21:51:31

Like Sarah said. I would make a tarball with only /home and /etc as backup. /home for your home dir, obviously, and /etc for the config files so that you can restore them easily. And other directories where you changed/added stuff manually (e.g. /usr/local).

renners1 · 2004-11-03 21:52:57

phrakture, I'm not near my Arch PC at moment so can't work on it, but as for the fonts, check out this screenie and look at the DearWandy webpage. You can see the smaller text is all wrong. I think the problem may be the font resolution is not matching my TFT res. I'll have a play with this tomorrow....

[URL=http://img71.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img71&image=snapshot17.jpg] snapshot17.th.jpg [/URL]

That's not due to jpg compression on this pic, that's really how they look!

Cheers, Renners

ScottTFrazer · 2004-11-03 22:08:03

Just the other night I ran a test on my home machine of tarring everything up, ftp-ing it off to another machine, then fdisking the drive into a different partition layout. Then I used the arch boot cd to ftp the tar file back and restored the system with no issues. Just remember to create the /proc dir manually :-)

I've played with Mondo Rescue http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/index.html but had issues with the restore, so I abandoned it.

For work I'm playing around with using subversion to backup my /etc and /home directories to a central location.

There's also a HOWTO I haven't had the chance to go through here:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Complet … ery-HOWTO/
[/url]

z4ziggy · 2004-11-03 22:32:14

regarding the fonts, u might wanna take a look at http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=866

also, if ttf-ms-fonts didnt help, maybe xfree86-freefonts-fonts will help (though according to pkg info its gimp fonts).

renners1 · 2004-11-04 16:07:49

looking much better with the m$ fonts, thanks.

xerxes2 · 2004-11-04 16:46:22

bitstream veras are also nice, here is mine /etc/fonts/local.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file to configure system font access -->
<fontconfig>
         <match target="font">
            <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
             <edit name="autohinting" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
         </match>
         <match target="pattern">
                 <edit name="dpi" mode="assign"><double>85</double></edit>
         </match>
         <!--  Dongs  -->
 
         <alias>
                 <family>serif</family>
                 <prefer>
                         <family>Bitstream Vera Serif</family>
                 </prefer>
         </alias>
         <alias>
                 <family>sans-serif</family>
                 <prefer>
                         <family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
                 </prefer>
         </alias>
         <alias>
                 <family>monospace</family>
                 <prefer>
                         <family>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</family>
                 </prefer>
         </alias>
          <match target="font">
                <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
                        <const>rgb</const>
                </edit>
        </match>

<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF</dir>
<dir>/home/xerxes2/.fonts/texcm-ttf</dir>
</fontconfig>

don't forget to change the dpi settings to yours
good luck

islamguide.com · 2007-03-24 15:51:18

Try using xorg.conf built in function to set ur dpi resolution.

Section "Device"
    Option   "DPI" "96 x 96"

For some weird reason, mine was 96x95 previously....
The above tweak fixed font problems. Now they look exactly like on windows. Glad i didn't have to fiddle with local.conf and stuff.. looks daunting.

To find out ur current settings,

xdpyinfo | grep -B1 dot

Last edited by islamguide.com (2007-03-24 15:53:51)

Arch Linux

#1 2004-11-03 21:06:24

Newbie install report and questions

#2 2004-11-03 21:25:09

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#3 2004-11-03 21:26:55

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#4 2004-11-03 21:36:28

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#5 2004-11-03 21:51:31

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#6 2004-11-03 21:52:57

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#7 2004-11-03 22:08:03

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#8 2004-11-03 22:32:14

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#9 2004-11-04 16:07:49

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#10 2004-11-04 16:46:22

Re: Newbie install report and questions

#11 2007-03-24 15:51:18

Re: Newbie install report and questions

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