A newbie's perspective

nagash · 2010-05-21 03:23:49

Hey guys, I've just finished setting up my laptop with Arch. A week ago or so my Macbook Pro died, and I couldn't justify the hardware cost of another one, so I just got myself a PC laptop and installed Arch because I need a decent development environment (web development).

Having come from Gentoo a few years ago before I got my MBP, I guess I was in a much better position then most newbie's to Arch (coming from Ubuntu or similar).

Anyways, the first thing that struck me was that you can't get very far without touching AUR, which is fine, but I find the documentation kind of lacking in that department. Well, it's not even the documentation, I just find the AUR website doesn't point you in the right direction.

It isn't clear on the AUR website which file you have to download in order to build a package. I now know it's the Tarball, but that wasn't clear to me given that all the AUR docs seem to talk about PKGBUILD files.

Maybe I'm just blind/stupid, but that's the experience I had. I actually had no clue how to use AUR until I found the Yaourt page on the Wiki (I mean building the Yaourt package, not using Yaourt to access AUR packages).

In any case, I'm now up and running with Gnome/Compiz/Mintmenu and have managed to install most of the apps I need.

PS. Full screen flash video sucks in Linux

Inxsible · 2010-05-21 03:33:33

you can use the PKGBUILD to build and install the package as well. But for that you would need to have the development tools installed.
in the same directory as the PKGBUILD

makepkg -g

would verify the md5s

makepkg -s

would create the installation pkg.tar.gz
and finally

pacman -U <package-name>.pkg.tar.gz

would install the package

.:B:. · 2010-05-21 08:18:24

Feel free to improve the existing documentation (ie the wiki) if you feel it is lacking.

rransom · 2010-05-21 16:31:12

Inxsible wrote:

you can use the PKGBUILD to build and install the package as well. But for that you would need to have the development tools installed.

The PKGBUILD alone is often not sufficient. The AUR "Tarball" link leads to a tarball containing the PKGBUILD and all Arch-specific source files needed by the PKGBUILD; makepkg should still need to download most of the sources for the package. (If the AUR tarball *does* contain everything needed to build the package, complain to the maintainer -- the AUR guidelines forbid binaries.)

while · 2010-05-21 17:06:13

I'm new and coming from Gentoo as well but I didn't find the documentation lacking. I've built and installed packages from AUR successfully without any problem. I thought it was really smooth to be honest.

drcouzelis · 2010-05-21 18:15:35

I was going to go ahead and make the change to the wiki, but then I found the information about downloading the tarball was already there: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arc … uild_files

...even so, it's funny, last year when I started using Arch, I too remember being confused by which files to download from the AUR. I used to download the PKGBUILD file, try to build it, read the error messages, and then download the "Sources" files one at a time. Of course, I understand the AUR and the ABS much better now.

Anyway, if you can think of a way to make the AUR instructions more clear, then it would be great if you could add it to the wiki. On a similar but unrelated note, a while back I gave up trying to "fix" the wiki entry on the "ABS" and ended up just writing the "ABS_FAQ" instead.

tomk · 2010-05-21 18:48:37

In relation to this:

nagash wrote:

I just find the AUR website doesn't point you in the right direction.

The AUR home page links to AUR User Guidelines in the wiki, which redirects to the Arch User Repository page referenced by drcouzelis above.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-21 03:23:49

A newbie's perspective

#2 2010-05-21 03:33:33

Re: A newbie's perspective

#3 2010-05-21 08:18:24

Re: A newbie's perspective

#4 2010-05-21 16:31:12

Re: A newbie's perspective

#5 2010-05-21 17:06:13

Re: A newbie's perspective

#6 2010-05-21 18:15:35

Re: A newbie's perspective

#7 2010-05-21 18:48:37

Re: A newbie's perspective

Board footer