The Official Hello Everyone Thread

echo.unity · 2011-11-14 09:47:25

love arch

MickeyRat · 2011-11-15 12:28:48

Hello there,

I don't have arch installed but, I'm probably going to try it. This will probably be my longest post. A little history. I've been a computer professional for over 25 years. I cut my teeth programming Fortran on VMS and I still miss it. I know that's sacrilege to you old Unix guys. I also have programmed in C, Perl, a little in Pascal and even VMS assembler now and then. I've been a DBA for the last 15 years or so and I do use Linux at work.

My first experience installing Linux was around 2000 using a Mandrake distribution I picked up in a sale pile. It took hours to install. It's come a long way since then. What drove me away wasn't the setup though that was a challenge with the monitor timing lines etc. What drove me away was dependency hell and the lack of information about how to deal with it without installing a new version. Back then it seemed like it was still a system for experts and they were pretty snotty about it. I tried it again a few times over the years but, was always driven back for the same reason. I suspect Linux has benefited from a younger influence because it's clear some energy has been spent making it more user friendly and easier to setup and dependency hell has been dealt with. In 2008 I finally made the leap to Ubuntu. That was fine until they shoved Unity down my throat. I don't care for a tablet interface on a desktop. Right now, I'm running Mint and that's a lot better. I realize I could have installed and set up my own desktop and skipped Unity but, I'm not sure there's much point in using a bloated system like Ubuntu, if I'm going to to that.

Arch looks attractive for a number of reasons. I understand it's well documented. It's not bloated. I don't like having the interface change in ways I don't like. So, I like the fact that Arch isn't as married to the interface. The rolling upgrade is also intriguing. I'll be installing it the same way I installed Ubuntu at first. For that I pulled the laptop hard drive that had that awful Vista on it and installed to a USB hard drive. I still have that Vista drive collecting dust just in case. I bought another drive for the laptop and moved on to that later. I haven't read the docs yet but, hopefully I won't have to pull the hard drive this time. If I'm uncertain, I'll pull it.

When I ask questions and I'm sure I will, I don't mind being referred to manuals. However, before I ask I'll usually try to look at them first. So, I either didn't find what I was looking for or I didn't understand it. All I ask is that you tell me which manual and where to find it. I might also betray ignorance in areas that seem elementary to an old hand. Just try to educate me a bit. I'll catch on eventually.

I'm looking forward to giving this a try. Oh and that that last question on the registration page gave me a chuckle. You obviously don't consider Arch a system for the total novice.

clockworkrat · 2011-11-16 02:31:59

I forgot to add that to make up for my (probably) overwhelming inability to help anyone with any technical issues, I will do my bit by tidying up some of the wiki pages. You guys deal with the code and I'll deal with the grammar.

MickeyRat wrote:

I'm looking forward to giving this a try. Oh and that that last question on the registration page gave me a chuckle. You obviously don't consider Arch a system for the total novice.

It almost caught me out

karol · 2011-11-16 02:43:04

clockworkrat wrote:

MickeyRat wrote:
I'm looking forward to giving this a try. Oh and that that last question on the registration page gave me a chuckle. You obviously don't consider Arch a system for the total novice.
It almost caught me out

The real reason for introducing this CAPTCHA were spambots https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=104892
Arch is meant for competent Linux users so registration shouldn't be a problem for our target audience :-)

Last edited by karol (2011-11-16 02:44:12)

imawolfrawr · 2011-11-16 02:43:56

Ahoy!

Basic Ubuntu user here. I dabbled with linux back in middle school when I discovered Windows wasn't the only operating system available. At the time my computer knowledge wasn't too great and I had no idea what was going on. Fast forward about 8 years and I started using Ubuntu to ease my way back into the wonderful world of Linux. I never got too technical with it and kept switching between Windows (to play games since it's easier and not all games are supported by WINE) and Ubuntu. I've decided I want to use a more technical/hands on linux distro and found ARCH. I'm not quite a linux newbie but I'm close to being one, you won't have to worry about an onslaught of questions though, I like to try everything almost to point of getting angry since I can't figure it out before I ask questions.

Rawr!

sans · 2011-11-16 06:33:31

Hello World!

Your average distro-adventurer here -- first from Ubuntu to the pointless ones you try for a week then format over (OpenSUSE, Fedora...)

Then to the interesting (or at least different) ones: Puppy, Sabayon...

Now I've reached Arch and look forward to a steep learning curve, but from what I've seen so far the payoff will be more than worth the effort in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

I've looked forward to grasping the ins and outs of Arch for a long time, and now still someday Slackware and Gentoo, but all in its time...

Beyond experimenting with distro's I've been recently fascinated with the diverse realm of Window Managers and Desktop Environments. I don't understand those "tiling" DE's (GNUstep etc.) yet, but that'll the fun part; I've thus far mostly enjoyed XFCE, LXDE, Openbox, and have played around a bit with Enlightenment but haven't formed an opinion on it.

IMO Gnome3 is a mess and KDE is bloatware; and I'm glad to get away from GDM/KDM and hope to either make LightDM work in Arch or learn why SLIM is superior.

Let's see...in "real life" I'm a gay white male 30yr old cab driver in an upper midwest college town with a love of WWII history and classic Russian literature, and hope to someday visit Poland -- the land my blood came from.

Look forward to learning along with y'all.

shadowdancer · 2011-11-16 16:50:22

Hi,

Looks like I will need good amount of help with ArchLinux. Though I have spent some years in Linux, but this Arch is really special.

Astonishing design of Linux, in my opinion. Complete package as-is, no b*llsh*t

But still, some technical issue need attention and reading through Wiki paragraph.

It's a great distro, hope its greatness from the community also

FuzzyDoom · 2011-11-17 09:38:55

Hello all!

I've been using Linux (specifically Fedora 14 and Fedora 15) for the past year now. I decided I wanted a change from my starting grounds and Arch really interested me, so here I am! Got through the install just fine and now all I need to do is figure out this OSS installation (The OSS wiki says to edit rc.conf with some text, but it doesn't say where, and I'm wary of just dropping it anywhere in the file. Can someone tell me where to put it?) and I should be pretty much done with all my basic stuff. Glad to be here!

Edit: And Evolution doesn't want to receive my email from my hotmail. Hm.

Last edited by FuzzyDoom (2011-11-17 09:52:04)

ooOlaurieOoo · 2011-11-17 23:54:02

You know you're a geek when...you've got to join a forum for shop talk. Hello all!

My path to arch was an inevitable one. The amount of work to get a clean arch build with a beauty of a desktop = the amount of work to install a heavily loaded distro then de-install half the system.

My tinker toy is an old pc, amd athlon w/nvidia geforce, 2.5G ram (an upgrade) and 80G hd, half of which is for arch. I run debian on the other half.

I'm having a great time with arch. Seriously. This is great fun.

/dev/zero · 2011-11-18 00:00:48

ooOlaurieOoo wrote:

The amount of work to get a clean arch build with a beauty of a desktop = the amount of work to install a heavily loaded distro then de-install half the system.

Hahahaha! Love it. This is why I like minimalistic systems: not because my computers aren't powerful enough to handle more bloat, but because all that bloat gets in the way of having a nice clean system where you can do what you want, how you want.

Welcome to the forum :-)

20k · 2011-11-19 02:15:19

Hello all!

Moved from Ubuntu to Fedora to Arch. Arch is definitely giving me a run for my money.
But it is worth it. Most recently Arch taught me how a linux deals with wireless connections. Prior to Arch, on Ubuntu or Fedora, you would install
an RPM and things just worked. Thanks to Arch I now understand why!

Still tons of stuff to learn though.

ooOlaurieOoo · 2011-11-19 03:03:23

/dev/zero wrote:

ooOlaurieOoo wrote:
The amount of work to get a clean arch build with a beauty of a desktop = the amount of work to install a heavily loaded distro then de-install half the system.
Hahahaha! Love it. This is why I like minimalistic systems: not because my computers aren't powerful enough to handle more bloat, but because all that bloat gets in the way of having a nice clean system where you can do what you want, how you want.
Welcome to the forum :-)

Thanks for the welcome.

sapper · 2011-11-19 08:03:18

Ok, well I'm officially an Arch user now, though some might still dispute it. Many moons ago I tried to put Arch on my laptop and failed (wifi would not work - it'd start just fine but no matter what I did I could not get an IP address assigned from a router, and I tried several). After that I kind of gave up on Arch for a while and kept going with Ubuntu. Eventually I decided to give Arch another go after I heard of Archbang. My thought process was that if it included a GUI by default then maybe - just maybe - it would be better for my wifi card. Despite the complete lack of logic in that, it proved true. Archbang installed and I was up and running, complete with wifi. Totally unscientific, mind you, as there were at least 3 kernel upgrades in the interem and any one of them could be the reason for the cure. After installing Archbang I proceeded to customize it to my heart's content and now have what I consider to be a functional Arch laptop running XFCE. I almost feel like I did 10 years ago when I was running Slackware and FreeBSD on my home machines. In other words, I feel like I'm once again better than the average computer user

I hope to become a part of the Arch community here, though I must admit I'm antisocial at heart. The only reason I'm writing this now is because I've had too much to drink tonight. Pretty soon I'll be asking for advice on my frustrations with resuming from suspend in XFCE, but until then, glad to be a part of the Arch family!

skmarch · 2011-11-19 23:22:16

ooOlaurieOoo wrote:

The amount of work to get a clean arch build with a beauty of a desktop = the amount of work to install a heavily loaded distro then de-install half the system.

LOL. I would guess that it takes more work to remove bloat from bulky distros than a clean arch install. Sometimes you may not have even removed all bloat. I love Arch's approach. As a true geek, I hate to be told that I must use a device in a particular way or only use particular applications. It annoys me. Besides, why not just let me do my work the way I want to do it instead of assuming I am dumb? This is linux, not windows or MacOSX!

After moving to Arch, initially I was using it with Gnome3 (hated its bloat). I had not tried KDE in a long time. So tried it. It was worse than Gnome3. KDE is most linux bloat you can take. Then I peacefully did the following:

$sudo pacman -Rs gnome kde
$sudo pacman -S xfce4

I liked xfce better than gnome/kde. However, I had customized it so much that I was only using xfwm in xfce (I was not even using application menu!). I realized that I cannot use desktop environments anymore and perhaps should move to WMs and use applications I like with them. So I moved to openbox. I have been thinking about Archbang for a while now - it comes configured with openbox - but it also installs some more applications (which I may have to remove by sudo pacman -Rs). I don't like remove bloat. I would rather not install it. This is Arch! Not ubuntu!

I am also seeing a lot of Arch minimalists raving about awesome wm. I tried awesome wm between xfce and openbox. I did not like the experience (Kupfer was broken!!??). Perhaps I will give awesome another honest try.

Moral of this long story: Arch Linux users love minimalism. I realized that I am a true minimalist after moving to Arch. Then I continue moving further more in that direction. Its not that my computer is not powerful. I just don't like junk in my computing life. Its that simple!

V

Last edited by skmarch (2011-11-19 23:26:46)

Ranmaru · 2011-11-20 05:59:16

Hello!

I'm Alex (or Ranmaru around the internet) -- I was born in Germany but I am living in Japan.

I recently moved from Ubuntu to Arch because I wanted to have a little more control over my system and I love it. I'm still new to it so I can't get everything up and running as quickly as I'd like but I'm feeling that I make progress every day. Arch is definitely great when it comes to performance, never ever did a system run so smoothly on my notebook (which is a Macbook Pro ... I bought it a few years back because I wanted to give OS X a try; however, I was back with Linux after a few months because I just didn't like it).

I still have a lot to learn, but I'm eager to do it because Arch made messing with my system fun again.

Nice too meet you all ... or, as we'd say here in Japan, どうぞ宜しくお願いします！^_^

andesho91 · 2011-11-20 20:53:06

Hi

I'm Andes (or diesal3/andesho91 on the web), living in the UK ^^

I've flitted between Ubuntu, Fedora and couple of smaller distros like puppy, and porteus, and now I've settled with Arch, mainly because there is so much to fiddle about with and seems to hissy fit less when I break something. I've also noticed that it seems to perform better on battery life so I'll be sticking to it (except for my recent discovery that banshee seems to like pushing the processor into zombie state, which I will report sometime ><)

It's also nice that Google is on our side with Arch ^^

Nice to meet you all!!

decoherence · 2011-11-20 21:18:36

Hi! Long time Arch user from the Great White North. Just ditched Ubuntu off my last machine so not much reason to hang around those forums anymore...

I look forward to holding newbie's hands as I walk them through the most basic things! hahaha -- go read the wiki.

Love,
decoherence

cedricmc · 2011-11-21 00:39:10

Hi, there!

I am just moving to Arch Linux. I was born in Suse (I payed 7.300 ptas. by the time), but I have also lived in Red Hat (and Fedora) and, since 2006, in Ubuntu. I have been very happy there and I felt very comfortable. There there is a huge and awesome community with the great support from Canonical (even though I don't like all their decisions). Since a couple of years ago, I have been looking for new lands and Arch Linux has always been my dream. I like its easiness of use (like Ubuntu), its strong power (like Gentoo) but, overall, I like its simple complexity (like myself). In real-live, I do live in many places and many worlds, so I never had nor time nor will to move to the lands of Arch Linux. At the end, Canonical pushed me to it. In the last year, Ubuntu has taken a path that I dislike. I do really dislike Unity and some problems inherent to Ubuntu. So I have finally decided to move to Arch Linux. I installed/tested it on my laptop to get familiar and now I will do so on my desktop computer. I will have to confront a RAID5 installation trough a Cisco VPN connection (together with a windows installation for gaming purposes), so wish me luck.

Here I am, resolute to stay. I hope you will enjoy my company and learn many things from you.

Vitamina Cé!

PS: btw, I had some problems with video call on Empathy (specifically telepathy-gabble). Any help is welcomed.

Last edited by cedricmc (2011-11-21 00:42:12)

usagi · 2011-11-21 02:09:36

Hello everyone,

Just arrived from Ubuntu. Gotta say, after installing twice (used a 32-bit ISO for a 64-bit machine ) i'm in, and i've got everything set up. It was a bit of a curve, but experience with Arch in a VM really helped. Judging by the look of Cairo-dock and my copy of X-plane, i'm compositing AND accellerated, which is a good first day fo' me! So, Hi! Also, i'm in LOVE with the AUR. it's such a fantastic idea, and so much more organised that some of the other makepkg tools i've seen around.

Thanks again!
--Aaron

amandus · 2011-11-21 17:33:32

Hello I'm new with Arch but had many linuxdist over the year, I installed arch for the first time yesterday and I love it............

I have Gentoo under 5 years and Debian 2 years slackware 3 years and tested many many distributions.

Everything works in the Arch my bluetooth mouse and everything else, the documentations are exelent I think even better than Gentoo who not is up to date anymore.

My name is Bengt and I live in Sweden:)

MikeW · 2011-11-22 08:18:22

Its probably about time I said hello here. I'm also new to Arch and have tinkered with many distributions starting with Slackware back when windows 3.0 was all the rage. Nothing really stuck since windows was required for my job. That has changed since I now have a completely separate machine for work and arch has become my personal desktop OS.

I am learning a lot rather quickly, and must say that the biggest reason for that is the awesome wiki and arch community. I do a bit of development on windows for my job. Once I have everything working I may start on learning QT dev, that will require a bit of a leap from C# to C++ though. Before I get into QT I have been diving into bash scripting since its been useful in following how the init scripts and such work.

For a distribution that is fairly bleeding edge I've been quite impressed with how stable this system is. Keep up the great work!

I am also a Canadian left coaster, living on Vancouver Island.

MartyTM · 2011-11-22 16:58:38

I finally installed Arch this weekend and I was extremely surprised with how easy it was to install. Took me about an hour from start to finish the first time and I have a complete KDE desktop. It's so much snappier than Kubuntu and openSUSE, it's great!

Too bad my desktop has issues working with newer kernels so I have to run a long-term distro there.

Dbusterplus · 2011-11-22 18:00:08

Hello everyone, first-time Arch user here. Got my feet wet with ubuntu 10.04, and was strongly suggested to move (and learn Linux) using Arch. I'm running GNOME 3.2 environment and it's real functional, aside from my wireless which is why I've joined the forums, to help where I can and get help when I need it.

opasnost · 2011-11-22 18:50:03

Hello everyone. I have been using linux for about a year and a half now and just love the open source concept. Untill recently I've mainly stuck to ubuntu but decided to give arch a try mainly to test out the latest version of gnome 3. Then with a little more research discovered the rolling release system and the benifet of having the most up to date software available constantly which is really great to constantly try things out. To boot its stable too.

Anyways just wanted to say hi and look forward to much knowledge sharing in the future.

mjv196 · 2011-11-22 22:56:01

Hello everyone. Was finally able to move to Linux for most of my work. So now I'm triple booting my Macbook Pro with most space dedicated to Arch linux, small OS X partition in case I need to use InDesign for a client, and a Win7 partition for games.

Arch Linux

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