Arch Linux

SamuraiDan

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2005-09-26

Posts: 17

Comments from a new user

Hello all!
I switched to Arch about two weeks ago now and have got to say that I'm impressed!

The first thing that struck me was that the speed of both pacman and Arch in general was refreshingly good compared to others out there.

After a little more use it just seems that care really has been taken to make the whole thing solid right down to the smaller packages. This was really brought home as after about a week I decided to sync the whole system up from current to testing. To be fair I expected breakages and to be fixing things as have done similar on other distros with plenty of fun and games - but not Arch - only one package decided to go wrong. That package was imwheel, which in the scale of things, is not significant - well done guys!

The only thing I wanted back was gcc3.4 to compile things that don't like 4, which I copied from a backup of the system I made before the upgrade to run alongside 4. It is useful IMHO to have both at the moment and am wondering if it is worth making a separate gcc3.x package for those synced to testing?

One thing that has surprised me however is that there is no wiki page for pacman. Granted the man page is good, but there are a few tricks that I have found from the forums that I haven't seen officially documented or aren't clear in the man. One example is to explicitly grab a package from testing you use

pacman -S testing/[pkgname] 

and am sure there are many more. Is a wiki page for pacman on someones todo list or a current work in progress? If not, and, if there are of course no objections I may create one (or at least a stub) focusing on these aspects. Maybe people could suggest some 'tricks' they would like to see mentioned here?

All in all though got to say again I'm very excited by Arch, especially as it is comparatively young, and my thanks go out to those who have put in the effort to get it this way.

Dan

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"if i have a bag of rocks to carry as i go, i just want to hold my head up high
i don't care what i have to step over, i'm prepared to look you in the eye"

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Comments from a new user

Hmmm, I think a wiki page about pacman itself is overkill, but maybe little tricks would be cool.  For instance:
pacman -Ss does not search groups.  To search through package groups, you can do "pacman -Sg | grep <search term>"
i.e. there is a group of all the fortune-mod packages, but I couldn't recall the name.... pacman -Sg | grep fortune = "fortune-mods"
HOORAY!

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