Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

cactus · 2005-12-02 22:06:04

Anyone used underground?

arooaroo · 2005-12-02 22:20:33

I use The Underground - but that's just for my daily commute.

groan...

cactus · 2005-12-02 22:22:29

I thought they called that "the tubes"..
oh wait. damn. off-topic.
ooops..

arooaroo · 2005-12-02 22:30:46

Tube - singular.

Official name: The London Underground.

Talking about the Underground: "Let's get the Underground." | "The Tube was packed"

Unlike every other country, it's never called the Metro.

Sorry for hijaking - back to Arch...

cactus · 2005-12-02 22:36:37

This thread has gone down the tubes...

judland · 2005-12-03 06:25:23

cactus wrote:

Anyone used underground?

Out of pure curiosity, I downloaded and installed UD on my test box just a couple hours ago to see what it was like.

If you want a simple way to install Arch with kernel 2.6.14, Udev, hwd, Xorg, and KDE 3.5 installed and configured all in one go... this might be for you.

After the install is complete, you reboot, you're welcomed with the Lilo boot loader, then whisked away to the KDM log-in manager with a root account. Log in and you get KDE 3.5 with (which looks like to me) all of the kde extra packages you'd typically download with pacman.

To forego pacman at the command line, you have Guzuta installed as well.

The only thing I don't like about UD so far is that I don't have virtual terminals that I can switch to. I've only been using Arch for a little while now, but I've come to really love the power I get from my command prompt. So, for me, I miss not having it now with UD. However, this was easily remedied by removing the "nodeadkeys" from xorg.conf.

I also noticed that KDE 3.5 seems a little bit slower on my PII 400Mhz box in comparison to Arch 0.71 install I just did a couple nights ago.

I did a bit of poking around and all of the standard Arch config files seem to be in place (rc.conf, pacman.conf, etc.).

Before giving up on Arch completely, Dusty, you may want to test-drive UD.

Gullible Jones · 2005-12-03 17:50:20

Wait a minute... Did you say "graphical login manager with a root acount"?

As in, it provides default configs for KDE as root?

ARRRGGGH! Why the bloody hell do distros keep doing this! :evil:

judland · 2005-12-03 18:09:45

I don't know and I don't much like the idea either. But, I'm just the messenger

As I've mentioned earlier, I've come to appreciate the advantage of manual configuration that Arch is built on. I just thought I'd put Underground Desktop out there for folks like Dusty to consider before moving off to Debian or RPM based distros.

UD ain't perfect, but at least it's still using the best solution available (which is Arch).

magnum_opus · 2005-12-03 18:53:29

judland wrote:

As for hwdetect... can one not just opt-out of having it installed /run on their system if they so wanted to?

Thats sort of the crux of the matter, for a long time arch has had, whether or not judd felt it, a very strong opt-in philosophy, and thats a strong apeal for people like me, and clearly some others.

codemac · 2005-12-03 19:40:17

In your rc.conf, put MOD_AUTOLOAD="no"

There. hwdetect turned off.

Snarkout · 2005-12-03 19:49:16

Just a quick and possibly stupid question:

How many people are having these types of problems when running current rather than testing? I'm having a hard time gauging whether the problems are Sid-like breakage, or genuine issues caused by changes to how things are done in current.

judland · 2005-12-03 20:11:05

I don't use "Testing" and I haven't had any problems.

Moo-Crumpus · 2005-12-03 21:04:09

I don't use testing, had a lot of problems on my pc, while none using the laptop.

Gullible Jones · 2005-12-03 23:01:42

I use Current, and I haven't had that many problems. There are some showstopping bugs with KDE though - see my thread on KDE's embedded multimedia support.

Dusty · 2005-12-04 07:14:26

Penguin wrote:

You'll be back, Dusty. They always come back :twisted:

This was short-lived...

Apparently everybody *else* finds ubuntu "just works". For me, no network. I gave up. Since I've got past the initrd and hardware detect crap in Arch, I'll stick around until the next Ubuntu release or something. I don't have time to fix things. Next time Arch fails me I'll be totally screwed I guess. 8)

I should buy me a mac.....

Dusty

cactus · 2005-12-04 08:34:02

Dusty wrote:

I should buy me a mac.....

yeah. then you and sarah can hold hands and dance off into the sunset.

clank · 2005-12-04 09:35:05

Cactus wrote:

yeah. then you and sarah can hold hands and dance off into the sunset.
Smile

That was the funniest mental image I had all day...

Picturing two people frollicing on a snow-covered beach into the sunset, each carrying a mac-mini. Then the view pans to the left to see their two, now useless, x86 machines floating out into the ocean on a small sheet of ice. As the view slowly fades out, a penguin springs out of the water, on to the ice sheet, and lays next to the pieces of hardware; almost as if it was trying to console them...

I'd go on, but I'm sure everyone else was thinking the same thing anyway.

pixel · 2005-12-04 11:54:21

Dusty: you should try Debian Testing (Etch).. it's definetly rock solid stable and "just works" plus it has the feel of Arch. *buntu is a piece of crap (I hate GUI's)

just my 2 cents

pikass · 2005-12-04 12:38:38

Then Debian is crap too. There a lot more guis available in etch....

baze · 2005-12-04 13:28:32

not if you don't want them...

LB06 · 2005-12-04 14:31:38

I have experienced exactly the same as you did (well I think). I too left Arch in search for an environment that was more stable (as in: fewer changes). Not that I wanted to run Debian Woody on my laptop or something, but I just wanted to be productive without really having to worry about the underlying technology. Even if that meant sacrificing performance or control to a certain extent.

So I considered buying an iBook, and I probably would have done it if I hadn't recently bought a Centrino laptop. Windows was also not an option, because I have to do a lot of work (part-time php/mysql coder and student) via SSH (putty sucks). Besides, I still do not like adware and virusses and I do want to be secure.

Slack and Debian was also not an option. Slack is very powerful, yet it involves as much work as let's say Gentoo. Debian Stable was tóó stable (don't want to run a production server on it) and Debian Testing didn't receive any security updates at that time. Debian Unstable would be like running Arch without the advantages of Arch.

So the only options that remained were Ubuntu and the like. And in my past experiences, they've proven to be very fragile (with Ubuntu being the most robust) and be less maintance friendly than Arch/Debian. But I had to do something, so I gave Ubuntu a swing again. Everything want fine, until I upgraded for 4.10 to 5.04. It's like upgrading Arch from 0.6 to 0.7. You'll have a lot of upgrade issues. But instead of being incremental, which is the case with Arch if you track current on a regular basis, you get ALL the changes at once. Of course some of them were taken care of during the upgrade, but some weren't. So I ended up doing just as much maintainance as I did with Arch.

Short version: First have a REALLY close look at the alternatives. While some shortcomings of a certain OS/distro may be valid, other distro's will be just as bad, or probably be worse than Arch, but just in some other way than you expected.

pikass · 2005-12-04 15:59:03

baze wrote:

not if you don't want them...

You dont't have to use them with Ubuntu neither, what is exactly my point. Blaming a Distro for optional guis is rubbish.

deficite · 2005-12-04 16:07:02

I went through the same thing as you when I tried out Ubuntu, Dusty. I thought it was great until I tried to actually do anything with it. I then realized how much I took pacman and Arch for granted so I went back.

Reading some of the things on flyspray have put me closer to distro hunting again though. I realize that people are doing this on their own time and all, but I still don't understand the "I don't care what you [the community] wants, it's not what I want so deal with it" type of attitude. If you design a system well enough you can get around petty disputes such as that. <sarcasm> Of course, not to criticise anybody or anything </sarcasm>

Snarkout · 2005-12-04 17:09:32

EDIT: warning - the following is long, probably boring, and probably too ranty.

IMO, linux has reached a really difficult point in many ways, at least as a desktop.

Debian: if you want to be current, you have to run Sid, which at this point is broken more often than it's not. This isn't a slam on Sid -- that's how it was *meant* to be. People (myself included) just got so used to running it as stable before the move from woody/sarge to sarge/etch that they forgot that it was *supposed* to be unstable. This is a problem for Sid as well as those polishers based on it. At this point, if you're running Sid, you either need to be really good at pinning, or just don't install/upgrade software for weeks at a time.

(K)Ubuntu: One of the polishers I was referencing in my previous paragraph. My experience with (k)ubuntu hasn't been that great -- yes, everything works OOTB for the most part. However, lots of their packages seems to be semi-broken (Mplayer barfed on DVDs in Hoary, and this was never addressed. Kaffeine crashes when you quit it, then takes up 100% cpu until you kill it from the cmd line - this issue was fixed in Hoary, but reappeared in Breezy. The Panel Clock is completely broken. Etc.). They have also made several choices to change the default behavior of apps, which personally I do not like. Their substitute for Kcontrol is unacceptable IMO, but even worse is the way they've mangled konqueror.

Then there's the 6 month release/freeze cycle. Apt-get dist-upgrading between releases simply doesn't work. I've done it 3 times on multiple computers, and there's always some bizarre breakage. Reinstalling my OS every 6 months to remain even semi-current is not my cup of tea. The fact that a lot of debian packages *won't* install on ubuntu, and that debian repos will break your system sometimes is also a big bummer. The packagename-ubuntu* (or however I should put that) naming system seems to really screw with some packages/repos. Suffice it to say that at least personally, I've tried very hard to love the distro, but in the end I just don't want to deal with it's bizarre and distro-specific quirks.

Fedora: Fedora has the same 6 month release cycle that's problematic for many, but Fedora at least very actively backports updates/upgrades to the previous release. Fedora, however, requires that you use 3rd party repos unless you aren't interested in a breadth of software. Generally, this means you can go the livna route, or the rpm-forge route. At least when I tried it, livna was kind of sparse package-wise, and rpm-forge means dealing with multiple different repos, which sometimes have different ideas of how things should be done. At-rpms ate my brain (and killed my box) on a few occasions, badly enough that I stopped using it altogether. If you use KDE, you also need to include kde-for-redhat in that mix unless you actually *like* how redhat is treating KDE by default. If you want to upgrade from version to version, download your isos, and start yumming because IME, it's basically impossible to do from the command line (IME).

Suse: Dunno - I installed 9.3 on my testing box, and installed over it less than an hour later. I don't like yast.

Mandrake - never used it.

Arch, Slack, Gentoo - Sorry if it's insulting to lump these all together, but that's more or less how I see it. Out of the 3, the only one I'm interested in is Arch -- the other two just take far too much time to get to where I want them, and honestly, I'm probably not patient enough to get either of them there. So Arch... It looks great from the outside. So far, the only thing I'm running into regularly is that pacman refuses to install an app if it is planning on installing the same file that another package has already installed (mplayer and kmplayer for instance) - my (probably completely wrong) solution for this is to rename the existing file filename.old and then proceed with installation. I have to admit, though, that all the recent talk of breakage, and of long-time users looking for other options has me a little leery. However, I really like AUR/ABS, and (so far) I really like pacman. I'm wondering how much actual fiddling is required to just keep a system up to date, and if it's at all worse than the ABI issues in Sid at this point.

Arch Linux

#26 2005-12-02 22:06:04

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#27 2005-12-02 22:20:33

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#28 2005-12-02 22:22:29

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#29 2005-12-02 22:30:46

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#30 2005-12-02 22:36:37

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#31 2005-12-03 06:25:23

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#32 2005-12-03 17:50:20

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#33 2005-12-03 18:09:45

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#34 2005-12-03 18:53:29

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#35 2005-12-03 19:40:17

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#36 2005-12-03 19:49:16

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#37 2005-12-03 20:11:05

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#38 2005-12-03 21:04:09

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#39 2005-12-03 23:01:42

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#40 2005-12-04 07:14:26

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#41 2005-12-04 08:34:02

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#42 2005-12-04 09:35:05

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#43 2005-12-04 11:54:21

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#44 2005-12-04 12:38:38

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#45 2005-12-04 13:28:32

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#46 2005-12-04 14:31:38

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#47 2005-12-04 15:59:03

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#48 2005-12-04 16:07:02

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

#49 2005-12-04 17:09:32

Re: Has the arch philosophy changed? No.

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