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Hey, all I'm new to the forums, very happy arch user. I can't remember how I found arch, it must've been fate. I did my share of distro hopping. Actually, I plunged into the deep end with my first Linux install by choosing to run Gentoo. To their credit I was able to get it installed by relying on their solid documentation, even though I was an absolute novice at the time. Still I had to leave Gentoo because on the whole I'm too impatient to compile every single program from source.
I then drifted to Mandrake for a short time, and then Fedora for a longer time. I became intimately familiar with dependency hell, and tracking down specific versions of libraries. I like using a few bleeding edge programs that are compiled out of CVS or SVN, and I found that it was a nightmare satisfying dependencies and dealing with package conflcts. I also ran Ubuntu for literally about 5 minutes. I won't get into why that lasted such a short time.
I was on irc the the other day in a dev channel for bmpx, attempting to get the newest version of bmpx to run (still am). One of the devs asked me if I was running FC4 (Fedora Core 4). My response:
Me: "I don't think I'd have a snowball's chance in hell of getting this working under FC."
Dev: "I'm running FC5."
I had to swallow my words. Here I am, a proud arch user with a seg faulting bmpx while the dev is running it on FC. Moral of the story: that guy must be a magician. That or FC is much more up to date now. Still, nothing could convince me to abandon pacman and go back to RPMs. Pacman is a Godsend. The whole ABS system is beautiful.
I just recently reinstalled a fresh version of arch after something of a hiatus. A while ago I borked my system (I had an ugly situation with my partition table, among other things) and I didn't get around to resurrecting my install for a while.
Now this was before Xorg7, and uDev, and ArchCK's move to initramfs. Obviously I was upgrading after those things were introduced. To further enrich this unhealthy mix, I have an ATI Radeon 9800, 2 ethernet cards (onboard), and 2 sound cards (PCI, and onboard). It might go without saying that I had a rocky install experience. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded. Then I came to the Arch site and read about all the changes. Even then it was a messy experience, what with uDev simultaneously loading modules and whatnot (turns out that this can be a problem on systems with multiple soundcards or NICs). Finally after a boatload of troubleshooting, and much reading of the Wiki and the forum, I got everything setup. Queue angelic choir: I even got 3d acceleration via fglrx to work thanks to Iphitus's drivers, and posts in the forum by Cerebral.
So I'm once again a happy arch user, but I'm glad it wasn't my first arch install. My first install was ultra smooth by comparison.
If you're still reading you're probably wondering if I'm going to make a point. Well since, I'm new to the forum I figured I'd give a little background for anyone interested, and a little hope to to anyone wrestling with their install.
Actually I do have a question which I alluded to in the subject of this post. I did an FTP install from a CD I downloaded several months ago.
The Grub installer gives this message:
"Arch Linux supports two /dev device systems, DevFS and uDev. You can select the one you want by modifying your bootloader's configuration."
Obviously now only uDev is supported so that message is outdated. Plus the auto-generated fstab and menu.lst use the DevFS device paths by default.
So my question is do the newer install CDs generate fstab and bootloader config files using the uDev naming scheme or do they still default to DevFS? I realize I was using an older CD, but it was confusing not knowing that DevFS had been completely abandoned.
Also there should be an initrd line added to the autogenerated bootloader config (can't remember if it's there or not).
Maybe these issues have already been addressed in newer install CDs. Hopefully they have for the sake of first-time installers.
Whew okay I'm done, thanks guys.
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Nice review, welcome to the forums.
May I ask what version of the arch installer do you have?
It seems you have 0.7 even though 0.7.1 fixes all those devfs,initrd issues.
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It seems you have 0.7 even though 0.7.1 fixes all those devfs,initrd issues.
Yea I think I do have the 0.7 CD. I just do FTP installs anyway so I didn't bother downloading a new CD. I was kinda guessing that the newer CD probably sorts out the uDev / DevFS issue but I wasn't sure. Nothing to worry about then!
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Remember the old devfs nomenclature if you use the archCD for rescue..
Justa reminder...
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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