should i come back to arch ;)

nagoola · 2007-05-08 10:15:29

Hi,

I left arch about 1.5 or 2 years ago and chose Debian as my primary Distribution. There were two main reasons for it. First of all things sometimes went wrong when doing a system update - usually this happens when you really need your system. The other reason is that I need a working oracle installation - preferrably the express database as it is not that huge but i dont really care which one.
I have never stopped checking the forum and reading about arch as I do actually prefer its way of doing things and I especially loved the easy way of creating new packages.
Can anybody take my fear away and make me go back to arch? Did the situation with the updates improve? How do you go about it - I used to only upgrade my system every couple weeks when I knew I had some time in case things went wrong.
Anyway, has anybody managed to install oracle under arch? Just curious.
I'd love to come back by the way.

Nagoola

sH · 2007-05-08 11:06:09

My experience with arch in the past was : pacman -Syu -> kernel panic.

I was always intrigued to come back. Now there were two kernel updates and udev, and hwdetect updates. Everything went fine. It seems there are no problems anymore You should come back, it's a great distro.

Weeks · 2007-05-08 11:43:08

My IgnorePkg in pacman.conf includes "grub udev klib* freetype2 klib* kernel26 mkinitcpio mkinitrd". My updates proceed without problem. You may want to add some of the critical apps for your development there.

Whenever I'm not using my PC for my essays or whathaveyou I update the more sensitive apps.

patroclo7 · 2007-05-08 11:47:51

Arch is much more stable than two years ago. The gold rule to avoid problems after update is to read CAREFULLY the warnings in the output of pacman -Syu. This is necessary, since they include essential informations about operations generally needed by the evolution of the linux kernel more than of arch itself.

I am sorry to be fully ignorant about oracle.

deficite · 2007-05-08 12:25:48

Yes.

KerowynM · 2007-05-08 15:50:09

If you are using Debian now, I don't see any reason why you couldn't install Arch, get it how you like it, and just not pacman -Suy. You could likely go a year without updating and still be more current then Debian.

chaosgeisterchen · 2007-05-08 18:52:15

I've never had problems which were unsolvable for more than 5-10 hours with arch since I first installed it. So I would suggest that you go for it in general.

Concerning oracle I have to fold as well.

Last edited by chaosgeisterchen (2007-05-08 18:52:35)

mitsoko · 2007-05-08 19:09:45

i've been using arch for almost a year .. i think ... and i've never had an unbootable system following an upgrade ...
the main reason being, i keepan eye on the nes page, the warnings in the posinst scripts .. so if anything is seending me down the whole, i'm suffieciently prepared ... also, i'm prolly just lucky

so to sum up, yes, come back .. but if someting goes wrong don't blame me

pelle.k · 2007-05-08 20:30:12

I've learned to live with it. See, i'm not in this arch linux business for the rolling updates, but for the way it works. It's simplicity.
I would rather see a monolithic update happening every 3-6 months. I can fake that with not updating, but that makes my system go out of synch with the repositories. My solution to this "problem" is that i put kernel26, ndiswrapper and nvidia (kernel + modules i use) in IgnorePkg array in pacman.conf until i have the time to take a hit. This way i'm updated (or in synch with the repos if you will), but relatively sure nothing will happen. And, when i choose to update those 3 packages, i'll be relatively sure what to roll back to when i get stabbed in the back

ravster · 2007-05-08 20:53:45

As far as kernel upgrades go. I have a policy of having an up-to-date kernel on all three of the computers at home. All of these kernels are configured and compiled by myself. And I never do a kernel update without knowing that the custom kernel works (IgnorePkg = kernel26 glibc).
And I keep a small second Arch partition, just in case something does go wrong. I haven't had to use that as yet.

rayjgu3 · 2007-05-09 00:11:56

ravster wrote:

I keep a small second Arch partition, just in case something does go wrong. I haven't had to use that as yet.

this would be the option id go with
run the updates/upgrades on testing partition 1st if all works well then run it on user partition
if you really cant spare the drive space ask at your local independant pc store bout used drives ill bet you can get like somewhere between a 5-20 GB drive pretty cheap. for a test partition you could probably get away with 1-2 GB

i dont use oracle so no help to you there

ive been with arch i believe it says 2004 that i registered <over there by my name<
with not many issues the biggest stumbling block i recall (with exception of my introduction to arch) was my mp3 player (zen xtra by creative) getting udev to properly recognize it to work with gnomad2 & id hardly say that was a high priority problem

but this is my experience
the choice is yours
if you come back & absolutely need your stuff to run without issue then setup a testing platform to test before commiting to updates it can be a pain but youll be assuring yourself that you can upgrade with least amount of issue

mezoko · 2007-05-09 00:57:12

I came back, I had similar situations like yours about a year ago. I've been using arch for about the last 2 months now and I haven't seen and problems. (I was using gentoo before ... that does mean arch->gentoo(1yr)->arch)

Hope that helps

Excessive · 2007-05-09 03:42:18

Arch is definately the best Linux distro out there. I too, left Arch behind, but I have a feeling that I'll return in near future. Everything else has "something wrong", or "doesn't feel like home". If you return, I suppose the excellent Arch Linux community will welcome you again

STiAT · 2007-05-09 07:07:26

First of all, i've just once been in a unbootable system since i started using arch, and that was the "big" change from 0.7 to 0.8, where the harddisks changed from hda to sda.
I'm using arch since 2004.

I've once installed oracle on this machine without any problems or hassles except that the oracle startup scripts were in invalid (/etc/rc.d/init.d) pathes.

Actually, what helps a lot is the fallback kernel in arch ... if something with the kernel upgrade goes wrong you still can boot the fallback system.

Last edited by STiAT (2007-05-09 07:08:16)

nagoola · 2007-05-09 07:59:20

STiAT wrote:

I've once installed oracle on this machine without any problems or hassles except that the oracle startup scripts were in invalid (/etc/rc.d/init.d) pathes.

Do you remeber which version of oracle that was? I assume it ran fine after fixing the problem with the init scripts?
Anyway, thanks for all your replies!!

STiAT · 2007-05-09 10:19:47

I've used 10g on this system. It ran fine after fixing (better rewriting) the scripts, yes.

Lord_Bad · 2007-05-09 13:05:44

I had similar experience. I ran Arch for more than an year and then one day my system went completely dead after some filesystem corruption errors. I had a lot of work at the time so I decided to put Fedora, because it takes a lot less time to configure it. I ran Fedora for another year and now I decided to come back to arch and my impressions are very good, everything is much better than I remember it. Truly a great distribution with a great team around it. I'd also like to run Oracle 10g on arch. but as usual I'm short on time and will leave my attempts to achieve this goal for some moment in the future. Never-the-less it'd be great if someone with experience would compile a wiki page for Oracle under arch. I think that a lot of people would benefit from it.

rbrownclown · 2007-05-09 14:27:37

I've used Arch for a couple of months and had one kernel update that made my system unbootable. It was an easy fix, though. All I had to do was change around some things in menu.lst (Grub).

KerowynM · 2007-05-09 15:57:28

pelle.k wrote:

I would rather see a monolithic update happening every 3-6 months.

You can always set pacman to use [release] instead of [current], and then you stay in sync with the repo, and get a monolithic update every release cycle.

sweiss · 2007-05-09 18:28:50

As you can see, there are several ways to keep your Arch system stable:
1. Use [release] as your main repository - This is probably the safest.
2. Use [current] - Bleeding edge, but not too much. The risky updates are tested at the [testing] repository first.
3. Add the critical packages to your IgnorePkg setting in /etc/pacman.conf.

Personally I'm using [current] and I do not update that often. It works well for me.

sokuban · 2007-05-10 14:42:42

I always thought that the [release] repo wasn't made for actual use and that it doesn't even come with security updates.

So it can be worse than [current], or so I believe.

STiAT · 2007-05-10 14:48:49

If there was enough manpower to hold release up to date with security updates it might would be done.

Allthough, it's a rolling release system... that's what it's description. Current and extra shouldn't break that much without any notice on the news page or in the forums. It happens that something breaks without a warning or similar, but not very often (once since i have arch installed)

bones · 2007-05-10 20:58:54

In 3 years of use and doing an upgrade 2 or 3 times a week the only problem I'v had was a graphics driver problem, still usable but damn annoying. Took 2 days to fix. I have a knoppix cd for emergencies but it's never been used. Just keeping an eye on warnings and reading the news is all that's really required.

Echo · 2007-05-10 21:06:22

sokuban wrote:

I always thought that the [release] repo wasn't made for actual use and that it doesn't even come with security updates.
So it can be worse than [current], or so I believe.

Yeah, that was my impression too.

oli · 2007-05-11 18:03:48

Bouncing between distros destroys these distros in the end. And after a while you do know every distro, but you don't use them anymore. There are massive problems from time to time in FreeBSD, in Debian, Ubuntu etc. and of course in Arch. You have got a problem with Arch? Try to fix it and help other people with it - that's the way to go. Running away is just lame ...

Arch Linux

#1 2007-05-08 10:15:29

should i come back to arch ;)

#2 2007-05-08 11:06:09

Re: should i come back to arch ;)

#3 2007-05-08 11:43:08

Re: should i come back to arch ;)

#4 2007-05-08 11:47:51

Re: should i come back to arch ;)

#5 2007-05-08 12:25:48

Re: should i come back to arch ;)

#6 2007-05-08 15:50:09

Re: should i come back to arch ;)

#7 2007-05-08 18:52:15

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#8 2007-05-08 19:09:45

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#9 2007-05-08 20:30:12

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Re: should i come back to arch ;)

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