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#1 2007-06-26 23:24:04

Thrillhouse
Member
From: Arlington, VA, USA
Registered: 2007-05-29
Posts: 175

Arch Review

If anyone's interested, I wrote what I guess you would call a review of Arch on my blog.  I don't claim to be a Linux pro but a couple of people who have used Ubuntu had asked me to help them with an Arch install and so I decided to write it up into a full article.

The review certainly isn't all-encompassing, just my personal experience with the installation and every day usage up to this point.  I should mention that I really do like Arch a lot and am hoping to become more proficient with it the more I use it.

If you have any comments I'd really like to hear them: typos, things you like or don't like or if I got something completely wrong.  My goal was to assist the people who asked for help with the installation process so I didn't really go into detail about a lot of things.

Anyways, here's the link:
http://rohrbakn.blogspot.com/2007/06/ar … eview.html

It is a little long so you're not obligated to read the whole thing but I would like to hear your thoughts.  Thanks.


For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

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#2 2007-06-27 00:01:04

cry0x
Member
Registered: 2007-04-11
Posts: 91

Re: Arch Review

Your review is very detailed. Although I did notice one issue:

This third repository is the Arch User Repository (AUR) and it is maintained by what Arch calls "Trusted Users." With these three repositories, you would be hard-pressed to find a piece of software you need that could not be installed with pacman. To add the AUR as a repository, you must edit /etc/pacman.conf (AUR is not enabled by default).

By default, pacman cannot communicate with the AUR. Anyone can submit a package to the AUR. The repository that you are referring to is the Community repository. Community contains packages (many from the AUR) that were approved by Trusted Users and given the green light.


Who is this doin' this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin'?

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#3 2007-06-27 19:15:22

Thrillhouse
Member
From: Arlington, VA, USA
Registered: 2007-05-29
Posts: 175

Re: Arch Review

Thanks for reading and thanks for the correction.  The review should now reflect this update.

Anybody else have any comments?


For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

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#4 2007-06-27 20:56:20

Cerebral
Forum Fellow
From: Waterloo, ON, CA
Registered: 2005-04-08
Posts: 3,108
Website

Re: Arch Review

cry0x wrote:

By default, pacman cannot communicate with the AUR. Anyone can submit a package to the AUR. The repository that you are referring to is the Community repository. Community contains packages (many from the AUR) that were approved by Trusted Users and given the green light.

Actually to be TOTALLY accurate, Community is one part of the AUR.  The other part is Unsupported.  Pacman syncs from Community, regular users upload their pkgs to unsupported, and the term "AUR" is used to refer to both.

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#5 2007-06-28 08:43:25

klixon
Member
From: Nederland
Registered: 2007-01-17
Posts: 525

Re: Arch Review

There are two default pacman repositories: current and extras.

I think this should be "extra".
You're also missing out on the unstable and testing repository. Unstable is where I get my reiser4progs for example. Though it might not be sensible to recommend those to beginning archers wink

• Initially, the installer recognized my hard drive as hda (as most distributions did seeing as how it is an IDE drive). However, after installation and running a pacman -Syu, I rebooted to a terrible error about superblock not describing a correct ext2 filesystem. After much googling, I realized that the system upgrade had replaced my kernel with a new one that the new one recognized my hard drive as sda(it seems most of the newer releases of the major distributions are doing this now).The fix was fairly simple, I just had to change the entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst to compensate for this change.

This should be a non-issue when you use the newer install-media. Libata is the default on those...

This was done with the following command:

    route add default gw 192.168.0.1 dev eth0

I think your problem was that the default gateway in /etc/rc.conf was disabled, as in

# grep gateway /etc/rc.conf
gateway="default gw 192.168.0.1"
ROUTES=(!gateway) # Note the '!' in front of gateway. This disables the route

Also, you might want to tell the world a bit about "rolling release". You kinda touched the tip of the iceberg when you said you don't need to upgrade to the newest version every six months, but that doesn't really do justice to the fact that you usually have the latest stable developper-release some day after they're released by doing a simple pacman -Syu

Otherwise, great job! I like your writing style. Makes it an easy read smile And it covers a lot.


Stand back, intruder, or i'll blast you out of space! I am Klixon and I don't want any dealings with you human lifeforms. I'm a cyborg!

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