Arch Linux

The Orange Peanut

Member

Registered: 2008-01-06

Posts: 152

I'm going to install Arch this weekend but I have some questions

Currently I use Linux Mint on my primary PC, but I've installed Arch on my older PC at my parents house.  I like it a lot and I think I want a distro that is rolling release and also that I build myself (as opposed to installing all of the bloat on Mint).  However, I do have some questions; Linux is pretty new to me (been using it since about November) so I don't know exactly how everything works.

1)  How do I know what packages I have to have installed for building C/C++ programs?  I know in Ubuntu install gcc/g++ by itself doesn't get the job done, you need build-essential to get all of the libraries.  Also, what packages do I need for OpenGL and SDL?  I'm a CS major and I'm in an OpenGL class so I need to be able to compile OpenGL programs; SDL is for my own purposes, but I'd still like to have it.

2)  I use Amarok to transfer songs to my iPod.  Amarok 1.48 and libgpod 0.6.0 are in the repos and I know both of those are compatible with my 6th gen.  However, I do have a question about transferring album art.  On Mint, Amarok transfers the album art as I transfer the album, but someone told me that Amarok doesn't do that by default; there must have been a setting changed somewhere to do that.  I looked through Amarok's options and didn't see anything like that... anyone know if I can do that in Arch, and how?  There's no real information about Amarok in the wiki.

3)  I'm going to use Gnome environment but some KDE apps (like Amarok).  Will there be any problems with that that I should know about in advance?

I'll probably have some more questions once I actually install Arch, but that will do for now   Those are the important ones.

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: I'm going to install Arch this weekend but I have some questions

2) I would have thought Amarok would be the same for any distribution, apart from possibly the version (and arch being arch, the amarok in the repo is probably the most recent stable version). I'd check any documentation they have on their own website.

3) Nope. Just expect KDE apps to be a little slower, that's all (which is the same for any distro when running multiple libraries).

Last edited by dyscoria (2008-03-25 00:35:47)

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carlocci

Member

From: Padova - Italy

Registered: 2008-02-12

Posts: 368

Re: I'm going to install Arch this weekend but I have some questions

1) pacman -S base-devel

Kknd

Member

From: Brazil, Santa Catarina

Registered: 2007-08-15

Posts: 100

Website

Re: I'm going to install Arch this weekend but I have some questions

1) You know by seeing its dependencies on pacman or by the developer documentation. Unlike other distros, you don't need to install dev packages. Example: You have gcc and all the basic gnu tools installed, and you want to compile a program that is not in a arch linux package yet (if theres a package, you can build it using abs / makepkg and pacman will handle the dependencies) and requires, for example, a library called "xyz", you only need to download "xyz" from pacman, and all the dev stuff will come together (like header and etc).

I hope it helps.