Interested in Arch64

zebeste · 2009-02-02 17:41:19

Hello, I'm a relatively new linux user that has just given up on using fedora 10, and now I'm considering Arch64. I just spent three days trying to install the ATI proprietary driver on Fedora (unsuccessfully), and although it was difficult, it was an excellent learning experience and now I feel that I've become somewhat proficient with the command line and other utilities. However, not being able to use the ATI proprietary driver is a deal breaker for me, and because I can't seem to get it working on fedora 10 (by default it doesn't even generate an xorg.conf file! So I had to manually create one), I have to abandon fedora.

I personally would like to try freebsd because I used it a little 4 years ago, however, I know the driver won't work on it. I'm now considering Arch64, because features such as fast and simple appeal to me. I am aware that I have to install through the command line, which is fine for me. But I do have a few conditions that Arch64 needs to fill for me before installing:
1) I have to be able to dual boot it with my already installed Win XP x64. I have one program that I need that I cannot use on Linux (I actually hope to port it myself, but I don't expect that to happen for a while). Given that the default boot loader for Arch64 is grub, I see no problems arising
2) I have to be able to install the ATI proprietary driver. I have my reasons for this, and I can't be lenient and use the free versions.
3) I would like to be able to install KDE. I did not like Gnome on fedora 10, and the images and features of KDE 4.2 really appeal to me. I do not expect to much trouble doing this.

So, anything I should be aware of? Suggestions and comments are welcome. Thanks.

mrunion · 2009-02-02 18:29:06

I dual boot Windows on the desktop and laptop -- but only for the occasional game and BIOS upgrades. I don't have Windows 64, though. Anyway, both machines have Arch on them, and run them as the primary OS. The laptop is Arch32 and the desktop is Arch64. I only use nVidia video cards (personal preference), but none have problems dual booting, nor with KDE 4.2.

I hope that helps.

zebeste · 2009-02-02 19:10:13

It does, thanks. It confirms my assumptions of 1 and 3 that they should be doable. Now for the biggie: number 2. Any takers?

Also, I'm in a situation where I can't do network installs of any kind on my home computer due to dialup, are there any severe limitations that might arise from the fact that I have to download everything from another computer and either save them to a cd/dvd or flash drive to bring them home to my computer? I should think not but I always like to double check. Thanks.

Barrucadu · 2009-02-02 19:30:31

I use the proprietory ATI driver and it works fine, nor was it difficult to install.

Misfit138 · 2009-02-02 19:33:08

It's all in the excellent archwiki.
Also, try the Beginners' Guide.

zebeste · 2009-02-02 19:49:19

Thank you all. The wiki here is definately much more useful than the one for fedora.

Nepherte · 2009-02-02 19:59:19

I've read some "horror" stories about installing catalyst drivers and fedora, I don't think you will have a lot of troubles with catalyst on arch.

zebeste · 2009-02-02 20:20:12

I hope so. With fedora I actually got them installed, but when it got to the point where I restarted the computer all I would get was a blank screen. I assumed that maybe some of the default settings were the problem (my monitor won't run at low resolutions like 640x480), but I couldn't figure it out, and the hacks available were not appealing to me, so here I am. I just finished burning the iso to a dvd and will install Arch64 tonight. Just one last quick question, is KDE and GCC included in the ISO, or do I have to download them seperately? Thanks.

EDIT: I should ask, where can I find a list of the applications in the core repository?

Last edited by zebeste (2009-02-02 20:25:00)

Kilz · 2009-02-02 20:27:07

I installed about 2 week ago using the beginners guide, I did end up having to reinstall once because of confusion of when the ati driver should be installed. I ended up installing at 3.2 instead of 3.4 the second time to avoid conflicts.

Surgat_ · 2009-02-02 20:40:01

When you install Arch from any live media all you get is a base system from which you can install all the packages you need, but you have to download them :S. You will have no troubles on GCC as it is on the base-devel group and I think it's provided on the install media (not sure about this, you should check), but KDE is a very different thing.

If you can't download the packages as you install them you will have to download all of them and then install them on your PC. KDE has a lot of dependencies: you can check for example the kdelibs web page on ArchPackages:

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/kdelibs/

Instead of that I would recommend you to install Arch from the Chakra project [1]. It's quite new and they have only released one alpha cd, although you should get an Arch working system. Maybe you should wait for the next alpha release which will include KDE 4.2 (alpha 1 was released last december with KDE 4.1.3). Check that possibility if you can't download all the packages you need.

[1] http://chakra-project.org/

rsambuca · 2009-02-02 21:25:10

Personally I am not sure I would be using a rolling release distro (Arch or otherwise) if I didn't have internet access.

Ranguvar · 2009-02-02 21:47:46

On the FreeBSD ATI thing, you may be able to try it soon. xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd are both improving at record speed, and already beat fglrx for 2D on most cards (very new cards are not supported, some cards won't work with EXA rendering, etc). 3D is a whole 'nother story, but since AMD and Novell are actively supporting the open source driver development (docs, tools, etc.), I expect a near-fully working driver by about the end of this year. Open-source drivers should mean good suppot for both Linux and FreeBSD. Phoronix has up-to-date info.

May-C · 2009-02-02 22:33:08

I am using here arch64 with closed ati drivers and no problems here. If you want to use kde4 you should also consider the kdemod project. It has modular packages so you do not need to install programs you do not like...

http://chakra-project.org/

zebeste · 2009-02-03 18:12:17

Well, I got Arch installed last night without any problems, and I can dual boot it and windows via grub.

rsambuca wrote:

Personally I am not sure I would be using a rolling release distro (Arch or otherwise) if I didn't have internet access.

I just read the sticky that explains about the rolling updates. Is it still possible for me to download the updates from another computer onto some sort of media (DVD, flash drive, etc) and install them from that? Whether or not it would be an inconvenience for me doesn't matter to me, because I've been dealing with the inconvenience of dial up for the last several years, and I'm used to it, I just need to know if it is possible.

Ranguvar wrote:

On the FreeBSD ATI thing...

The problem is that the only reason I'm installing linux is because of the features the proprietary drivers offer in terms of supporting a SDK from AMD that I'm fairly positive the open source ones don't (but the only way to know for sure would be to directly contact ATI/AMD because I haven't been able to confirm or deny it by searching through google). I'll admit that I can do everything I want with Windows, but setting up the Microsoft Visual Express compiler the way I need to is more of a hassle than I want, especially considering that I don't like it in the first place. The reason Arch64 is really appealing to me right now over other linux distributions is that it allows me to essentially configure it exactly how I want without any bloat, and it appears like it should be able to do what I need.

Basically, as long as I know what I want to do is possible on Arch64, I probably won't give up on it.

Last edited by zebeste (2009-02-03 18:14:06)

Ranguvar · 2009-02-03 18:49:57

Here's the only info I can find on AMD-released stuff, I hope the first link is the SDK you want.
Though I do have no clue on whether it'll work with the OSS drivers - it should, or should soon, since AMD is backing the RadeonHD driver, but we'll see.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … ased&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … s_3d&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … rser&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … mper&num=1

Last edited by Ranguvar (2009-02-04 15:59:55)

zebeste · 2009-02-03 19:08:47

Yeah, stream is the sdk I was referring to. i actually downloaded it a while ago for fedora, but never got a chance to try it. Like you said, I also have no clue whether the open source drivers will work, because I haven't seen anything about it, so I just am going to assume they don't until I see otherwise (or if I actually try it myself).

In regards to my question about the rolling updates, I notice that on the mirrors there are two directories named "core" and "current", do one of these contain the up to date files? If so, which one, because they both look like they have the same contents at first glance, but I can't compare everything on the list to be sure? Finally, according to the wiki section on pacman, the first thing it does is apparently syncs the local machine with the online repositories, which to me implies that it downloads all the updated files. Is the correct? If so, I should be able to download them manually and copy them to where pacman needs them to be and then I can run the installation command, correct? Please let me know what I'm incorrect about here. Thanks.

SiC · 2009-02-03 19:10:50

You can install up to date versions of the software using a DVD or other media, once you are familiar with the way pacman works, you could do it manually easily enough, or setup a script to do it for you.

Question though, you state you are on dialup, which is fine, but do you have a metered or unmetered connection, i.e do you pay for the amount of time you spend online or is it a bundled cost? If the latter, then you could easily enough setup a cron job to update your pacman database (about 800k at worst) and then download the packages for updating whilst you are not using the computer, i.e. when at work or overnight. Granted it may not be ideal, but it would allow you to run an up to date system, and still minimise the time it impacts you. I have cron setup to check for, and download new packages hourly myself (although I am using a broadband connection), but cron is extremely flexible in this regard.

zebeste · 2009-02-03 19:16:10

I'm a college student and I live with my parents right now, and my dad requires the phone line for his business, so we pretty much just use the dialup for checking messages. Whenever I need anything larger than a couple of megabytes (our dialup speed is approx 2.5kbps during download ), which is fairly often, I just get it from the computer labs at school during my hours off between classes.

EDIT: And just to clarify, which directory would I get the updated files from?

Last edited by zebeste (2009-02-03 19:41:15)

SiC · 2009-02-03 20:21:37

To get the files, you would look at the appropriate path within your mirror list, which should be in something like /etc/pacman.d (can't check right now as using windows), and then you can navigate to that directory using your favourite ftp client. You can then download all the files in that repository location (downloading all of them is important, as you may require dependencies, and you will also need to grab the database files. This post I made in another thread will tell you how to update the database files, and you can copy all the individual packages into /var/cache/pacman/pkg and pacman will use the correct files when updating using pacman -Su (don't do pacman -Syu as it will attempt to update over the internet).

The thread I mentioned is here.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 19#p479319

zebeste · 2009-02-03 23:46:39

Thanks SiC, that looks fairly straight forward. Just one thing, is there some way to do a batch copy of the files from the command line? Typing cp for every one of those files is not something to look forward to.

EDIT: never mind, I finally found it on google.

Last edited by zebeste (2009-02-03 23:49:16)

Surgat_ · 2009-02-04 00:24:37

I don't think you need to download the whole repositories, mainly because [extra] must be a very, very large directory. Just go through the packages you need and their dependencies and download them. There will be a lot of them, but much less than the whole repo.

FYI I have just wc'ed the index.html from [extra] and it has 2070 lines, of which only three are not packages

zebeste · 2009-02-04 00:39:10

Yeah, according to filezilla the extras directory is >5GB in size, which is more than my 1GB usb drive can hold. However the core directory is fairly small so, I was able to download it. So for now I'll just patch the system, then tommorow I'll start looking at what specific extras I'll want and need.

SiC · 2009-02-04 15:30:37

My advice would be to keep the core repository up to date, this is the stuff you really need to worry about, kernel etc...

Then you can update extra as and when, the only thing you may need to check is whether or not you need to upgrade X11 components after a kernel upgrade.

zebeste · 2009-02-04 16:23:33

I seem to have hit some sort of problem. After a couple of hours of work, I fianlly managed to learn how to mount a cd, so I copied all of the core files to the /var/cache/pacman/pkg directory and I actually looked at the file names to be sure it worked, and it did. I then entered the following commands from the link SiC gave me, which I hope was what he was wanting me to do:

cd /var/lib/pacman/sync/core
rm -rf *
tar -zxf /path/to/core/db/file/core.db.tar.gz

Except on the third one which decompresses the package, I assumed that the path needed to be /var/cache/pacman/pkg/core.db.tar.gz because that is the only place where I know the pacakge to exist. I then ran the command pacman -Su, which I'm positive was the right one to use. I then got two lines of output. Unfortunately I can't remember off the top of my head what they were, but I *think* they are something along the lines of:
Starting full system upgrade...
local database is up to date
Again, I'm not sure if those are the right words, but the point is, the command completed in an instant, but I was kinda of expecting it to take a little longer for the packages to install. Also, reading through some documentation somewhere, I was under the impression that I should have recieved some sort of confirmation dialog, but I did't. And after I rebooted Arch, I noticed that the kernel version at the top of the screen did not match up with the current one in the core repository I downloaded.

I retried again, but before copying the core repository to /var/cache/pacman/pkg , I removed all the files in it, so I could be sure that I was getting only up to date packages, but when I ran pacman -Su, same results. No errors, no up to date kernel. So, I must have missed something somewhere, but I don't where. Any suggestions? Thanks

EDIT: Got the exact output of pacman -Su written above.

Last edited by zebeste (2009-02-04 19:27:23)

zebeste · 2009-02-04 19:38:13

Searching through the forums, I may have found the reason why. Apparently I don't have an up to date package list, so it thinks i am up to date (or something like that). I'm currently looking at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cus … repository as a solution, but I'm not sure if this would work. Any ideas?

EDIT: also, apparently the core..db.tar.gx file needs to be copied to /var/lib/pacman/ is this correct?

Last edited by zebeste (2009-02-04 19:42:00)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-02-02 17:41:19

Interested in Arch64

#2 2009-02-02 18:29:06

Re: Interested in Arch64

#3 2009-02-02 19:10:13

Re: Interested in Arch64

#4 2009-02-02 19:30:31

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#5 2009-02-02 19:33:08

Re: Interested in Arch64

#6 2009-02-02 19:49:19

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#7 2009-02-02 19:59:19

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#8 2009-02-02 20:20:12

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#9 2009-02-02 20:27:07

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#10 2009-02-02 20:40:01

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#25 2009-02-04 19:38:13

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