Support in Arch

TemplarGR · 2010-01-01 08:39:42

Hello to all. I would like to share my thoughts on Arch linux community and the support it provides. I do not claim that what i will say is totally correct, but i would like to discuss my issues with you.

I am a professional programmer from Greece. Just completed my studies at my University. I have used pcs for almost 13 years, mostly windows but i have also used various linux distros since 2001. I am not an expert in Linux in any way, but i could say that i have an above average knowledge of Linux ecosystem. After some time with windows 7, i simply decided that i had no need for windows anymore. In the past, i was a hard core gamer and also i was helping people with windows pcs to solve problems, so i had a need for them, but not anymore, so i decided to use Linux exclusively.
I decided to use Kubuntu 9.10, and i really liked it. It worked out of the box for me. But i had some issues and i decided to look elsewhere. My main problems had to do with packages being too old for my taste, and slow speed for my gpu(ati 3870) using fglrx drivers, both in GUI responsiveness and in rendering videos. I decided i wanted a more bleeding edge distro, especially since i had heard good things about the open source drivers for ati.

I went to Fedora(once again), only to leave(for the 20th time) frustrated by its instability and lack of polish. I promised to myself never to touch this pile of garbage again.

I tried several other distros, including Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Sabayon, Gentoo, and none was what i wanted for various reasons. Then i installed Arch. It really was love at first sight. It ended my distrohopping for good. I am using it for a month now and i really would like to stay for a long time.

I even brought other people in Arch, by "advertising" its advantages and my wonderful experience with it.

But as is usually the case with love at first sight, when the novelty had faded and problems began to show up, i began considering switching again...

The one problem which troubles me, is the lack of serious support in case of hardware trouble. In my case, my old dvd burner died, and my girlfriend bought me a brand new one for present. But when i needed to use it, i encountered problems. At first i thought it was a permissions issue, and indeed it was, although i was in optical group. I created a burning group, setup my k3b for it, and it began burning dvds... But at an average 0,50x speed... I googled for hours, i searched the forums here, tried the arch wiki, i asked in irc, i tried various things, destroyed many disks, but still no solution. I posted here in the forums, and no one even tried to help me. Then i stumbled in a forum post for ubuntu, and someone posted something about an incompatibility problem with recent kernels and my drive...

It was the second time i encountered a serious hardware issue and had not found a solution here. The first was about my rt61 card, although i admit not posting in the forum for help for it. When i found a workaround, i posted it for anyone using the same hardware.

I am not a selfish person. I understand very well that arch is a community effort, and all must share in order for it to grow. I am willing to provide help to others, and indeed i would be glad if i could provide more for Arch in the future, because in order to receive help you have to provide it too. But i am wondering, what incentive do i have after badly needing some help and being ignored?

People on #archlinux cared more about discussing BS staff like windows sux, than helping a person in trouble. In the forum, none even tried to tell me"hey do that and print the output",or "it could be this X issue". In the wiki, i didn't find anything about k3b, setting up dvd drives etc... All info provided was about automated configurations. it seems to me that for Arch wiki at least, if your hardware is properly setup automagically, then good, elsewere you are screwed.

Now what i want to happen, is to discuss what measures we could use to make Arch support better. I am willing to help if someone guides me on what needs to be done. Please don't tell me that support is sufficient, because that is not the case. Heck, even the beginners installation guide i used was outdated.

What i would really like to see, and at the moment i am not able to help it, is a tutorial on linux kernel configuration in the Arch wiki. I really needed documentation to check my hardware configuration for errors, and although i googled, i couldn't find anything helpful(or recent). If someone else knows about something like that i missed, i would like to know about it. I am talking about various commands and their parameters, in order to check and configure hardware. If i knew more about that, i would write something myself, but for the time being, i am only starting to getting to know about these things.

Another thing i would love to see, is some form of interactive compatibility list. I mean, a kind of software distributed with Arch, that checks the hardware on a given system, and can send a report to Arch servers. A user could then provide feedback about his current state of hardware support, and could see what others report for the same hardware. I don't know if a tool like this exist for Arch. Please enlighten me on this. In any case, it wouldn't be too difficult to create, and would be extremely useful and saving much time and headaches for many people.

That is what i wanted to say for now. I would like to know your thoughts about it. And HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Last edited by TemplarGR (2010-01-01 08:43:28)

Gen2ly · 2010-01-01 09:50:16

Welcome and congratulations.

From the posts I've read of yours, I would recommend being humble. People help here on their free time and like running Linux because it is fun... we all run into problems that have us paused of clarity at times. The people here are very knowledgeable but like in all things in life 'explore experts carefully' (as they say).

Please use references when stating things like 'BG is outdated' Sounds trollish. No details. This cannot provide any useful content to the forum users about what currently your problem(s) are with the documentation, nor a relevant way to fix it.

I can give a couple tips about posting useful help:

When you run into a problem, go ahead and post immediately (or before getting in too deep). This is especially important to new or semi-new Linux users. This does well in the case that ideas don't get lodged and time must be taken to chisel them out. You may get posts at times (hey, we're all human) that such a subject has already been covered here but you get your foot in the door and people seldom remember it.

Don't provide too many details and don't say things like 'this probably has to do with...'. A lot of time I've learned it doesn't and providing too many details makes us write longer posts . For your K3B example, just putting your model and doesn't write would probably have gotten a good start.

At the end, leave it open. This iterates back to the 'this might have to do with' pose before. 'When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.'

Another thing i would love to see, is some form of interactive compatibility list.

Probably not gonna happen. This is tough to do because hardware compatibility gets developed rather fast in Linux. I've seen pages created in the Gentoo Wiki that did this and became quickly outdated. What some users like to do is post their install experience for their model in the wiki. Doing this you might greatly get the relief from another user who has stumbled upon.

Here's a link to a post I wrote recently to get help in the forum, that may be able of help to you with reference.

Last edited by Gen2ly (2010-01-01 09:51:56)

tomk · 2010-01-01 09:54:25

OK - I'm going to summarise your post, so please correct me if I'm wrong,

First point: you didn't get help on two issues, so you don't feel motivated to help others.
Well, these things happen. Nobody is obliged to help you, and you are not obliged to help anyone else. I understand your issues were important to you, but that doesn't necessarily make them important or even interesting for anyone else.

Second point: you want a kernel configuration tutorial in the Arch wiki, but you are only learning how to do it yourself.
IME a wiki page only gets going if someone actually starts it. I have seen various similar requests posted here over the years, but the ones that get the best response are the ones that say "I've started a new wiki page about <some_vital_issue>." Another thing is that there is nothing Arch-specific about kernel configuration, so it's possible that other users have not felt it appropriate to include that kind of detail in the Arch wiki.

Third point: you want a utility that generates reports about hardware and sends them to some central database for the benefit of other users.
I may be stating the obvious here, but you are a programmer. Can you not write this tool yourself?

bangkok_manouel · 2010-01-01 10:18:18

[OT]

Gen2ly wrote:

[---snip---]

Thanks for my new sig. Love it :-P

[/OT]

TemplarGR · 2010-01-01 12:10:32

tomk wrote:

OK - I'm going to summarise your post, so please correct me if I'm wrong,
First point: you didn't get help on two issues, so you don't feel motivated to help others.
Well, these things happen. Nobody is obliged to help you, and you are not obliged to help anyone else. I understand your issues were important to you, but that doesn't necessarily make them important or even interesting for anyone else.
Second point: you want a kernel configuration tutorial in the Arch wiki, but you are only learning how to do it yourself.
IME a wiki page only gets going if someone actually starts it. I have seen various similar requests posted here over the years, but the ones that get the best response are the ones that say "I've started a new wiki page about <some_vital_issue>." Another thing is that there is nothing Arch-specific about kernel configuration, so it's possible that other users have not felt it appropriate to include that kind of detail in the Arch wiki.
Third point: you want a utility that generates reports about hardware and sends them to some central database for the benefit of other users.
I may be stating the obvious here, but you are a programmer. Can you not write this tool yourself?

1) it is true that they were my problems and probably others do not care, but i believe that the whole point of using opensource is caring about other people's problems. Most opensource devs create software for other people to use. If everyone was interested only in his personal problems, then there would be no progress in GNU in general. I do not expect most users to be educated enough to help in such hardware problems, or to write software.

Now it is a personal issue of mine, and i do not expect anyone to understand, but since i am a "Computer pro", everyone and their dog in my personal life expect me to help them from laptops to mobile phones and cameras... People most of the time are so spoiled... Now, when i try to get some help and none helps me, this makes me lose faith in open source... Because if i wanted to help others without them helping me, i would stay in windows, which work out of the box, and i would get payed to help them. That's what i meant when i said that when none helps me, why would i help others?I lose any motive to do so, since in my perception, it is like helping spoiled people, who never care about anyone other than themselves, without any profit.

Since i installed Arch, i only asked help for once, just once. I never bugged anyone, i tried to not waste other people's time. I didn't want to ask anyone for help, because i respect other people's time. I know what if feels like to help others troubleshoot configurations. If i knew what to do about my dvd-rw problem, trust me, i would. This all is new to me. I know that after some time i will be able to solve such matters.

2) While it is true that kernel and hardware configuration isn't Arch-specific, having some kind of tutorial or documentation would certainly be helpful. Other stuff in the wiki aren't Arch-specific, but are included.

3) I could write the software, and in fact i thought about it, if i gain sufficient knowledge about the infastructure of Linux. Creating a GUI, translating it in various languages and creating a the underlying communication protocol wouldn't be hard.

@Gen2ly It is not my intention to be trollish. Maybe i am so tired spending so much time solving this problem that makes me seem that way. I wrote this post in order to discuss something i feel is lacking, and this is the documentation and support of Arch.

But i still believe that a tool for hardware compatibility check could be implemented. What i have in mind is this:

The tool checks the hardware and lists all known devices. It also acquires basic information about kernel version etc. A gui appears for the user and asks for feedback. If user is satisfied, he just sends the default report. If he has faced a problem, he selects the device and writes about the problem. In any case, a report is received by some server, and is added to a database.

Now the tool could also access this database, and display statistics about other peoples experiences with the same hardware. A user could even select a different kernel etc and see what problems he could expect if he was using that version of software.

I know it may seem farfetched, but it would really help troubleshooting and would make Arch more user-friendly. Anyway,that's just my idea.

loafer · 2010-01-01 12:23:00

TemplarGR wrote:

Now, when i try to get some help and none helps me, this makes me lose faith in open source... Because if i wanted to help others without them helping me, i would stay in windows, which work out of the box, and i would get payed to help them. That's what i meant when i said that when none helps me, why would i help others?I lose any motive to do so, since in my perception, it is like helping spoiled people, who never care about anyone other than themselves, without any profit.

This is somewhat of an overreaction, bearing in mind that the specific post your are referring to was made on New Years Eve and you are complaining about a lack of a reply early on New Years Day. Many people, in many parts of the world, would have been otherwise engaged! Lots of paid people are on holiday today...

Cdh · 2010-01-01 12:32:18

Maybe there is just noone who has a clue what is wrong with your DVD writer here.
You don't want posts like

Sorry, I can't help you to fix this problem

do you?

In the ubuntu forums there are definitely more people so your chance to find anyone who actually does know what the problem is, is much higher there.

tomk · 2010-01-01 12:55:22

Answers for your answers:
1. Are you seriously saying you're "losing faith in open source" because you didn't get help with one problem? If everyone thought like that, we'd have all given up years ago.
2. You didn't respond to my suggestion that you start this kernel config wiki page yourself.
3. that's the second time you've said it would be easy - so go do it!

TemplarGR · 2010-01-01 13:12:53

It is true that this is a holiday for a big part of the world. But not all countries follow the same calendar. And on top of that, since Arch is a community effort, and most are using it and developing it in their spare time, it makes more sense that on a holiday more people would be active. For example, i wouldn't try to solve it during working hours, obviously, but during holidays i have enough free time to engage such problems.

Anyway, don't get me wrong, my problem isn't just about not receiving replies here in the forums. My problem is that i needed help, i put more than enough of my free time into a problem, and i couldn't help it. I didn't have enough tools at my disposal. Not enough documentation, not enough expert advice. I believe that i am not the only one who has faced such a situation, and i believe a discussion should begin about what could we do in order to better equip arch users with info and tools for troubleshooting.

In the end, if there was some kind of documentation in order for me to test my drive for example, i would have figured it was an upstream problem earlier. I wouldn't lose so many hours of my time, and i wouldn't rant about it.

TemplarGR · 2010-01-01 13:24:47

tomk wrote:

Answers for your answers:
1. Are you seriously saying you're "losing faith in open source" because you didn't get help with one problem? If everyone thought like that, we'd have all given up years ago.
2. You didn't respond to my suggestion that you start this kernel config wiki page yourself.
3. that's the second time you've said it would be easy - so go do it!

1) I didn't say i lost my faith in opensource, only that this situation makes me begin losing it. For example, look at your answers here in this topic. You only care about proving me wrong, you fail to see the bigger picture. Even if i abandon Arch, this is not your loss by itself. But for every one like myself, there others more silent that will leave. And if the linux(and Arch) userbase shrank, i am curious to see if you would still be using it. Less devs, less testers, less contributions, less market share so less motive for closed source support etc...

Instead of trying to debate, try looking at what i have to say. I simply say that the arch documentation and tools, could use some improvement. If there was enough documentation, i wouldn't need to post in the forum anyway...

2) I am sorry, i just thought that it was obvious i cannot start a wiki page like that at the moment. you wouldn't want me post there irrelevant info would you?

3) Even if i do it, without official Arch support it will be useless. For such a project to work, it needs to be an official distribution tool.

tomk · 2010-01-01 13:24:57

TemplarGR wrote:

I didn't have enough tools at my disposal. Not enough documentation, not enough expert advice.

And in your opinion, whose responsibility is it to provide all this documentation and expert advice?

TemplarGR · 2010-01-01 13:30:37

tomk wrote:

TemplarGR wrote:
I didn't have enough tools at my disposal. Not enough documentation, not enough expert advice.
And in your opinion, whose responsibility is it to provide all this documentation and expert advice?

People who know about that stuff. For example Arch devs, TU, etc. I would certainly love contributing in my spare time, once i feel ready for it.

faelar · 2010-01-01 14:12:51

TemplarGR wrote:

tomk wrote:
TemplarGR wrote:
I didn't have enough tools at my disposal. Not enough documentation, not enough expert advice.
And in your opinion, whose responsibility is it to provide all this documentation and expert advice?
People who know about that stuff. For example Arch devs, TU, etc. I would certainly love contributing in my spare time, once i feel ready for it.

I think tomk is talking of those people who make hardware, sell it and provide only a ugly binary driver for Windows

You should understand that hardware related problems are complicated. If we talk about intel processor, don't you think there's many many MANY people with the same chipset ? So problem are solved quickly, documentation appears etc...
If you're the only one with that hardware, how am I suppose to know if it works or not ? You said yourself that the problem was upstream, maybe a kernel dev should have warned you, but how can you expect from arch devs to know about your hardware ? (Note : providing output should not have helped here I think).

About the Arch Wiki, you're free to add, change or correct information. If you hesitate, simply write "Note : This doesn't appear to work for me", at least others users like you are warned, and maybe someone with sufficient knowledge will correct it.

I understand your point, and I think I'm not the only one. We don't say there's no problem, that our wiki is perfect, or there's no need to improve support. We are just trying to explain to you that things can't simply change.

I also think your hardware database idea is a good one if you provide :
- An open system, don't keep gathered information in a dark corner of the web.
- Easy to use.
Don't bother with a GUI at first, I prefer CLI software, it's easier to report that your graphic card doesn't work Maybe a simple list of questions :
"Does your mouse works ? [Y/n]"
And if the answer is no, allow user to provide feedback. Also allow user to update informations with the same account, maybe the next release of Xorg will allow my keyboard to work ?

Last edited by faelar (2010-01-01 14:16:44)

Mr Green · 2010-01-01 14:47:14

Hardware issues are not an 'Arch' problem....

Arch does take more work to set up [but not a great deal] and thats its main selling point

'You make Arch what you want'

In return you get bleeding edge packages [6 months ahead of ubuntu], a great forum and wiki

MrG

beroal · 2010-01-01 15:20:01

TemplarGR wrote:

Now what i want to happen, is to discuss what measures we could use to make Arch support better. I am willing to help if someone guides me on what needs to be done. Please don't tell me that support is sufficient, because that is not the case.

I think support is sufficient for free support. If you want payed support, find the right person and pay s/he the right amount of money.

dyscoria · 2010-01-01 15:29:20

TemplarGR wrote:

tomk wrote:
Answers for your answers:
1. Are you seriously saying you're "losing faith in open source" because you didn't get help with one problem? If everyone thought like that, we'd have all given up years ago.
2. You didn't respond to my suggestion that you start this kernel config wiki page yourself.
3. that's the second time you've said it would be easy - so go do it!
1) I didn't say i lost my faith in opensource, only that this situation makes me begin losing it. For example, look at your answers here in this topic. You only care about proving me wrong, you fail to see the bigger picture. Even if i abandon Arch, this is not your loss by itself. But for every one like myself, there others more silent that will leave. And if the linux(and Arch) userbase shrank, i am curious to see if you would still be using it. Less devs, less testers, less contributions, less market share so less motive for closed source support etc...
Instead of trying to debate, try looking at what i have to say. I simply say that the arch documentation and tools, could use some improvement. If there was enough documentation, i wouldn't need to post in the forum anyway...
2) I am sorry, i just thought that it was obvious i cannot start a wiki page like that at the moment. you wouldn't want me post there irrelevant info would you?
3) Even if i do it, without official Arch support it will be useless. For such a project to work, it needs to be an official distribution tool.

1) Well yes people are trying to prove you wrong, but you are also trying to prove everyone else wrong. That's what happens in debates no? And so far there doesn't seem to be hordes of people jumping on your bandwagon.

And threats of Arch dying off aren't really gonna get you anywhere. The documentation, tools and support of any distribution anywhere can always do with improvement, and you've suggested a number of ways. And since it doesn't look like you are going to do 2) or 3) yourself, I guess you just have to wait until someone with both the knowledge and interest in such things to read through your rant, and agree with it, and also have the time to spare. Right, well let's wait and see who turns up then if you're lucky then there may be people in the community wanting to help you out in your goals. I'm warning you though, Arch is very much a do it yourself kind of distribution.

Last edited by dyscoria (2010-01-01 15:30:25)

Dusty · 2010-01-01 19:57:04

I agree with the OP. If you aren't able to fix a problem yourself (and, ideally, document it), and aren't able to get the help you need in the arch community wiki, forum, or mailing list, and are dissatisfied with the overall ArchLinux experience, you should probably be using a different distro or OS.

Those who are satisfied, on the other hand, aren't very useful to the community either; they never bother to improve it. It's the people who are "mostly," or "almost" satisfied that are most useful to improving the overall.

Remember, no matter how much you contribute to this community, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the sum of all that has been contributed by all others. If you flip this over, you can't really demand anything from the community either because you'll never be able to pay back the debt in comparison to everything you've already received from it.

Dusty

brain0 · 2010-01-01 23:52:04

TemplarGR wrote:

The one problem which troubles me, is the lack of serious support in case of hardware trouble. In my case, my old dvd burner died, and my girlfriend bought me a brand new one for present. But when i needed to use it, i encountered problems. At first i thought it was a permissions issue, and indeed it was, although i was in optical group. I created a burning group, setup my k3b for it, and it began burning dvds... But at an average 0,50x speed... I googled for hours, i searched the forums here, tried the arch wiki, i asked in irc, i tried various things, destroyed many disks, but still no solution. I posted here in the forums, and no one even tried to help me. Then i stumbled in a forum post for ubuntu, and someone posted something about an incompatibility problem with recent kernels and my drive...
It was the second time i encountered a serious hardware issue and had not found a solution here. The first was about my rt61 card, although i admit not posting in the forum for help for it. When i found a workaround, i posted it for anyone using the same hardware.

So, what you expect is that you post your problem here and someone else googles it for you, finds out what the problem is and then posts it here. You do realize that this is the kind of support people get paid for, right? If it is a rare problem and nobody happens to have researched the same or a similar issue before, there just will be no responses

Arch usually has the latest versions of packages, and as a result you can ask for support upstream, where people actually understand the problems.

drcouzelis · 2010-01-02 00:32:12

Without official Arch support it will be useless. For such a project to work, it needs to be an official distribution tool.

One of my favorite things about Arch is that it is so easy to create a piece of software and have it be "part of" the distribution by putting it in the AUR. I know the AUR isn't really part of the distribution, but holy moley a lot of people use it. I love reading in the forums about a new piece of software an Archer writes and puts in the AUR for others to try out. I plan on adding some packages to it soon, including software someone else wrote that isn't in there already and software that I am writing. (A video game, in case you were wondering)

I also really like the way there is so much communication between developers of Arch and users. Compared to the other distributions I've used, it feels a lot less like "them" and "us" to me.

Now what i want to happen, is to discuss what measures we could use to make Arch support better. I am willing to help if someone guides me on what needs to be done. Please don't tell me that support is sufficient, because that is not the case. Heck, even the beginners installation guide i used was outdated.

I find the Arch wiki and forum to be outstanding, especially compared to the distribution I was using previously. And if I can't find my answer through the Arch resources, I can usually find it on the (more outstading?) Ubuntu forums. They even had an "Arch Linux" forum on the Ubuntu forum, but they had to close it apparently because there were too many people. (too many people helping on a forum is what I like to call a happy problem)

Since the beginner's guide is a wiki, I hope you can find the time to update the out of date parts that you found! You could even just put "OUT OF DATE" or "DOES NOT WORK" next to that part. Thank you!

Allan · 2010-01-02 00:54:31

Normally I would do a tl:dr; on a post like this, but there were a few replies from people who usually have interesting opinions so I invested my time... it really was a waste.

If you want guaranteed support for your distro, pay for some enterprise distro as Arch is not for you. You will note that all of those have really old packages with most of the bugs ironed out, which is the opposite to Arch's goal. It is not anybodies job (including the unpaided devs/TUs) to support you in any way.

As others have pointed out, if you find any area that you see needing improved, then you are likely the most motivated person to fix it. If you are lucky, other people will join in and help you out. For the hardware support database, if it becomes popular, then if may even become official (just like the 64bit port did).

Gen2ly · 2010-01-02 02:26:27

Allan wrote:

Normally I would do a tl:dr; on a post like this..

Oh oh, reminds me of a brown forum adm post.

Allan wrote:

... but there were a few replies from people who usually have interesting opinions so I invested my time... it really was a waste.

Last edited by Gen2ly (2010-01-02 02:39:15)

beroal · 2010-01-02 10:20:11

drcouzelis wrote:

I find the Arch wiki and forum to be outstanding, especially compared to the distribution I was using previously. And if I can't find my answer through the Arch resources, I can usually find it on the (more outstading?) Ubuntu forums. They even had an "Arch Linux" forum on the Ubuntu forum, but they had to close it apparently because there were too many people.

brain0 wrote:

Arch usually has the latest versions of packages, and as a result you can ask for support upstream, where people actually understand the problems.

I acquire a bad habit to post every question on Arch Linux forums. Every package has an URL of maintainer's web-site so I can go there, but there are more general questions "about a camera", "about a printer", "about the kernel". Are there definite upstream web-sites, can we write the list of them to the wiki? (I've found in wiki only the tiny bit of text: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rep … or_Arch.3F)

ngoonee · 2010-01-02 10:44:39

beroal wrote:

drcouzelis wrote:
I find the Arch wiki and forum to be outstanding, especially compared to the distribution I was using previously. And if I can't find my answer through the Arch resources, I can usually find it on the (more outstading?) Ubuntu forums. They even had an "Arch Linux" forum on the Ubuntu forum, but they had to close it apparently because there were too many people.
brain0 wrote:
Arch usually has the latest versions of packages, and as a result you can ask for support upstream, where people actually understand the problems.
I acquire a bad habit to post every question on Arch Linux forums. Every package has an URL of maintainer's web-site so I can go there, but there are more general questions "about a camera", "about a printer", "about the kernel". Are there definite upstream web-sites, can we write the list of them to the wiki? (I've found in wiki only the tiny bit of text: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rep … or_Arch.3F)

Good luck bugging some random manufacturer about their product's Linux support. I believe 'upstream' here refers more to the group of people who actually wrote the software you're trying to use. k3b or the kernel crew (for driver support) here.

.:B:. · 2010-01-02 14:39:02

Dusty wrote:

Remember, no matter how much you contribute to this community, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the sum of all that has been contributed by all others. If you flip this over, you can't really demand anything from the community either because you'll never be able to pay back the debt in comparison to everything you've already received from it.
Dusty

I think Dusty hit the nail on the head here.

Few people here are in a position to be able to impose demands upon the community. That might be frustrating. Then again, that's why there's paid support. Noone here is 'entitled' to help, but some people sure feel like it. Such an attitude is a huge turnoff for people wanting to provide help - so it will only make one's 'situation' worse.

Don'f forget that Arch also, more than most other distro's, is a DIY project for the user. There is great emphasis on fixing things yourself, and frankly, with enough initiative, an excellent wiki at hand, some logical thinking and basic google skills you come a far way.

pixellany · 2010-01-03 13:25:00

I don't know if the OP is still with us, but I offer 3 observations:

1. From my experience over at LinuxQuestions, one good way to get ignored is to make excessively long posts.

2. You signed up at the Arch forum on Dec. 16---right in the middle of the final Christmas shopping rush. You might want to give it just a bit more time.

3. Support for Arch is among the best---for example, have you used the wiki?

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-01 08:39:42

Support in Arch

#2 2010-01-01 09:50:16

Re: Support in Arch

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#5 2010-01-01 12:10:32

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Re: Support in Arch

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Re: Support in Arch

#8 2010-01-01 12:55:22

Re: Support in Arch

#9 2010-01-01 13:12:53

Re: Support in Arch

#10 2010-01-01 13:24:47

Re: Support in Arch

#11 2010-01-01 13:24:57

Re: Support in Arch

#12 2010-01-01 13:30:37

Re: Support in Arch

#13 2010-01-01 14:12:51

Re: Support in Arch

#14 2010-01-01 14:47:14

Re: Support in Arch

#15 2010-01-01 15:20:01

Re: Support in Arch

#16 2010-01-01 15:29:20

Re: Support in Arch

#17 2010-01-01 19:57:04

Re: Support in Arch

#18 2010-01-01 23:52:04

Re: Support in Arch

#19 2010-01-02 00:32:12

Re: Support in Arch

#20 2010-01-02 00:54:31

Re: Support in Arch

#21 2010-01-02 02:26:27

Re: Support in Arch

#22 2010-01-02 10:20:11

Re: Support in Arch

#23 2010-01-02 10:44:39

Re: Support in Arch

#24 2010-01-02 14:39:02

Re: Support in Arch

#25 2010-01-03 13:25:00

Re: Support in Arch

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