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#1 2010-01-14 20:19:30

count-corrupt
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2009-02-01
Posts: 112

A formal 'Hello' to the community and a few Arch-related questions

Hi guys.

As a long-time Genoo and part-time Arch user I finally made the switch to Arch complete. Since I've been reading here quite a lot in the last year I thought I could as well create an account (acutally I did that a while back but never used it) and say hello.
I've been running Arch on my laptop for about the last year. Coming from gentoo as my first ever Linux experience, Arch seemed the next logical step whenever I should grow weary of endless compiles and re-compiles (which is about now). I'm an enthusiastic Xmonad user which is why I'm particularily fond of this forum and it's Xmonad community. That's also the reason why I stumbled upon arch in the first place. So far it hasn't let me down once and I'm really happy with my (now 2) setups.

With a little help of some of you guys on IRC I installed Arch64 on a RocketRaid 2310 Raid5 a few days ago. It's running really smooth and I'm quite impressed by the overall difference (in speed and usability) of kdemod KDE4 to my gentoo compiled one.

For those interested as to how exactly I installed (there seems to be quite some controversy about the RocketRaid cards), here's how I did it:

1) Boot from the Arch64 install cd
2) Set up the environment for compilation of the driver:
- fire up the network
- edit the mirror file to my likings (a whole lot of German mirrors over here)
- blacklist the packages kernel26, ndiswrapper, ndiswrapper-utils and tiacx
     The kernel shouldn't be updated unless anyone knows some magic kexec tricks from inside a live environment
     The other packages somehow depend on the kernel package
3) Pacman -Suy base-devel
4) Download the driver package, unpack and make
5) rmmod sata_mv, modprobe rr2310_00 (The sata_mv module has to be unmounted, otherwise the raid controller will crash
6) Mount the raid drive and install

I did a manual installation since that's what i'm used to from gentoo (and since I don't trust the installer all too far with the whole raid setup) and the rest of it went pretty smoothly. I had to go for by-label uuid'ing my partitions though because they come in randomly on each boot.

I do have a question now:
Is there any way to conveniently trigger rebuilding the RocketRaid driver whenever a new kernel has been installed? I did create my own PKGBUILD of the driver from an old one that's in the aur so all it would take is to tell pacman that every update of kernel26 should automatically force-update the driver even though it's version hasn't changed. The alternative is of course to just keep compiling my own kernel as I did on gentoo but I'd like to not have to think about any of that stuff and just use the system.
Or, if anyone has another cool idea how to handle this, I'm open to that too.

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#2 2010-01-14 21:13:19

barzam
Member
From: Sweden
Registered: 2009-01-27
Posts: 277

Re: A formal 'Hello' to the community and a few Arch-related questions

Why don't you create a wiki entry as well with your guide? I bet it will make someone's life easier in the future!

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#3 2010-01-15 12:48:25

count-corrupt
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2009-02-01
Posts: 112

Re: A formal 'Hello' to the community and a few Arch-related questions

barzam wrote:

Why don't you create a wiki entry as well with your guide? I bet it will make someone's life easier in the future!

I didn't think this was such a big deal. Also they way I did it, though working for me, is not the most elegant solution. One would rather build his own install cd with the driver included that then can serve as a backup system in case the raid driver is not rebuilt after a kernel update.

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