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#1 2008-05-05 20:48:36

bladdo
Member
From: Blacksburg, VA
Registered: 2008-05-05
Posts: 111
Website

Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

I've been a linux user since 2003, with a 3 year mac break sad (lol I've forgotten so much hmm). I started with slackware and moved onto gentoo. I used gentoo for quite some time until I got a powerbook. Anyway recently I have returned to linux, did a gentoo install on my HP Pavilion(AMD Athelon 2ghz - 512mb ram - 80 gb hdd).

In anycase I think I need a change, I'm tired of compiling every package and I've found portage to be buggy lately. I've been considering switching over or trying out Arch... It really sucks though cause I just customized gentoo(like set up all my .config files and such). Here are a few questions I'm wondering about:

1) Is there colorized terminal in arch?

2) Other than /etc/X11/xorg.conf, .bashrc, .pypanelrc, .pekwm/, what other config files are worth bringing over?

3) Is there a real speed drop from the pre-compiled packages retrieved with pacman in arch from gentoo source compiled?

4)What is the best feature of Arch wink ?

Also any insight from anyone who has switched from gentoo to arch would be awesome cool

Thanks,
bladdo

Last edited by bladdo (2008-05-05 20:50:05)


bladdo / mil / Miles
userbound.com - blog and projects

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#2 2008-05-05 21:13:13

shining
Pacman Developer
Registered: 2006-05-10
Posts: 2,043

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

I find your first question rather interesting (as a first question) smile

Otherwise, I switched from gentoo to arch, ages ago and never looked back.
I was also a bit sick of compiling everything. Arch made me realize it was all for nothing. That's its best feature.


pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

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#3 2008-05-05 21:17:15

escondida
Package Maintainer (PM)
Registered: 2008-04-03
Posts: 157

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

bladdo wrote:

1) Is there colorized terminal in arch?

Yeah, with dircolors (in the coreutils package, available in pretty
much any distribution). There should be something in your .bashrc that
invokes it.

2) Other than /etc/X11/xorg.conf, .bashrc, .pypanelrc, .pekwm/, what other config files are worth bringing over?

Any config files for programs you use regularly. And for future
reference, you might want to start keeping your /home on a separate
partition.

3) Is there a real speed drop from the pre-compiled packages retrieved with pacman in arch from gentoo source compiled?

I doubt it; they're compiled to be optimized for i686 (the minor
problem others sometimes have has to do with compiling packages for
all ix86 packages).

4)What is the best feature of Arch wink ?

rc.conf (easy config.) and abs/makepkg (allows for easy building of
packages if you don't want to use a precompiled package). Also, the
community is good.

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#4 2008-05-06 00:54:31

eskay
Member
Registered: 2008-04-23
Posts: 23

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

I too came from Gentoo. I wouldn't say that I was a power user or anything but what I liked about Gentoo was that everything that needed to be done could be done from the command line and there are set config files and config scripts which made proper sense - ie. rc.conf, make.conf, rc-update

But then I too got tired of compiling everything so I tried various other distros like Ubuntu, openSuSe, Fedora, and Debian. I was going to stick with Debian until I found Arch. Arch is pretty much as close to Gentoo as you can get without compiling. I can play around with KDE or Gnome or E17 or XFCE without having to wait for hours/days to compile. It literally takes minutes to install a DE. Downloading the packages isn't an issue either as there are plenty of mirrors, and if something isn't in the official repositories then it would most likely be in user repositories which are easy to get a hold of.

Arch also has excellent Wikis and user forums like Gentoo.

The only thing I miss about Gentoo is its package search but this could be because I've only spent a week on Arch. emerge -s would give you a nice summary of the version you have installed vs the version that's available in the repositories.

Anyway, good luck.

- eskay

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#5 2008-05-06 02:29:48

shiver
Member
Registered: 2008-05-06
Posts: 2

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

Another Gentoo (could be soon ex-Gentoo) user here.

As with everyone who leaves Gentoo, I too have grown tired of the compiles and will hopefully be making the switch in the not too distant future.

I think the only reason I started off with Gentoo was because it was fairly popular back then and gave me a minimalist install I wanted. Had I known I could have got the same with Arch but without all the compiles, I probably would have started here.

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#6 2008-05-06 02:49:11

bladdo
Member
From: Blacksburg, VA
Registered: 2008-05-05
Posts: 111
Website

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

shiver, I feel the same way, I don't really know why I came to gentoo in the first place actually, I think a friend recommend and I didn't know much about linux at the time so naturally I used the only thing I knew about and it looked nice.

eskay .. are you sure pacman doesn't have a search feature, it seems like it should sad

Also about the colorized terminal, I'm talking about how when you boot up say gentoo( i think knoppix does it to) it looks real nice and its multi colored and very easy on the eyes opposed from the standard black/grey scheme.

And 1 more question: Can you set up gensplash with Arch?


bladdo / mil / Miles
userbound.com - blog and projects

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#7 2008-05-06 03:45:54

eskay
Member
Registered: 2008-04-23
Posts: 23

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

bladdo wrote:

eskay .. are you sure pacman doesn't have a search feature, it seems like it should sad

no no.. I didn't mean that. I meant that with Gentoo's search it provided "Current installed version" and "Current available version" but from what I can see pacman doesn't have that... it's not a big deal.

pacman DOES have search.

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#8 2008-05-06 05:29:13

mcmillan
Member
Registered: 2006-04-06
Posts: 737

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

You can get the current installed version with pacman -Q [package name]. The version available from the repositories is listed with the pacman search.  If you just want to see if there's updates available you can get that with pacman -Qu (would need to synch with pacman -Sy first to get the most recent versions).

I haven't used gentoo, but it sounds like emerge -s gave this info as a single command while pacman would need stringing a couple commands together.

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#9 2008-05-06 05:46:09

synthead
Member
Registered: 2006-05-09
Posts: 1,337

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

eskay wrote:
bladdo wrote:

eskay .. are you sure pacman doesn't have a search feature, it seems like it should sad

no no.. I didn't mean that. I meant that with Gentoo's search it provided "Current installed version" and "Current available version" but from what I can see pacman doesn't have that... it's not a big deal.

pacman DOES have search.

Oh yeah, pacman can check versions.  Look into yaourt too, it's a wrapper for pacman that provides many extra features.

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#10 2008-05-06 17:35:35

MONODA
Member
Registered: 2008-02-09
Posts: 256

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

i havent used gentoo but i can say that arch is realllyyyy fast. I boot in 13 seconds big_smile

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#11 2010-03-28 02:33:06

raj7095
Member
Registered: 2010-02-14
Posts: 91

Re: Thinking about Gentoo --> Arch

eskay wrote:

The only thing I miss about Gentoo is its package search but this could be because I've only spent a week on Arch. emerge -s would give you a nice summary of the version you have installed vs the version that's available in the repositories

But remember, you can use yaourt for that, which is a better frontend of pacman with aur support.

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#12 2010-03-28 02:38:53

Misfit138
Misfit Emeritus
From: USA
Registered: 2006-11-27
Posts: 4,189

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