Archlinux... forever?

snack · 2010-07-25 11:08:17

Hi, the topic is somewhat misleading but t's funny and indeed is meaningful, in the end...
My first Linux experience was some time ago with Ubuntu 8.04. Very nice, very easy, then 8.10 came up, I upgraded and then my system got broken. After googling and googling I understood that the problem was that the upgrade didn't put an antry for the new kernel in grub configuration files. So I contnued to boot the old kernel and obviously new vga drivers didn't work. I fixed it (not bad for a complete newbie, I think) but I was shocked. It has been so difficult, my knowledges where ~ NULL and feared t would happen again at next upgrade. Then I found Arch: at first glance it looked even more difficult, but I decided to try, fascinated by the rolling release system that wouldn't make me do any other distribution upgrade. Since then, learned a lot about GNU/Linux and now I'm confortable with this environment. The rolling release proved to be what I was searching for, no more major upgrades, no formats or else. It seems that my system can run forever, being always up-to-date and without the necessity for any major mantenance (more or less).
Then came my question: how true is this? Is there anything that at some time will force me to format and reinstall from scratch? By now, I can think only about the filesystem: if at some point I will want to switch from ext4 to a hypothetic ext5 or similar, will it be possible without a complete reinstall? Are there any other features that would force me to a major maintenance (eg., something more than pacman -Syu)?
Thank you all, maybe some interestng discussion can stem from this...

karol · 2010-07-25 11:10:29

> By now, I can think only about the filesystem
IIRC you can go from ext3 to ext4 w/o a reinstall so why not to ext5, ext6 etc? :-)

Allan · 2010-07-25 11:10:58

Nope... I only have ever reinstalled when I got a new computer. And I do weird things to my system that are not recommended!

karol · 2010-07-25 11:12:55

Allan wrote:

Nope... I only have ever reinstalled when I got a new computer. And I do weird things to my system that are not recommended!

I always wondered, who do you blame if sth breaks? :-D

wonder · 2010-07-25 11:14:44

i only reinstall when i buy new hardware, new computer, new hdd because my first died. only once i had to reinstall because i screw so badly the filesystem(my mistake)

Last edited by wonder (2010-07-25 11:14:58)

Allan · 2010-07-25 11:57:11

karol wrote:

Allan wrote:
Nope... I only have ever reinstalled when I got a new computer. And I do weird things to my system that are not recommended!
I always wondered, who do you blame if sth breaks? :-D

Well, I have only ever had issues related to GNOME and Xorg updates, so I blame JGC

(or upstream, where the blame usually belongs)

Kooothor · 2010-07-25 11:58:03

I reinstall my system every week, because I love the AIF

Ramses de Norre · 2010-07-25 12:00:17

Kooothor wrote:

I reinstall my system every week, because I love the AIF

Get a job;)

eldragon · 2010-07-25 13:06:25

from /var/log/pacman.log: my first line is

[2008-11-17 17:04] installed filesystem (2008.06-2)

and check that with my forum registration date

karol · 2010-07-25 13:09:57

eldragon wrote:

from /var/log/pacman.log: my first line is
[2008-11-17 17:04] installed filesystem (2008.06-2)
and check that with my forum registration date

shopped ;P

alexandrite · 2010-07-25 14:32:43

I've only had to reinstall once, and it was because I decided I wanted to clean up all the cruft that I had accumulated from installing everything under the sun and never using pacman -Rsn when I got sick of it.

Barrucadu · 2010-07-25 14:55:43

I reinstalled late last year, as I switched from i686 to x86_64. There have also been a couple of times before that were I've messed up something so badly a reinstall is the only thing to do (eg, losing the contents of /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin, with no backup).

snack · 2010-07-25 15:25:06

Interesting, guys. So it seems that, for what have been discussed so far, Arch does't need any reinstall, apart from architecture switch or bad mistakes, cool. Back in my Windows period, I used to format once or twice a year, and I always suggested to do so to my friends. It seems that all the time spent to learn and configure Arch is paying back, now...

Last edited by snack (2010-07-25 15:25:53)

Spacenick · 2010-07-25 22:43:39

When hunting a bug (turned out to be my harddrives dislike of power manager settings making it corrupt random files while reading while keeping them ok on the disk) I copied my whole / back and forth onto an external hd reconfigured to work from that directly and so on like 3 times over. And still now I'm left with a system that's perfectly ok and had to do no reinstalling even though I reformatted the drive messed up the Apple gpt+mbr partitions, guessed at the partition size and other weired stuff.
Now the filesystem is bigger and all but it's still the same install in some way.
So no there is no need to reinstall just to switch filesystems. In fact the only thing that prevented me from just copying over the system from my laptop was the fact that the CPU in my current main system can't do 64bit.

doorknob60 · 2010-07-26 01:32:02

[2008-11-11 19:47] installed filesystem (2008.06-2)

That's the longest any OS has lasted on this computer And still going good as new Even Ubuntu managed to screw itself up every 3 months or so lol, at least with what I did with it Arch can take a lot of abuse...

sand_man · 2010-07-26 02:32:34

The last time I reinstalled mine was because I deleted the pacman db.

[ty@donna ~]$ head /var/log/pacman.log 
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed filesystem (2009.07-1)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed dbus-core (1.2.16-1)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed dcron (3.2-4)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed dhcpcd (5.1.3-1)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed dialog (1.1_20080819-3)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed diffutils (2.8.1-6)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed file (5.03-2)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed gawk (3.1.7-1)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed gdbm (1.8.3-6)
[2009-12-12 08:45] installed gen-init-cpio (2.6.32-1)

thepanu · 2010-07-26 05:48:59

I've only done reinstalls when I have either bought new hdd or like completely new machine. But, arch install is such a joy that I don't mind doing it from time to time

sand_man · 2010-07-26 06:17:03

thepanu wrote:

I've only done reinstalls when I have either bought new hdd or like completely new machine. But, arch install is such a joy that I don't mind doing it from time to time

Having your separate /home partition makes it easy. Just install the packages again and all your settings are still there. Like magic

PirateJonno · 2010-07-26 07:35:36

snack wrote:

By now, I can think only about the filesystem: if at some point I will want to switch from ext4 to a hypothetic ext5 or similar, will it be possible without a complete reinstall?

Just FYI, btrfs is the next one, and you will apparently be able to update in-place

snack · 2010-07-26 08:00:13

PirateJonno wrote:

snack wrote:
By now, I can think only about the filesystem: if at some point I will want to switch from ext4 to a hypothetic ext5 or similar, will it be possible without a complete reinstall?
Just FYI, btrfs is the next one, and you will apparently be able to update in-place

Yes, I heard about btrfs. The last OpenSUSE release let the user choose to use it, even if it seems that it's still not ready for production use.
This thread unleashed some sort of "oldest Arch installation" competition, it's very funny!
Mine is:

$ head /var/log/pacman.log
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed filesystem (2008.06-2)
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed pcre (7.7-1)
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed grep (2.5.3-3)
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed sed (4.1.5-3)
[2009-01-04 02:36] updating /etc/ld.so.conf... done.
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed fakeroot (1.9.3-1)
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed flex (2.5.33-4)
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed binutils (2.18-8)
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed gmp (4.2.2-2)
[2009-01-03 20:36] installed mpfr (2.3.1-1)

Quite a newbie...

Cdh · 2010-07-26 11:11:46

I wanted to look how long it is since I last changed my filesystem to ext4 on /.

[2008-11-27 20:57] installed filesystem (2008.07-1)

But then I remembered that I just have made a tar out of the whole filesystem, reformatted it and then untar'ed it.
(I did this because I finally removed my windows partition and made / and former windows partition into one).

Crooksey · 2010-07-26 11:39:20

My longest serving arch box was last re-installed when arch switched from /dev/hda to /dev/sda

I deleted my fstab (by accident), but I had my /home on another partition so just re-installed the base system. I have no idea when this was now, and my machines are all in storage whilst I am moving house.

na12 · 2010-07-26 15:10:18

[2009-01-04 19:29] installed filesystem (2008.07-1)
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed pcre (7.8-1)
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed grep (2.5.3-3)
[2009-01-05 01:29] updating /etc/ld.so.conf... done.
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed fakeroot (1.11.4-1)
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed flex (2.5.35-1)
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed binutils (2.19-1)
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed gmp (4.2.4-1)
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed mpfr (2.3.2-2)
[2009-01-04 19:29] installed gcc (4.3.2-2)

This is my second arch installation and it last until now. My first installation was several months before that. I was newbie and I was learning arch.

Arm-the-Homeless · 2010-07-26 16:55:25

[2009-02-27 11:41] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)

I do have a lot of bloat, though from stuff I installed which I use once and never again or I never did at all. I should reinstall sometime or later.
(Too lazy to go through 800 packages and picking out what I don't need).

Last edited by Arm-the-Homeless (2010-07-26 16:55:46)

kmason · 2010-07-26 16:59:42

On my laptop, the command head /var/log/pacman.log shows this:

[2010-07-14 10:15] installed filesystem (2010.02-4)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed util-linux-ng (2.18-2)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed libusb (0.1.12-4)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed pcre (8.10-1)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed glib2 (2.24.1-1)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed module-init-tools (3.11.1-2)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed udev (159-1)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed device-mapper (2.02.70-1)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed libgpg-error (1.7-3)
[2010-07-14 10:15] installed libgcrypt (1.4.5-2)

Its a relatively fresh install, as this laptop is new (to me). My desktop back at home on the other hand...

Arch Linux

#1 2010-07-25 11:08:17

Archlinux... forever?

#2 2010-07-25 11:10:29

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#3 2010-07-25 11:10:58

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#4 2010-07-25 11:12:55

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#5 2010-07-25 11:14:44

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#6 2010-07-25 11:57:11

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#7 2010-07-25 11:58:03

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#8 2010-07-25 12:00:17

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#9 2010-07-25 13:06:25

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#10 2010-07-25 13:09:57

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#11 2010-07-25 14:32:43

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#12 2010-07-25 14:55:43

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#13 2010-07-25 15:25:06

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#14 2010-07-25 22:43:39

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#15 2010-07-26 01:32:02

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#16 2010-07-26 02:32:34

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#17 2010-07-26 05:48:59

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#18 2010-07-26 06:17:03

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#19 2010-07-26 07:35:36

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#20 2010-07-26 08:00:13

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#21 2010-07-26 11:11:46

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#22 2010-07-26 11:39:20

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#23 2010-07-26 15:10:18

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#24 2010-07-26 16:55:25

Re: Archlinux... forever?

#25 2010-07-26 16:59:42

Re: Archlinux... forever?

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