My Experience With Arch Linux

Well I am here today describing my experience with the Arch Linux distribution and I must say it was a unique one.
Usually I can tell if a like a distro within 2mins of using it, call me judgmental but thats me. I feel in love with Slax within those two minutes and then feel in love with Slackware 12 within two minutes again (v11 was another story 😉 ). I tried Debian 4.0 Stable, and hated it. The installer required me choose a mirror, I choose a mirror close to me, as a good user should do, and then the installer decided to download ALL the packages from the mirror filling the 5gigs of space, that I made on my virtual hard drive for Debian. After filling those five gigs with packages I didntn’t even choose, the installer told me that I ran out of space and exited. This was really aggravating to me because the Slackware DVD doesn’t even use 5gigs (Full Install). (To anwser those who say 5gigs is not enough space still, unlike most Linux fanatics (fanboys cough cough) I dont have the hardware to spare on testing (Please feel free to send me some). I test all my OS’s on VM’s (VirtualBox and Qemu)).

Sorry for that small rant, well yea Debian didn’t go “well” with me, I tried Fedora, thinking a “simple, noob friendly distro”(yes im a noob since I say noob…) I might like it, I am lazy). First thing I noticed there was no console installer (just like *buntu)… it required 256megs of RAM to install… Windows XP doesnt even require that much… I havent even dared tried *Suse since its in bed with Microsoft, not that theres anything wrong with Microsoft (lol) but I use linux to use linux not M$… I even tried openBSD :), gave me nightmares for several weeks (j/k), it was wonderful I have been meaning to use it more often, but becuase of GPL vs BSD based licenses I have been having personal conflicts between using both OS’s that are based on these totally different philosophies.

Sorry again for another rant but here we go into Arch Linux.
I decided to test it out using the latest STABLE release which was 2007.08-2. I started off creating my partitions with fdisk and then went to formating and choosing mount points, I choose to install all packages it was during the installation of these packages then I ran into my first of many problems. But first I wanted to see how well the partitioner including in the installer was compared to doing it manually with fisk (it is recommended to do it manually but then why even include a partitioner?). It failed miserably, It gave me option to adjust size, I choose 48megs for my /boot, 128megs for swap and then came to the predicament of either having a / and no /home or having both. the partitioner didn’t tell me how much space I had left… so I ended up choosing to use rest for /. and everything seemingly worked fine from here. I choose to install all packages on the CD (CORE) installer (I learned my lesson from FTP based installers). The packages installed fairly quickly. After installing the packages it created the initrds and let me choose to configure system scripts afterwards. This was something very strange as a Slackware user, becuase mostly everything is already working out of the box if not I fix it after booting into the new box (or chrooting into it after install it done). I then went in and edited /etc/resolvs.conf (if that is correct name) to use the the host as a DNS Server (as I do in Slack). I choose the root password here and default mirror to download software, and then proceeded to install Grub over Lilo becuase it was first option 🙂 ) I looked at the grub config (as part of install) and everything “looked” fine, I exited out of nano (default text editor). It then gave me option to install to a particular device, I choose /dev/sda (only one drive anyway, it showed me nonexistent drives…). The Arch Linux install had finished and I rebooted the VM. I was relieved to see grub becuase with my luck the VM would’ve excecuted rm -rf / on my actual host. I choose the default Archlinux boot option and began boot process. While watching ArchLinux boot up it reminded me of gparted-liveCD’s startup (which had simliar startup to Gentoo (not that I have used Gentoo since I hear portage is all fuxed up)) which has BSD like startup scripts (which Arch suprisingly has).

Suddenly I see big “FAILED” red message flair up, I panic and try to glance at the upper corner to catch the error. I see something along the terms of “it failed to mount / read only” some more error messages fly by. I tense up and worry what had failed. I finally ended up at the login screen. I was really disappointed to see my install fail. I logged in as root to see if I could fix these issues. I issued df to see if anything mounted and I appeared to be the initrd environment, due to the fact that everything was readonly and nothing that would be of importance was mounted)… I tried mounting my partitions: /, /boot, but nothing was there… Arch Linux failed me. I told myself, I have never heard a bad review from anyone about Arch, I am just crazy?. I reinstalled this time around I got all the way to the booting screen (error free) then it gave me a kernel stop error, I check grub and /dev/sda6 was were it was reading my kernel from which I knew was wrong since /boot was at /dev/sda1 I edited grub and rebooted.. I get a different stop error. It was getting late I was getting tired. I decided to undue what I edited and halt the system.
Day 2: Next Morning I power up the VM, everything works? “What the World” I deiced to not investigate previous problems, becuase if it works DONT CHANGE IT.

I then proceeded to get audio working, alsa-utils (and deps werent installed) I had to download them, I installed them via pacman, which did its job gracefully. I then issued lspci to see if arch saw my card. It was a soundblaster16 (I added this to qemu) and arch didnt see it… second abrupt failure. I began to get aggravated. Qemu has never failed me before… I blamed arch, I was patient, I tried another card and it worked… it was detected. I then decided to install XFCE as my default (lightweight) DM, I had to issue several commands with pacman to upgrade my sytem, else before it downloads the packages and fails with some cryptic message about “/.CHANGELOG” inconsistencies… (I already issued the command to upgrade the system the night before) but it seems to fail since it began to install the same packages all ever again (these little things tick off people like me who dont use these forms of package management). I then have to manually edit the packager manager configuration file to use my mirror of choose, at first it kind’ve aggravated me but then I thought to myself “stop b1ching this is Unix you were going to have to fireup vi(vim wasnt installed :,( ) and do some (heavy) editing sooner or later”. I finished editing the configuration file and issued to the command to install xfce4 and it seemed to work, WHAT A MIRACLE, after 30different tries I finally got it to work. XFCE successfully installed but X wasn’t installed along side as a DEP.

I noticed later on in the wiki article “Setting up a DM” and this must be were/how to setup X since all norm DMs depend on X. I had already halted system when I realized this…

Day 3. Now into my third day of trying/testing Arch out I booted up the VM, boot process started as usuall. I turn around for a sec and then turned back to notice my screen pitch black, as if loading uDEV initiates the startup of some mysterious screensaver. I have now decieded to pause my adventures of arch for several weeks ;). so Remember Folks PATIENCE IS A VIRTURE.

Conclusion:
Great ideology behind the distro, The package management system was supperb when working (it even reminded me of openBSD’s). I had to say I encountered one too many problems. I tried the docs and no help I decieded to proceed to its official IRC channel; #archlinux@irc.freenode.net (the following I say obviously does not apply to the WHOLE channel only to those who represented arch, that responded to me at that time). My first question about the detection of my seemingly nonexistent (virtual) soundblaster16 card, They kept on telling to modprobe the drivers which is (call me egotistic here) stupid if lspci/hwd does not even detect the device (they seemed to ignore me whenever I asked why isnt lspci even detecting it, asking if I added the switch proper switch to qemu for a soundcard… ). Then they started to ignore my question and laughed at the idea of someone using a sb16 card in 08) They even went on to blame qemu, something that I took to heart becuase Qemu has NEVER failed me (although crappy compiled versions have such as current 9.1 win32 release it does not properly detect windows pathways and the images must be in the same directory), even the idea of qemu being my problem sent shivers down my spine. I decieded to choose another card (asking input from the channel on which since I had several options and hardware isn’t my strong point). They told me to use the ENSONIQ card, it worked that problem was solved or avoided depends on how you look at it).

My second question there was dealing with installing xfce and the error I was gettiing cryptic error about conflicting changelogs. No one on the channel (at the time) had seen the error before. I pastebined the whole output of pacman using tee+links. I was told to issue several different switches, (flushing the pacman cashe, synchronize with server, and several more) to fix the problem. After about 20different tries, I got it to work (using all the different combinations I was told to use, I was told to issue several different switches, (flushing the pacman cashe, synchronize with server, and several more) Its official freenode irc channel was not unhelpful, but questionable at times, telling me to stop using the stable and jump to the latest RC to fix my problems, stating that it was more stable then the actual 2007 release. This (to me atleast) sounded ridiculous; how is a distro going to have a release candidate that is more stable then its latest release? Overall Arch acted “funny” (from grub working from wrong devices, my screen saver during startup, pacman upgrading itself, pacman reinstalling system updates that where already installed) it got aggravating.

This distro just brings backs (bad) memories of actually trying Linux distros such as with Debian and Fedora, only reinstating my idea that all Linux distros have problems that make them imperfect, just not Slackware (j/k 🙂 ).

Posting from Slackware 12.1, this is nycjv321 please feel free to leave comments.
[my grammer isn’t the best, just ignore those simple/stupid mistakes]
This doc was created/edited from vi(m)
Have a Wonderful Day!

***UPDATE

I recentely tried the RC and installed X (lol…) and everything worked perfectly 😀 (I Highly recommend this distro if you have to patience)