Diving Head First into ArchLinux
…and having one hell of a time.
It isn’t that hard to notice that I haven’t posted anything recently. There’s a reason for that: I am now an ArchLinux user!
Now that I’ve shifted full time, I’m back up and running, and have lots to post about.
Why ArchLinux?
I’ve actually tried ArchLinux out a couple of times before. All of those times, I encountered a solid brick wall at the step that says “connect to the internet”. I happen to be situated behind an NTLM authenticating proxy server, through which I must access the internet. This is possible only by running a client-side proxy of my own, to speak the NTLM language.
This gives rise to my very own chicken-egg problem, where I need the internet to download CNTLM (the client-side proxy I use), and where I need CNTLM to access the internet. This paradox has never failed to frustrate me during any installation.
This time however, my Debian install was failing, and I was already drooling at what Arch users were able to do, and decided that I was going to make this work. I even downloaded every release of CNTLM as far back as I remember, about 15 or so of them.
The installation of Arch itself went smoothly — almost. After partioning my hard drive, I forgot which partition was which. As Arch splits the step of partitioning, and assigning mount points, and displays only the partition name and no other details when assigning said mount points, I screwed up, and had to do over, writing down which one was which.
Once the basic installation was over, I tried my luck at CNTLM. It worked like a charm. I don’t know what changed since the last time I tried, maybe CNTLM released again, or something else. In any case, I now had a brand new Arch system, as clean as you can get, which internet access. Things were looking up.
The rest of the story is simply a long line of pacman -S, and the occasional yaourt. My local mirror dosen’t do ArchLinux, but there’s another one fairly nearby, so I’m getting decent speeds. Add to that the fact that pacman is intrinsically fast, and I’m zipping through system updates.
What I like about Arch
ArchLinux is essentially a DIY distribution. There’s no hand-holding, no fancy GUI Tools, no end to documentation, and an amazing community. The only thing that did not get resolved to my satisfaction was OSS, which I had wanted to try in place of ALSA. I gave up on that pretty quickly, however, when I was unable to use MPD to change the volume, and it remained fixed at 4294967295% (for those wondering, that’s -1 with an unsigned underflow).
Configuration is simple, I just edit text files. I prefer doing that, and now that is the recommended way. I have only 2 qualms:
- When I install a package that has a bootscript, I’m not told that it’s there, and have to figure that out myself, and then add it to the DAEMONS array.
- I’m not told that I have to add myself to a particular group, to get permissions to do something.
I fit right into Arch because it is a DIY distro, and that’s what I like doing. All the Arch packages are bleeding edge and come with all bells and whistles turned on by default, which is how I like it. Everything can be configured, which is also how I like it. Everyone’s like me, or I’m like them, always ready to help, and know enough to actually do so. It’s great.
Arch, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
wow nice !! the reason why i am still sceptical about switching to ARCH is that i don’t have a stable Net connection, the BSNL might time out any time !! and when that happens it will frustrate you like hell :( .Besides that,crappy speeds to make the installation process run for hours together. And amidst that there is this fear of power failure which is predominant in this limited RAINY domain days :P, and i have a crappy comp. as well so no inclination to think of KDE which i have been dreaming of for years now :P. Probably will give it a go,once again when i have a reliable Connection and a better system ! Till than Ubuntu is where i find my lINUX-ing solace !! :P
I remember trying out Arch a long time ago. I liked Pacman, but didn’t really like the rest of the system. I don’t like bleeding edge stuff, and I don’t like it compiled with bells and whistles. I don’t like DIY; I love it when things work out-of-the-box, while being super-configurable at the same time. Apt NEVER breaks, and Debian Testing is amazingly stable. I compile the few packages that I need bleeding edge versions of, and live on a little more than a debootstrap + my dotfiles + my compile of Emacs and StumpWM. I guess it all boils down to personal preferences at the end of the day.