Adventures in Arch Linux!

Got my new lappy, installed Win7 on it, but I always seem to have a hankering to play around with Linux.

I had Mint for a few days, tried PCLinuxOS, was going to try one or two more as well, but then I remembered Arch. Build my own system however I want it? Sounded interesting. Start from the command line? Sounded frightening

I'm here to tell you that it isn't so bad. I read the Unofficial Beginner's Guide, and that walks you through it pretty well. Booting up to a command line with basically nothing installed is an interesting experience though, I haven't dealt with that since the DOS days, and I never had a strictly DOS computer.

I got the X server set up though, got some programs installed using pacman, also set up yaourt for the AUR. KDE4 is what I'm using right now as I did not find Gnome3 to be helpful in the slightest. I was thinking of using something smaller like Openbox or LXDE, but I figured KDE4 has eye-candy and more features, so I would give it a go. So far I like it.

Haven't ran into too many problems. Only thing that I haven't been able to solve yet is after booting up, wicd asks for my password to connect to my wireless network. It connects no problem, but after typing in my password is throws up a wicd cannot connect to the d-bus error. I've seen some similar problems, but haven't figured out how to fix it yet. Funny thing is it doesn't actually seem like there is an error, since the wireless does connect.

Anyone else have experience with Arch?

I've toyed with pretty much all of the Linux distros at one point or another.

The Beginner's Guide is pretty much foolproof...do what it tells you to do, and you can get a KDE/Gnome desktop in fairly short order.

My favorite "source" distribution is not Arch, or Gentoo, but Slackware. But Slackware is way too much like work!

Arch sounds a lot like Gentoo, which I toyed with for about a year. Now I use SuSE at work, but it's all pre-built kernel.

Have you installed D-bus? If you haven't, that's probably why wicd is complaining - it connects to the network okay, but it wants to register the new network with D-Bus, which isn't there, so it throws an error.

Basically, D-Bus is a way for programs to talk amongst themselves. By listening on the right channel, other programs can see the new network is up, and take appropriate actions -- maybe popping up a little message, or connecting to some service, or whatever.

mateo wrote:

I've toyed with pretty much all of the Linux distros at one point or another.

The Beginner's Guide is pretty much foolproof...do what it tells you to do, and you can get a KDE/Gnome desktop in fairly short order.

My favorite "source" distribution is not Arch, or Gentoo, but Slackware. But Slackware is way too much like work! :)

I haven't tried Gentoo or Slackware. I have read a lot of people that like both though. What's up with Slackware being too much work though? It doesn't have the one-button update like Arch?

bighoppa wrote:

Arch sounds a lot like Gentoo, which I toyed with for about a year. Now I use SuSE at work, but it's all pre-built kernel.

Yeah I have never tried compiling kernels or even programs really. Guess I will get there eventually.

Do you do programming work on Linux? I would like to go completely Linux, but unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen. Games are on Windows pain-free, and I also use the Adobe Suites often.

Malor wrote:

Have you installed D-bus? If you haven't, that's probably why wicd is complaining - it connects to the network okay, but it wants to register the new network with D-Bus, which isn't there, so it throws an error.

Basically, D-Bus is a way for programs to talk amongst themselves. By listening on the right channel, other programs can see the new network is up, and take appropriate actions -- maybe popping up a little message, or connecting to some service, or whatever.

I do have Dbus installed. There is also a section on the Wiki about wicd and dbus giving errors, but not the same problem I'm having. One of the suggestions is to completely remove and then reinstall wicd though, so I might give that a try. Thanks for the suggestion though

Citizen86 wrote:
bighoppa wrote:

Arch sounds a lot like Gentoo, which I toyed with for about a year. Now I use SuSE at work, but it's all pre-built kernel.

Yeah I have never tried compiling kernels or even programs really. Guess I will get there eventually.

Do you do programming work on Linux? I would like to go completely Linux, but unfortunately I don't think that will ever happen. Games are on Windows pain-free, and I also use the Adobe Suites often.

I do as little programming as possible these days, though I really should just gut check and get back into it. My current Linux task is managing a small (54 nodes right now, but we add more each semester) high performance computing cluster that is used for biostatistics and epidemiology studies. The whole thing runs on top of SuSE Linux Enterprise. Most of what I do involves keeping the cluster running smoothly, but I do some scripting and I've been trying to get more into the programming side of things.

Honestly, I can't ever see switching to Linux full-time. I like my games too much. I do, however, run Linux VMs on my home machine so that I can play around with the environment at my own leisure.

The job sounds interesting, I don't know very much about all that though, heh

I know a lot of people run VM's in Windows. I don't know though, unless you have a specific program you need to run that doesn't on Windows.

But then again, some people can't stand dual-booting all the time. I agree it's a hassle, but if I'm going to use Linux, I want it installed and running natively.

It depends on what programs you're running. If it's utility-type stuff, running Linux as a VM guest means you have pretty much all the power of Unix, while still having access to your regular Windows programs, all with minimal fuss. As long as you're not trying to run fast-action 3D or fullscreen video in your guest, it feels just about the same speed as running it natively, so you don't actually gain THAT much by running it on the bare metal. It's only when you're really pushing the machine hard that you notice the overhead of virtualization.

Citizen86 wrote:

Haven't ran into too many problems. Only thing that I haven't been able to solve yet is after booting up, wicd asks for my password to connect to my wireless network. It connects no problem, but after typing in my password is throws up a wicd cannot connect to the d-bus error. I've seen some similar problems, but haven't figured out how to fix it yet. Funny thing is it doesn't actually seem like there is an error, since the wireless does connect.

Is dbus listed in your DAEMONS array in rc.conf?

Citizen86 wrote:

Anyone else have experience with Arch?

I love Arch. I've been running it for two years now and only had one issue with an update (networkmanager broke).

Malor wrote:

It depends on what programs you're running. If it's utility-type stuff, running Linux as a VM guest means you have pretty much all the power of Unix, while still having access to your regular Windows programs, all with minimal fuss. As long as you're not trying to run fast-action 3D or fullscreen video in your guest, it feels just about the same speed as running it natively, so you don't actually gain THAT much by running it on the bare metal. It's only when you're really pushing the machine hard that you notice the overhead of virtualization.

That's interesting, I suppose I could give it a try. I think even the 3d and fullscreen video has made advancements. I can watch Netflix in Linux, I just had to install WinXP in a VM. It's pretty round-about, but it does work and looks fine

Andy wrote:

Is dbus listed in your DAEMONS array in rc.conf?

Dbus is in rc.conf, and shows running when I run "rc.conf list". I'll try to search some more, but I think I've gone over almost everything in the Arch wiki referring to wicd. Of course, I could be completely wrong about that as well though.

Andy wrote:

I love Arch. I've been running it for two years now and only had one issue with an update (networkmanager broke).

That's cool, glad I have some company in these parts

Citizen86 wrote:
mateo wrote:

I've toyed with pretty much all of the Linux distros at one point or another.

The Beginner's Guide is pretty much foolproof...do what it tells you to do, and you can get a KDE/Gnome desktop in fairly short order.

My favorite "source" distribution is not Arch, or Gentoo, but Slackware. But Slackware is way too much like work! :)

I haven't tried Gentoo or Slackware. I have read a lot of people that like both though. What's up with Slackware being too much work though? It doesn't have the one-button update like Arch?

No, Slackware doesn't have a "one button upgrade". Not natively anyway.

If there's a Slackware package for the program, you can use pkgtool to install it. It's very basic, but it does let you tune the compile to your system a little.

There's Slapt-get, which brings APT to Slackware, but that's as close to Pacman as Slackware gets. It's not included in the distro, as it's a third party hack.

So, there's a lot of hunting down packages and compiling by hand in the Slackware world. Which is a lot of work.

Never had a faster system though. And bulletproof too. Slackware is fast and hard to kill.

Damn, now I'm talking myself back into Slacksanity!

With the advent of Unity in Ubuntu, I've seen a lot more talk about Arch.

BadMojo wrote:

With the advent of Unity in Ubuntu, I've seen a lot more talk about Arch.

True, it seems like Unity did the opposite of what many were hoping for in Ubuntu. Of course, a lot of people are saying the same thing about Gnome 3 as well

Arch is, from my perspective, Gentoo done right.

I was more or less happy with Gentoo for many years, but they started to run into governance problems and eventually technical problems as well. The wiki was lost with no proper backups, ebuilds started to languish, broken things started to make it to stable... about a year ago i'd had enough, and Arch seemed like the best choice.

Arch, like gentoo, is a rolling distribution; the idea is that everything is always as up to date as is reasonably possible. There is no "version of Arch" - there's just Arch. This is unlike most distributions, which operate with a fundamental assumption that you have to "freeze" packages and release "a version" of the distribution periodically. Gentoo, as far as I know, was the first rolling distribution to attract much attention. Arch takes the ball and runs with it.

I think Arch's biggest advantage over gentoo (other than being a seemingly better managed project) is that it defaults to using binary packages and gives you the option of building from source, whereas gentoo defaults to building from source with the option of using binaries. The Gentoo approach, with its myriad build options and esoteric combinations thereof, ensures that almost no two systems are alike. There end up being so many corner cases where portage falls down and things just break.

By giving users a default build, Arch ensures that things will more or less work properly. And realizing that sometimes building from source has value, they give you a system to build packages on your own from source when you need to, but don't encourage you to do so by default.

Arch is not a distribution for luddites. You have to either know what you're doing, or be willing to use the (exceptionally good) documentation to learn, and that's a barrier to entry that (e.g.) Ubuntu doesn't have. It's also an immense advantage for people who are willing to dig in, since they can more easily make a system that is exactly what they want.

I like Arch a lot. I know I came to the Arch game late, but I have a strong sense that Arch has positioned itself as the Linux Nerd distribution of choice. I think dramatic UI departures like Gnome 3 Shell and Unity will cause more Linux users to re-evaluate whether their current distribution is making the best choices for them, and perhaps gravitate towards a system that doesn't make many choices for you at all.

Thanks for the write-up gore! That's interesting the difference between Arch and Gentoo. I definitely like the sounds of Arch more, as it just seems more stream-lined. So far I'm really happy with Arch as well

I think I've figured out my wicd problem. First I did some more searching and found that you can put wicd in rc.conf. Not sure why I didn't put that there previously. I also removed wicd and wicd-gtk, reinstalled, and now I'm not getting an error on bootup. Actually the wireless is now connecting right away without asking for a password. I don't mind, but I guess that is there by default for security reasons? Not sure what I did to change that though.

I actually found this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.... and followed post 12 by doing this:
pacman -R wicd
rm -rf /etc/wicd /var/log/wicd /etc/dbus-1/system.d/wicd
pacman -S wicd

For the moment it seems fixed. Let's hope.

If wicd is in rc.conf it should be started as root. I guess it doesn't need a password as root.
(A regular user might need to be in the network group to be able to connect.)

Yep I haven't had an issue with wicd now. Actually since it's booting with rc.conf now, Skype and Pidgin automatically connect as soon as the desktop is loaded, which is nice.

I'm enjoying Arch a lot, although now that basically everything is installed, it's only small tweaks from here... unless I break something.

EDIT: Nevermind the following comments. There is a known bug with some of the later releases of Wine, so I'm not the only one having this problem: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?...

Anyone a gamer on Linux? I have a few decent games running well with Wine. Assassin's Creed 2 is okay, although some effects are messed up and it kind of skips every few seconds. I'm going to have to play with the settings.

Fallout New Vegas looks great. I think some of the post-processing effects might not be working, but it looks almost as good as on Windows, and runs beautifully. I very might well play through it on Linux.

Alpha Protocol also plays pretty decent, although I've only had it on for a few minutes.

One thing though, in basically every game I've tried so far. The mouse cursor likes to stay right in the center of the screen. It doesn't move, but the cursor does not disappear. Kin of frustrating, especially in FPS games. Actually, I also tried Thief Deadly Shadows, and it might not have been showing the cursor, but I can only look around until the mouse hits the left or right side of the screen. I think I had to press escape for it to work again, but it would continue to do it after that.

Any ideas about those problems? Sorry for wall of text

I just started using Arch Linux.

I'm giving myself from now until Ubuntu 12.04's release to give Arch a full-blown try. There's a definite tension between enjoying the transparent nature of Arch, and having to deal with little annoyances that I wasn't dealing with before. It's tough because pretty much all I want from my desktop environment is to work, and all of my nitpicky stuff has to do with my shell environment.

So far, pretty good.

The only thing I've dealt with that I don't yet have a solution to is that my mouse pointer would go awry when my game controllers (a 360 gamepad and a Saitek stick/throttle combo) were plugged into USB. They would not affect anything in Ubuntu but the stick axes were definitely interpreted as mouse movement when plugged in with Arch (I could actually make the mouse go left/right by moving my stick throttle forward and back).

I'm sure there's a resolution to this, but I haven't yet bothered to go find it.

I have two working DEs in Xfce 4 + Compiz, and GNOME 3.

Arch just upgraded pacman to 4.0, which adds package signing. A little wonky at the moment, but, hooray.

Not to hijack but during the coming snowstorm (if it happens) I plan on migrating my first Fedora Core 3 box to Ubuntu! I'm a bit rusty but have my notes/confs from getting webmin, samba and rsync up the last time...

Is this a server, or a desktop computer you've been punishing?

Server.

I like Debian better as a server than Ubuntu Server. The support cycles are almost as long as even the LTS releases, because the Debian release cycle is slow. It's the code that Ubuntu is based on, minus the instability and churn that Ubuntu introduces. For a desktop, Ubuntu can be quite a bit better (although I HATE HATE HATE the recent Ubuntu Unity bullsh*t), but for a server, all you get is pain for adding the Ubuntu label onto base Debian.

If you want it to be stable, run Debian Stable, which gets only security fixes, and is supported for long periods of time. (typically about four years... you'd probably get about three if you installed Stable now, because they're about a year into their next Testing cycle.)

If you want to split the difference between current software and lack of updates, run Testing, which is what will become the next Debian release. You'll get lots of updates, but if you run your updates from the name of the release, rather than the type (right now: "wheezy" rather than "testing"), then eventually the machine will settle down into a Stable install without you having to do anything other than to run updates regularly. And you can help improve the distro by filing bug reports with problematic packages as it moves toward Stable status.

If you want pretty bleeding-edge stuff, you can run Unstable, which is a constant stream of new stuff. Things break in Unstable, although it's not usually THAT bad. In exchange, you get all the newest toys to play with. It used to be that unstable would eventually become Testing, and then Stable, but if I understand the Debian page correctly, they've changed that. It appears that Unstable is always called 'sid', and it never becomes anything but Unstable, so once you've moved a box to that tree, you can't easily move back to more stable code. That's rather unfortunate, actually.

Myself, I run Testing on my personal machines, and Stable on any production box.

Malor wrote:

If you want pretty bleeding-edge stuff, you can run Unstable, which is a constant stream of new stuff. Things break in Unstable, although it's not usually THAT bad. In exchange, you get all the newest toys to play with. It used to be that unstable would eventually become Testing, and then Stable, but if I understand the Debian page correctly, they've changed that. It appears that Unstable is always called 'sid', and it never becomes anything but Unstable, so once you've moved a box to that tree, you can't easily move back to more stable code.

Sid ends up working like Arch - a rolling release - with arguably a lesser level of QA and dedication to security issues.

If you're thinking about Sid, why not try Arch instead?

Well I just completed the conversion of the first box. This is the mp3 'backup' server, it's almost the same as the main mp3 box but it's only used to rsync the main box /mp3 directory to the /backup directory.

The hardest part was sometime in the past 3 years (my last set of notes was then) the CDROM had died, it was powered but not functioning so I couldn't boot from it and the system is too old to boot from USB. I had recently cleaned the garage and threw away about 6 IDE CDROM/DVD drives so thought I was going to have to do the production box first but then I remembered the WHS box had an IDE DVD but wasn't powered because it is stuffed with HD's. After those few hours I was actually in the install routine of Ubuntu. Selected OpenSSH and Samba along with manual packages which I then used to confirm that rsync was included with the 'default' and away the install went.
I just finished up the post install work of doing the following:
Configured root to have a password
Added the striped array on the non-system disks to fstab
Added the NFS mapped drive to fstab
Installed NFS
Installed webmin
At that point I was able to do an rsync life is good. But for 'emergencies' I like to have samba for the windows clients to use and I had my old conf file, swapped those out and restarted (forgot to create the user in the conf file so did this and restarted again) and that was working.
Installed NTP and configured it for the US pool servers.
For a little polish I added the webmin repositories to the sources.list.

Now I feel confident enough to do the main box.