After having a lot of fun installing things on Ubuntu that worked with no problems at all, including the latest xgl-cvs and compiz THAT OTHER DISTROS DON’T EVEN HAVE (/me glares at debian), I decided that I wanted to play a bit more with Linux, that I wanted something like a challenge, just to learn more.
I tried a lot of distros, Debian Etch (the gui installer as of when I tried it, sucked, nvidia is unstable and xgl doesn’t even exist on the repos), Gentoo (Just what I wanted, too much time compiling, though), and finally Arch Linux 0.7.2.
Installation:
Got the Full Install ISO, burned it to a cd and booted, plain init, no fancy shit, the installer was a bit confusing at the start but it’s pretty quick and gets the job done in a hurry. Even when I got the Full install I didn’t want to select all the packages so I just installed the Base, then the kernel and finally the grub, all this install took less than 15 minutes to complete, then I took me to a place where I could edit the config files, I was a little bit annoyed at first since I was used to get everything working out of the box but it was easy though after reading the config file instructions.
When I rebooted all I got was the linux CLI, but damn, IT WAS FAST. Now all I had to do was install the gui, but first edit the pacman.conf file to enable the community and extra repo. The config file was clean enough to understand it all, and the command to install everything was easy:
pacman -Sy gnome gnome-extra kdebase gdm nvidia codecs
This command looks simple, right?, well, it checks the repos, installs kde and gnome, the gdm login manager, the nvidia drivers, and ALL the multimedia codecs. All I had to do after the install was adding gdm to the daemons on rc.conf.
And there it is, a fully functional Arch Linux Desktop system, all the packages were cutting edge and I’ve had no problems with it whatsoever.
Packing system:
They have a lot of packages, but if you can’t find something, http://aur.archlinux.org will teach you the Arch way, making arch packages is incredibly easy and you can upload them there and share it with others!, I was able to install the latest Amarok-svn and amule-cvs with kad support with a simple PKGBUILD (if you read more about it you’ll find that it’s so easy that makes .deb look like crap).
More info at: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS_-_The_Arch_Build_System
Help and Support:
Are you a newb? still don’t understand anything?, no problem!!!. The Arch wiki has a nice howto’s for almost anything, but if you still need more help you can go to their forums where people is all friendly and helps you to solve your problems (if they know how do it). So we can say that the Arch community is very cool, and is very noob-friendly.
Final Thoughts:
This distro is FAST, with a very established community, and it’s the only (after ubuntu) that feels like home for me, I recommend it to everyone with a basic knowledge of linux.
