My arch linux experiment

[snoopy]

I'm installing & configuring arch. I got tired of xubuntu. My plan is to run openbox without anything else under it. Anyone have any recommendations relative to how they think I should configure it & what software I should run on it?

I need to make decisions about what music player to use, figure out how to set my background & furthermore configure keyboard shortcuts, icon theme, X startup programs, and menus. I have an openbox theme and GTK+ theme configured.

PS: remember my plan to install 10.04 and stay with that until the support ended? lol.

[Isaac]

oh! I've heard lots about Arch but I haven't had the time to throw myself into it.

[snoopy]

It reminds me of way back in the day when I first tried red hat, minus the frustrating lack of hardware support (so far- I haven't actually gotten my sound cards going yet, but also haven't really tried either) in that it boots to a command prompt, and installs the bare minimum (no Xorg) by default. You then have to manually choose the majority of what you want to have installed. I like it because I like to tinker and manually configure. I also don't have a dire need for productivity at the moment (okay, so maybe I will next week when I have my final) but in general it's a good time to get myself another computer tinkering project.

Also, I'm going away from a taskbar, etc & am just gonna run the right-click menu that comes with openbox. For some devious reason, one of my goals is to make the thing baffling for windows users to figure out, while still looking good doing it. I like to be different for different's sake.

[Xamindar]

I just recently installed arch on one of my machines as well and so far I love it. It seems to be similar to Gentoo (distro I have used for the past 7 years) but without the long compile times and modified config files. Pacman and emerge work very much the same, both of which are derived from the bsd ports system. One of the main things I like about Arch and Gentoo is that they are rolling release systems meaning they always have updated packages. I could never get used to release cycles of other distros and always found release upgrades to break a lot of things. Going from Ubuntu 9 something on my wife's computer to 10.4 broke language support.

Also, the minimal system is nice. I can install only what I want and need, less wasted space.

Snoopy, check out the arch wiki. It has a lot of step by step instructions to getting things working. I found Xorg really easy to set up compared to how it used to be. Most settings in xorg are autodetected these days. To get sound working install the alsa packages and run alsaconfig.

[Skyalmian]

I've been using Arch Linux 64 since April 10, 2010. I went with an openbox (window manager) + tint2 (taskbar / panel) + thunar (file manager) setup as seen a gazillion times in all the monthly Arch Screenshots threads... No login manager, just ~/.xinit ("xinit") entered manually in console.

Things can only really get messed up package-wise if you add a lot of repositories or have them in weird orders...

I used to have the setup on paper but converted it to a document... "hal" was out of place and I since moved it; that's deprecated in favor of "udev" anyway but a signifant number of applications still use it...

[*poof*]

To get sound working install the alsa packages and run alsaconfig.

Yes...don't miss any. For a long while only one application was able to output sound at a time and I didn't do anything about it because I thought it was an inherent ALSA issue, but then went and looked again and installing everything with "alsa" attached corrected that. If I'm not mistaken it's just the 4 listed in the image under "Core".

Err...

Code: Select all

[skyalmian@alcyone ~]$ pacman -Qs alsa
local/alsa-firmware 1.0.23-1
    ALSA firmware package
local/alsa-lib 1.0.23-1
    An alternative implementation of Linux sound support
local/alsa-oss 1.0.17-1
    OSS compatibility library
local/alsa-plugins 1.0.23-1
    Extra alsa plugins
local/alsa-utils 1.0.23-2
    An alternative implementation of Linux sound support
local/lib32-alsa-lib 1.0.23-2 (lib32)
    An alternative implementation of Linux sound support (32 bit)
local/lib32-alsa-plugins 1.0.23-2 (lib32)
    Extra alsa plugins

I did get The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion working flawlessly via WINE...however, the 64-bit support recently added in WINE apparently has broken many formerly-working installers due to incorrect version & other errors... Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 (32-bit) used to install for instance so I could use the Oblivion Mod Manager Extended but now neither 32- nor 64-bit as well as installing Oblivion itself works (/resorted to a zipped extractable Windows install with exported registry install settings so it works)...

what music player to use

LnF Awards 2010 - The best Light & Fast apps of 2010

[snoopy]

Nice.
I think I'm going to grab nitrogen to set my background. I tried Xsetroot, and it's not working to my satisfaction (as in, really at all). I'm trying to stay away from any taskbars, so I'm going to try to stay away from tint2.... I might end up grabbing it, though, we'll see.

Yeah, alsa still isn't working for me after an alsaconfig. I'll investigate packages. I also couldn't compile wine this morning, so I need to check out dependencies for that- it wants 32bit libraries.

[Xamindar]

it wants 32bit libraries.

Yeah that's one thing I noticed about the 64 bit version of arch.....there are no 32 bit libraries installed by default. I have seen mention of 32 bit compat libraries in the pacman repository for using non-64 bit browser plugins and 3d games (descent 3) but I haven't looked into it much myself yet.

[snoopy]

I need to do a bit of homework for the audio player in that I'm hoping to hook it into conky, and I'm also wondering about launching it without the window decorations like I've seen in some screenshots.

I also need to learn about how to park stuff that I launch without decorations in the place and at the size that I want.

This is fun. (Except for having to go to work when I could be tinkering with my computer.)

[Skyalmian]

This is very recent; new: multilib repository: Feedback & Notification Thread. Correction: \"[multilib] is 32-bit apps built to work with 64-bit Arch. They're being moved out of [community] so that the 3 main and 1 extra repos (testing, core, extra, community) are purely 64-bit for 64-bit Arch, and purely 32-bit for 32-bit Arch (let's ignore grub for now).\"

[Jeff250]

I've been interested in Arch for the same reasons people like it in this thread (e.g., it's minimalist, namely no fracking pulseaudio or compiz unless you want it). The rolling package release cycle has also been touted as an advantage, but it's also what worries me. Are the packages more regression prone? Or, for instance, how would, say, an update from gnome 2.28 to 2.30 be handled? If this was pushed out in the middle of a project or semester, would I be able to *easily* avoid it while still upgrading other packages? Also, how does Arch compare to, say, debian unstable? Anyone's thoughts would be appreciated on any of these questions.

[Xamindar]

Or, for instance, how would, say, an update from gnome 2.28 to 2.30 be handled? If this was pushed out in the middle of a project or semester, would I be able to *easily* avoid it while still upgrading other packages?

All gnome packages of the next version will be dumped into the repositories at once so when you do the update you will get a whole bunch of packages that will update.

If you didn't want to update the gnome packages but still wanted everything else to update there is a way to block updates for certain packages. I haven't looked into it on arch but I know it is there. Gentoo has a similar thing called package masks.

Basicly a rolling release is constantly updated by the most recent stable (or they should be) version of every software you have installed as long as the dependancies are satisfied. If you really want to get adventurous you can set it to the unstable repository which will give you even more up to date packages but you will run into a lot of bugs and broken things.

[Xamindar]

This is very recent; new: multilib repository: Feedback & Notification Thread. Correction: "[multilib] is 32-bit apps built to work with 64-bit Arch. They're being moved out of [community] so that the 3 main and 1 extra repos (testing, core, extra, community) are purely 64-bit for 64-bit Arch, and purely 32-bit for 32-bit Arch (let's ignore grub for now)."

Bleh, only reason I wanted to get a little 32 was to install flash. For some reason arch chose to make it almost impossible to install 32 bit flash on a 64 bit system. The wiki is even completely wrong refering to packages that no longer exist. Gentoo has them beat in this regard.

Anyway, I ended up just installing chromium and using html5 for youtube videos. It's the only reason I wanted flash anyway. The day flash is no longer needed can't come soon enough.

[snoopy]

I gotta agree with you, X, on flash. I don't like it.

I my the machine pretty well set up now. Ftp, mythtv, lirc, media player, ssh, etc. all up to my liking.

Even with all of those daemons, uses less than 400mb of my ram.