I’m tired of spam. More than that I’m tired of this “blog”. Even more than that, I’m tired of not doing anything with a “neat” url. I will be removing this blog sometime in the next few weeks. It might be replaced by a place holder for a while or possibly something else. If you have any great ideas for what it should be, please comment. thanks.

After almost 2 weeks of Ubuntu 8.10 I finally decided enough was enough. I just don’t like Ubuntu and it’s “ease of use”. It made me feel more limited than anything. I am clearly not the target audience for that particular distribution. So, I went right on ahead and installed Arch Linux. During the install, I didn’t need to worry about the SSD optimizations as I have the HDD version. I didn’t dink around with the 2008.6 install .img. Instead I searched for an install disk with 2.6.27 on it, I found one <link>here</link>. It worked as expected, with one minor issue. The sources didn’t automatically mount, so the installer failed. It was an easy fix which was solved by following the <link>wiki</link> article found <link>here</link>. As for the things that don’t work, suspend. Has it ever worked for me? No. I am not even willing to spend the time to get it to work. Arch is plenty quick enough booting and shutting down that I don’t really need suspend for anything. The mic, webcam, sound, headphone jack, usb, work as expected. I have not tried to get the card readers to work. I will update this when I have a reason to use the card readers. It runs a full blown desktop environment, in this case Gnome, just fine. I chose to go with Fluxbox. It suites my needs very well. If you’re thinking about putting Arch Linux on one of these things, go for it! It works as you would expect it to! Next on my list of things to do, buy another one and install FreeBSD. Of course if you have one and have installed FreeBSD on it, please comment and let me know. Thank you.

I haven’t seen war cost a dollar, but I’ve seen it cost a life.

I read alot of Linux related news and articles. Why is it people find it so hard when trying to convince people to switch over to Linux that the chances of them being programmers is almost zero? Here’s a little stat, of the Windows users I know who ask frequently about switching to Linux, none of them even remotely care about programming. They just want an operating system that gives them more than what their current one has to offer. Most of them don’t even care what office suite it has, AbiWord is almost always sufficient enough for their needs. They don’t want to use the command line, I can understand that. Given the current technology there should be no need to. They aren’t system administrators regardless of what Windows labels their user account. They are basic internet users. They watch YouTube, listen to mp3s, watch DVDs. Chat with their friends and family. Check email, you get the point. They don’t know what sysctl is, nor do they ever want to learn. They don’t care what BASH is. To them it’s the “dos thingy” that they never use in Windows, so why should they use it in Linux? They care about a clean user interface. They don’t want to “RTFM”, or “RTFW”. They want a working system. Explain to them how drivers for their hardware updates AUTOMATICALLY. That they don’t have to goto every website known to man to update it. Explain that their software updates AUTOMATICALLY, and they don’t have to track down new versions and uninstall/reinstall them each time. To the average user it doesn’t matter what version of gcc is on the machine. Explain to them that their iPod will work without iTunes. Explain to them that most modern WiFi cards work without problems. Don’t explain to them how much more superior the network stack in Linux is. They don’t care about what GDM or KDM are, it’s just the login screen. Are you getting my point yet?

Okay I’ll continue. I think the biggest habit for Windows users to break would have to be downloading installers for applications. It does take some getting used to simplifying your life by going to one central place to find a program. I also understand it’s difficult to check a box and hit ‘apply’ to install it. Pretty tough stuff, yep, that’s Linux, it’s hard. What about multiple desktops? How many Windows users could benifit from that! Work on one, play on another, nobody needs to know! Oh no, my Linux system broke! Not a problem, it’s amazing the number of people who actually work on the operating system that are readily available for help. Not to mention all the users willing to help. Really if one wanted to, they could pay for support as well. (Dummies.) At any rate, if you want Linux to get its share of the desktop market, market it to desktop users.

Arch Linux is an awesome distribution. I think it is one of the best distributions available. It doesn’t receive a lot of press so maybe you have overlooked it. So fire up Virtualbox and check it out. You can read their official “about” page here. Arch could really be summed up in a few sentences. Here are some of the highlights:

• i686 optimized
• HIGHLY customizable
• One of (if not the) best package managers around

I would rather not bore you with the install details, because to be honest, if you’ve installed one or two distros you’ve basically installed them all. Some of the nicer things about the Arch installer are, installs in less than 5 minutes, and it leaves you with a basic install. Yep, no user accounts during install, no gui setup etc. Why is this nice? Simplicity. It gives you what amounts to total control over what you want out of your system. The base install installs things like pacman a binary package manager. Most of your networking needs, dhclient, pppoe, wpa_supplicant, etc.. It lets you decide the rest. If you want a full blown KDE, GNOME, or LXDE desktop fine. One simple command and you have what you want. pacman -S <package>. ie: pacman -S kde would install kde. If you want to setup a web server, no problem. Arch Linux works on a rolling release system, which means no waiting 6 months, 12 months, or in some cases years for another release. pacman -Syu and your system will be up to date. Up to date? Are the packages out dated? No, I would say 95% of packages in the repos are whatever is the current stable version of the application. Arch tries to use as few patches in the packages as possible, when you install Gnome you won’t get an ugly brown theme, just the standard Gnome theme. ;) We won’t even get into how easy it is to build your own packages, or choose thousands of others from source. See ABS. Excellent for those extremly rare times you can’t find what you’re looking for in one of the repos. In Arch one of the biggest things you will notice is the speed. I know   of people will argue this, i686 vs i386 optimized.. To those that have their doubts, I ask you to try Arch Linux. You will notice a difference. It could be due to the simple BSD style init system, or the boot scripts, I don’t really know, nor do I honestly care to take the time to find out. The init system is rocks though. Instead of /etc/rc.d/… you have a few simple config files, one of the bigger ones being /etc/rc.conf if you are familar with the BSD’s then you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you are simply missing out. Arch Linux could be a little daunting for some. After the install you are left with nothing except a command line where you login as root and setup your own users adding each to user to whatever groups you want them to have permission to eg: gpasswd -a <user> audio. The wiki has a very good Beginners Guide, as well as excellent documentation for everything else. Just like with every other distribution if you can’t find what you’re looking for there, the IRC channel, or forums are another excellent resource for quick information. Okay so with all the positive there is also some negative. Yes, even though I hate to admit it, it wouldn’t be fair to leave these things out. Arch breaks. With packages that are very current, occasionally things break. Most of the time there is a warning on the Arch home page stating packages that could potentially break your system if upgraded. With that said, every setup is different so some things may be work flawlessly on one system but not on another. This however is the case with every operating system, and is not Arch Linux specific. I currently have 3 Arch setups running, a web server, desktop, and my laptop. They are all very easy to maintain. As stable as I want them to be, and everything I could ask for in Linux. I have read some other reviews claiming Arch to not be for beginners. I disagree with this. Arch Linux is for anyone that wants to use it. Whether it’s your first Linux install, or your 200 millionth. It is of course free. It’s probably the best distribution you’ve never heard of. How many times have you referred to something in /usr/doc? Probably never. I may have twice. I can’t be sure though. Either way you will not find it in Arch. It tends to leave things you will probably never use out. Which I like. I like my disk space not being consumed by things I don’t want. I have also read in various places that Arch is based on CRUX. I would like to point out this is not true. It borrowed a few ideas from CRUX but Arch was written completely from scratch by Judd Vinet (who by the way, I read can lift a car over his head? If you have pictures, I would love to see them). The best thing in my opinion borrowed from CRUX was KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid. The configuration scripts should be proof enough of that. If you’re scared of VI, don’t worry there is nano. If you’re scared of the command line, don’t be, there is plenty of easy, straight to the point documentation.

Okay now I guess with a post entitled “Why I use Arch Linux” I should explain. I used to distro hop alot, I mean alot, 10-20 distros a month. I used to always fall back to Debian. It was my crutch, my favorite distro. I still love Debian, but Arch gives me more. With Arch I feel that it is MY system. Not someone elses OS that I’m lending my computer to.