Arch Linux 0.7 was finally released today after delays waiting for kernel 2.6.10 (waiting for Reiser4 support that didn’t happen). There are mirrors, torrents, and also docs.
For those who don’t know, Arch is an advanced Linux distribution blending the simplicity of Slackware and package management of Debian in it’s lean framework. This release uses the 2.6.10 kernel with the -as patchset and the new 4.2 release of the XFCE desktop environment among other current versions of well known apps. New Arch users can then edit /etc/pacman.conf to enable the -Current and -Extra trees and download them. Editor’s Take: A fantastic distribution, but it requires a substantial initial involvement by semi-advanced users to bring the distro to the wished configuration. After this point is passed, Arch will not dissapoint.
Arch Linux 0.7-“Wombat” Hits the Torrents
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
someone could shed some light on my ignorance and explain wich are the advantages of having “kernel with the -as patchset”?
If you had clicked the second link you would have read about it.
cool! just started downloading it, i love trying new distros. this is gonna be fun since i haven’t tried reiser4 yet and i haven’t used the xfce 4.2 final. i used rc1 and 2.
I just installed Arch about a week ago (moving from Gentoo). I throughly enjoy it for several reasons: The packages are bleeding edge, but stable, the community is extremely helpful and active, (as a former Gentoo user) speed without having to wait for an -O3 compile to finish, and general ease of use. I don’t mean ease of use in the point-and-click sense, but rather in simple configuration files that are commented well.
Arch is definately worth a try for people who have a little experience using the Linux CLI and want a learn and mean i686-optimized OS.
Has anyone compared these two? They sound similar.
No, they don’t really. Ubuntu is the desktop version of Debian. Arch would be more suitable compared to Debian itself, but not to Ubuntu.
As a note: It’s recommended that you grab the arch-0.7-base.iso, and then fetch all the packages you need from the repos using pacman. This way you’re not downloading extra stuff.
I’ve been running it for over six month and it is very nice. There is also a completely new library backend for the package manager in the works and a new web interface for the users PKGBUILDs is very close to get online.
I used to switch from one distro to another, and I finally found my home with arch. I tried debian, mdk, gentoo, redhat, fedora, mepis, knoppix, slackware, yoper, linspire, lycoris, ark and onebase.
Arch beats them all : bleedging up-to-date, stable, KISS, lot of packages, VERY good package management (including recursive dependency uninstalling – not just install – while preserving dependencies installed by the user), easy to make your own package, and binary AND source package management !
This week (or maybe last week) I’ve been running Arch for a year, and I’m very pleased. No, the packages are not always very stable. Every few weeks something breaks, but recovery is usually quite fast.
Still, I’m very happy about it. 686 binary packages for most things, and easy to modify the build scripts to roll your own packages whenever needed.
arch is great, I had a lot of fun with it. I recommend everyone to try it. If you would like to learn about linux but don’t have enough time / computing power to install gentoo, arch is for you. Pacman is wonderfull and freakin fast!
What language is pacman written in?
It’s written in C if I remember correctly.
I’m very curious about the mention of reiser4… I’m not sure if it’s stable though, regardless of it being in the vanilla kernel.
Anyway, other than that Arch is simply great. It’s young and has a lot of potential.
I’ve used it on and off since 0.5 and it has come a long way.
Plus xfce4 4.2 is sooooo nice. I love it. (file manager still needs work though)
Waiting for Reiser4 support that didn’t happen?
Oh please – it’s rather obvious that Reiser4 won’t make it into the official kernel anytime soon. If you don’t think so please read this article about Linus Torvalds and Hans Reiser et al. discussing reiser4: http://kerneltrap.org/node/3736 .
Since XFCE 4.2 is more than fresh it might be a better explanation for the delays.
i havent tried arch in a while, but i remember it not having the number of available packages that ubuntu has. this is obviously because ubuntu has access to debian’s packages.
as eugenia stated arch requires a certain level of understanding regarding configuration of the system using config files and the command line. ubuntu, and debian in general, attempt to save you the hassle of tweaking every little config file.
With the other Linux distros I tried it was just ordinary messing arround.
With Arch it was love at first sight, I just knew right away I had found the perfect distro for me.
I’ve been on Arch since Dec. 2002. It’s just the greatest combination of simplicity/elegance/speed/control (a la Slackware) and dependency-resolving package management (a la Debian). I’ve tried so many other distros, but none comes close to Arch’s blazing speed and user friendliness (user friendly if you know what you’re doing, I mean…ya dig?).
Everyone should try it!
I swear, Slackware did more on default! I don’t understand this “do it yourself” methodology. WHy do I have to type in /dev/hdb1 into grub.conf when Anaconda or whatever could do it without me asking?
Yes, the daily packages are nice but Debian sid/ubuntu hoary have packages everyday too…
it is mentioned in the 2.6.9-mm1 changelog:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/4040
also there is this thread:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/4058
— Judd Vinet <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 03:51:26PM -0800, hyp0luxa
> > wrote:
> > it’s looking like reiesr4 will be included in
> > 2.6.10.
> > any thoughts on waiting, so that reiser4 can be an
> > installer option? i know that 0.7 has been held up
> > for
> > some time, but it would suck if reiser4 was
> > included
> > in mainline soon after 0.7 was released.
>
> Hmm, is there a post or something that confirms
> this? If so, I’ll hold
> off 0.7 til 2.6.10 comes out.
>
> – J
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> arch mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch/2004-November/002712.html
And it’s not just that. Having access to CD, digital cameras, sound, scanners etc, require quite some work on hotplug’s and devfs/udev’s scripts.
These are the points that Arch needs to work more in order to evolve to the modern today: user convenience for trivial things. From the moment Arch will have master this too, it will be the day that it will have come of age.
Well, it’s really not that hard if you have some understanding of how Linux works. And really, not that much at all. I knew a bit here and there before I started with Arch, and I still don’t know a ton, but I have a nice general understanding now.
I know what my computer is doing and why, now. I can’t express how helpful this is when something breaks or I need new functionality. It sure doesn’t hurt my peace of mind, either.
It’s like restaurants. I won’t eat in the vast majority of them now that I’ve worked in a few (I’ll spare your bubble). I know the shortcuts and dumb hacks that get made, and most of them aren’t even necessary for my system, so why have them?
Meh, patch with supermount. Leave Frugalware and Project dEv to that, I’d prefer Arch carry on as the antithesis of user friendly. I think it’s better to have a strong, absolutely minimal foundation for these other projects to build upon.
> I’d prefer Arch carry on as the antithesis of user friendly.
User friendly DOES NOT mean bloated foundation as you imply. BeOS was NOT bloated, and yet was ULTRA user-friendly. And it’s not just on Arch’s hand to become user friendly. The authors of these utilities, like Hotplug or udev, must come with better defaults, *or* levels of defaults. Arch does not have to sacrifice anything to become more user-friendly. It just needs to work with these developers and ask for the right evolution path and then get it implemented.
I am afraid that I get the feeling of some snobbism on your part. Just like many users of a particular distro in the past: they WANTED their distro to be difficult to use, so only the few, geeks, would be able to use it. It gives them a feeling of superioty, a kind of status among the selected few. And I firmly believe, this is WRONG behavior.
Computers are tools. Tools that are hard to use *for no good reason*, are bad tools. End of story.
>>Tools that are hard to use *for no good reason*, are bad >>tools. End of story.
Er not quite…a tool used for something that it was not designed for is not bad
and don’t confuse “for no good reason” with
“i don’t understand the reason”
manual configuration allows greater flexibilty
for adapting a configuration to unusual hardware or
configurations. I use a user-friendly distro which
I love(Vectorlinux) but even there the auto tool
don’t always do what I want and I have to edit
config files manually.
Still I see nothing wrong with say suggested deafualts,
or a default install tool for beginners.
Still runs like new, fully updated, and uses the same diskspace it did when I started (a little more cause I have like 4 DE’s installed).
Period
Krell, you don’t get it. NOBODY said to take away the manual configuration OPTION. What I DID say is about BETTER DEFAULTS to *minimize* the need to edit a conf file.
>Er not quite…a tool used for something that it was not designed for is not bad
No, I do not agree. A tool is a tool, no matter for what it was designed for. If the tool is hard to use, even for the task it was designed to do, it is still a bad tool.
Please use the right subject when replying.
i was using Slackware before Patrick got sick
then i questioned the future of Slackware and decided to try some other distro
i tried several but ArchLinux is simply the best at keeping everything updated kiss style
i’m sticking with it =:D
Perhaps there is some snobbism, but I certainly don’t intend it that way.
No, I don’t think user friendly necessarily means bloated. As I said in my Ubuntu preview, I was impressed with how light it is for how user friendly it manages to be (though still not light enough to satisfy my craving for the extreme).
I say this because I honestly think that NOT catering to the average user will allow the user friendly distros to do their job better, and stay lighter in doing so. Sure, Arch could probably support automatic configuring and mounting of storage devices in a couple weeks if the developers set their minds to it. But what about when the distribution starts growing around that ability, and a better method comes about? I sincerely believe this will lead to Debian-esque release cycles. Plus users who do want to configure these things themselves will have to wade through what’s already there, and these are the users Arch currently caters to.
By the way, I don’t know if you were using it at this point (it was shortly after I moved to it), but Arch has been doing good things towards working defaults with the likes of the addition of the audio group for Alsa. This happened pre-0.7 beta1 and makes it worlds easier to setup Alsa with Udev. The same goes for the initscripts, more often than not you need to do little more than add a script to the daemon array in rc.conf, and occassionally add a sleep command to the script for the sake of hotplug. I think Arch developers take a firm hand exactly where they need to.
The one thing I see lacking is the default kernel, which takes some time trying to load things like PCIE. Switching to a custom built kernel cut my post-POST boot time in about half.
No, I do not agree. A tool is a tool, no matter for what it was designed for. If the tool is hard to use, even for the task it was designed to do, it is still a bad tool.
Ok, maybe we need to ask ourselves what this tool is meant to do. Is it meant to be a tool to be used as a desktop distribution, for all the content creation and office tasks people use? Or is it meant to be a tool for building that tool itself, and others such as server distributions, for example? Personally, I think it’s meant to be a building block, and a user can certainly use it for their own personal system, but that’s not going to be your average user. Where Arch is really going to be shine is in the building of Ubuntu and Libranet like distributions. In this sense, well… I already explained my stand on this. The more minimalistic it is the more you can do with it with fewer compatability compromises.
>The more minimalistic it is the more you can do with it with fewer compatability compromises.
Yes, but no one said about bloating the distro with new packages. What we did say is working WITH the authors of the importat utilities for better defaults. Better defaults means less command line work for any user, including the advanced user. I am saying it again: making Arch user-friendly the right way, DOES NOT involve making it bloated, or less compatible, or whatever else you try to point out here.
I am saying it again: making Arch user-friendly the right way, DOES NOT involve making it bloated, or less compatible, or whatever else you try to point out here.
Without a doubt. I just think they should limit this to /dev, initscripts, and the kernel as much as possible. Autodetection is debatable, perhaps it should be an optional package group beyond the installation CD.
Well i’m a current arch Linux intensive user. Since last 2/3 months arch binary packages are really bad!Lot’s of broken packages wich causes system instability, and some other problems! Anybody with similar experience?
RE: By Eugenia
And it’s not just that. Having access to CD, digital cameras, sound, scanners etc, require quite some work on hotplug’s and devfs/udev’s scripts.>>>
being i have a digital camera that depends on hotplug working, and i am not script writing genius i may have to bow out of using Arch because my digital camera is someting i really like to use, same with my flatbed camera on USB…
fixing to kill my bit torrent connection and delete a arch ISO, me sticks with slackware for a while longer…
You can use them. You just need to add/modify scripts on several locations, like on udev or hotplug (hotplug, as instructed on libgphoto’s website). It’s not difficult, but it IS involved. That’s what I mean when I say that better defaults are needed. There is no excuse for the owner of the computer with physical access to it, to not be able to use his/her camera or scanner. The “security” excuse does not hold up for this kind of thing.
the only bad packaged i found was aMule
it was compiled with wxGTK linked to GTK2 when it should be linked to GTK1 since version 2.4.2 of wxGTK has problems with GTK2
this is really a problem with wxGTK and not with arch
anyway i re-compiled wxGTK with GTK1 and now aMule is fine
didn’t have problems with any other package
what packages are you refering to ?
For alot of the common configs that need done, there are step-by-step wikis made up.
Arch is very elegant and I’ve learned quite a bit from it’s approach. I set up my Arch system in less than an hour doing an FTP install and installing all the packages I want and doing all the configs. It’s not bad, it just requires that you know what you’re doing. It’s not automated, and there’s no hand-holding going on. Do check out the Wiki before you declare it a lost cause, though. It’s very transparent.
As for the binary package quality, there was a time up until about 2 months ago, where I was having problems, but a new package submission system seems to have fixed the issues.
Arch is a great opportunity to learn about Linux and, IMO, the best distro out there.
You’re probably right, after all, you know much more about this stuff than me
It’s just that whenever I hear the words user friendly mentioned I start to get all worried about my precious distribution. And honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what you were getting at until the last couple posts.
Better defaults means less command line work for any user, including the advanced user. I am saying it again: making Arch user-friendly the right way, DOES NOT involve making it bloated, or less compatible, or whatever else you try to point out here.
i agree completely. the need to configure almost every little thing is what turned me away from distributions like arch and gentoo on the desktop. yes, you can look in the wiki or look in the forums for the instructions on how to configure something and then hand edit the config files yourself. perhaps the distribution would be wise to look at some of these howtos and docs and instead of leaving them as docs, incorporate the changes into the default installation of the package. while you may not be able to provide for every configuration possibility, a good default could be used. this is exactly what Eugenia is asking for, and is what other desktop distributions do. just because its user friendly does not mean its out to accomodate every user.
It’s a policy. Arch has everything off by default, as a policy. Some of us use it partially for that very reason. Arch is not meant for user friendlyism; it’s meant for people who know what they’re doing and want to efficiently control their system.
Don’t wine about bad defaults. It has the best defaults you can ask for:
off.
I used Arch for roughly nine months, building and upgrading packages from source. While initially my experience using the distro was positive – the development team at that time kept the Arch package repositories in reasonably good shape – it soured at a critical point and never righted itself. At the time I left Arch, the condition of the package builds would have made even stones cry. The development team, adolescent in the main, seemed entirely beyond itself keeping the most basic packages buildable. Two major system tragedies were enough for me.
Anyone migrating to Arch from Gentoo should expect little from this distro. Doing the small things well seems to get lost in an environment much too laden with immaturity and impulsivity. Perhaps a solution would be to offer Arch with an age limit, say 20 or 21.
jlowell
http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/install/arch-install-guide.h…
I’m not an expert but using Debian and being confused by a lot of rc*.d directory with a lot of symlinks to /etc/init.d it seems the Arch way is a simple way to do it.
Any thoughts ?
Well I must say that you do need a little work done in order to set up some hardware in Arch. However, is it really that critical? After all you only configure it just once.
Also I was having an “Arch Control Panel” project in mind for a while now, which I will try implementing myself using probably Python. Will anyone be interested in such a thing, by the way?
Nothing against the distro/Linux but just that Wombat sounds more like a virus…! Dont know why but the first thing that came to my mind after reading Wombat was ‘another virus??’
Guess I am using too much of Windoze these days
then you should get the idea that Arch is a bleeding edge distro. Being such a thing, sometimes means bugs in packages.
don’t say you weren’t warned:
http://www.archlinux.org/~jason/newsletters/newsletter-2005-Jan-16….
I’m using Arch one year and I was always able to fix the minor problems I encountered
I am afraid that I get the feeling of some snobbism on your part. Just like many users of a particular distro in the past: they WANTED their distro to be difficult to use, so only the few, geeks, would be able to use it. It gives them a feeling of superioty, a kind of status among the selected few. And I firmly believe, this is WRONG behavior.
First of all, being a user of the distro you are refering to I am quite offended. Secondly, you are totally and utterly wrong. Your opinion on why users do not want to change (a feeling of superiority) is just lame. Some users don’t want a one-size-fits-all distro, and that’s what you get when you dumb things down to the point that anyone can just press a button and install on OS. A user should have a basic understanding of what is going on. There are just too many options to include all of them and still be simple and if you eliminate some options you are eliminating your loyal, and intelligent userbase. Being an open and free project also means that commercial idiocy does NOT have to be catered to and this is a good thing, not a bad thing. It gives the users what they want, a fast, free, and flexible GNU/Linux distribution.
Computers are tools. Tools that are hard to use *for no good reason*, are bad tools. End of story.
True, but that’s not the case. They may be too difficult to use for some people, but then that’s not who is being catered to. This is not a popularity contest. No one cares (except maybe you) that some joe shmoe cannot learn how to use grub, which is so simple if you spend five minutes with it anyway. Distro’s that make you go through that are not looking for average users and it’s stupid to criticize them for not catering to a market that they DON’T want to cater to. It’s their decidion and it’s not a publicly owned entity that has to please its stockholders or anyone else for that matter.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, if you think X distro is too hard to use then go use another one. There are plenty of Fedora/Suse/Mandrake type distributions out there to choose from.
http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/install/arch-install-guide.h…..
I’m not an expert but using Debian and being confused by a lot of rc*.d directory with a lot of symlinks to /etc/init.d it seems the Arch way is a simple way to do it.
Any thoughts ?
I like this way too:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=…
Has any user actually settled on a distro and left it alone so they can be productive with it and not constantly reinstalling or tweaking it? I’ve been messing with various distros and am pretty settled in with Ubuntu now. Now it’s time to DO something with it.
I’ve settled on Arch-Linux for more than a year now with the very same installation…
I was switching distros almost every week before…
Well the comment I was going to post was almost literally allready posted.
Arch is dedicated to making the defaults as the original author of the software intended for them to be. And that’s the way it should be!
I moved to arch after getting sick of gentoo, and other distro’s ‘isms’. Redhat-isms Gentoo-isms .. It got old fast.
Arch is the best distro for experienced users who don’t mind setting things up as if they compiled it themselves. It’s great!
I keep a Slackware partition that has been there for awhile (8.0 I think). I do keep it updated to current now all the time. I have another HD that I use for trying different distros. I installed Arch again last night (had tried it a year ago or so) just to try it out again. I will poke around at it for awhile until I decide to change it again. So yes, some of us that hop distros do have a distro that they do actually use for productive things.
It’s a policy. Arch has everything off by default, as a policy. Some of us use it partially for that very reason. Arch is not meant for user friendlyism; it’s meant for people who know what they’re doing and want to efficiently control their system.
Don’t wine about bad defaults. It has the best defaults you can ask for:
off.
Providing useful scripts for udev has nothing to do with “turning everything to off”. If that was the case, you would have to write all the scripts by yourself.
I like ArchLinux. It has a lot of potential: it could easily become one of the Top 5 distros. I am currently evaluating Debian and I must say that Arch is definitely ahead in cleaness and rapidity of development. However, it seems to me that the devs don’t really want to fix the little annoyances or the poor QA that would improve the experience of the users that are less involved in the community. I can deal with bugs and annoyances but I don’t always have the time to. The sad thing is that most of these issues could be fixed without bloating the distro… and by keeping everything “off”, like you said.
I’m not an expert but using Debian and being confused by a lot of rc*.d directory with a lot of symlinks to /etc/init.d it seems the Arch way is a simple way to do it.
Any thoughts ?
I prefer Arch’s init system to init.d. It is similar to the new one in NetBSD:
http://www.mewburn.net/luke/papers/rc.d.pdf
—
One improvement I would like to see in pacman is AND-based searching instead of OR-based. E.g. when I type:
pacman -Ss this that
I should only see packages that contain “this” AND “that”, instead of “this” OR “that”.
I’m confused why none of the package managers use a proper database. Something simple like SQLite would do nicely – no need for big DBMSs. It would make the above search behaviour easy to implement and damn fast. Sometimes waiting for the package manager to churn away, doing a linear search through thousands of files, is very frustrating.
I see your point with “proper db” in package managers, but the whole point is that package managers should be clean and have as little dependencies as possible, since:
a) either all dependencies have to be installed b4 the manager and thus are not in the package db, or you’ll have to work around that manually
or
b) the manager has to be built statically on top of the library, which can be a license issue(not in SQ-Lite, I know) and also let the manager become a big binary
This prolly are just some reasons for that issue.
Having read a number of posts by Eugenia on Arch both here and on the Arch bug reporting forum, it is clear she has attitude problems towards the distro.
The Arch community is not snobbish or awkward, in fact it is an extremely friendly and helpful group of highly talented individuals (typically students) who willing and freely give their time to improving Arch to be one of the best out there. Time and time again, users sing its praises and describe how they are sticking with it after having tried, and frequently replaced, (numerous) other distros. These are people who understand the best choices available.
Arch is bleeding edge and includes many recently released versions of a wide range of applications. Creating your own packages is relatively straightforward and you can always ask for help. Any problems with packages are quickly solved and solutions shared through the Arch forums or the Arch IRC channel on Freenode.
Eugenia makes strong points, presumably to stimulate a response and usually talks in “black and white”, ie no grey areas. Although priding herself on writing bluntly, stating that distro developers “must” act in a certain way or “should” do this or that just because thats what she prefers, is unlikely to cut any ice with those in a position to change things. Arch is not a brought product – you get what you pay for. If you want guaranteed support, use a commercial distibution. Contributions to Arch are made voluntarily (and willingly) – don’t take people’s efforts for granted.
If you give as much as you get, everyone will benefit.