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Editorial Software Linux

Arch In Depth 27

Posted by Zonk from the walking-underneath dept.
The LinuxTimes Editor wrote in to alert us to a LinuxTimes article entitled Arch In-Depth, discussing the Arch Distribution. From the article: "First of all, let me go ahead and say I'm not approaching Arch with a completely clean slate. I've heard things about Arch Linux before. I've heard that it resembles Slackware in the way it was lean and meant for "advanced users". I've heard about its package manager called Pacman which is supposed to be all the rage. I've heard it's optimized for i686 by default which can arguably improve performance. I've heard it's Gentoo without "all that compiling". So when Arch 0.7 got out a few days ago I simply had to try it out."
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Arch In Depth More

Arch In Depth

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  • Reviewing the review (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IO ERROR ( 128968 ) * <errorNO@SPAMioerror.us> on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @12:29PM (#11607031) Homepage Journal
    From the article:

    To apply the changes, I just rebooted and now the network worked!

    OK, so much for this reviewer.

    Oh well, at least Arch has it in pacman. I was just about to open up Gnome Terminal and get pacman to install netstatus but I look through all the menus and a terminal application! Wow...no distribution I've ever tried didn't have a terminal application.

    OK, so much for Arch. (Turns out you have to pacman gnome-extra to get everything.)

    Turns out that Arch is extremely minimalist; you get only what you asked for and sometimes less than you asked for. This is probably good for, say, embedded systems, but for most of us with our 100GB+, 200GB+, drives, there's not a whole lot of point to leaving things out. Though there are people who will be quite happy with this.

    I'm not one of them.

    As I have mentioned before, Arch feels a bit like a modern version of Slackware. I wouldn't be surprised if a few Slack users jumped ship to Arch.

    I wouldn't be surprised at all if every Slackware user dropped Slack and went to Arch. It sounds like a much better Slackware than Slackware. But, again, this approach is not for me. Ironically, my favorite distributions are Gentoo and Fedora (in that order). Yes, I'm weird.

    • Bitmaps? Bitmap images? You voluntarily submitted an article to Slashdot that uses bitmap images? Every single image on that site is 800KB . Or more!

      And no, they didn't use actual thumbnails for the images, they link these monstrous images and resize them with HTML.

      I don't just not trust the reviewer, I don't trust the site! That is some seriously stunning incompetence for a website.

      (Of course, this will either be fixed, or you later "readers" won't be able to get through to the hammered server.)

      If you
      • Relax, they're all perfectly reasonable JPEGs now. 30-40kb is still a bit much for a black and white terminal screen grab, but, well, they're passable.
        • JPEGs.

          Seriously?

          Nope, that's not "stunning" incompetence anymore, but it's still incompetent.

          The correct format choices were ".gif" (864,054 -> 4961) or ".png" (-> 4370), and these are lossless.

          Still not impressed; it really only adds to my initial impression of incompetence, not removes it.
        • Indeed. I do screenshots [ioerror.us] in PNG format, and the 640x480 black-and-white shots come out between 4-8K. And all the shots look better, since it's lossless. The thumbnails look a lot better, too, since I used mogrify to create them. There's just no excuse for using BMP (or JPEG, for that matter).
    • Actually, I like that. One of my complains about Linux distros is that they install too much crud. The last Mandrake I saw in the stores had a super duper hyper-fighting edition which boasted 7 CDs and a bonus DVD. Do people have a fetish for installing stuff?

      Whenever I install some generic media package from the install CD, I get 5 image viewers and 3 mp3 players and 6 text editors. And of course, 1 image viewer scales up cleanly, 1 scales down cleanly, 2 have a slide show, and 1 plays movies.

      Compare
  • I, for one, applaud that another distro has the balls to enter what is increasingly a saturated market for minimalist distros. There must be two dozen micro-distros for really tiny embedded/small-footprint apps and about the same number of the next-larger variety, which seems to be the target niche of this system.

    So, why do I applaud yet another entry in this gladiatorial matinee? Because it seems to be (as others have already mentioned) gentooish without being gentoo. As much as I love the ideology behind

  • Not "Gentoo without all that compiling" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dammital ( 220641 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:05PM (#11608383)
    The reviewer twice referred to Arch as "Gentoo without all that compiling", suggesting that Arch's performance (with its precompiled 686 binaries) would appeal to Gentoo users.

    I doubt that those precompiled 686 binaries would appeal much to Gentoo users with AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS systems.

    And as for "all that compiling", Gentoo allows you to install from binary packages if you must. But I compile away some of the bloat via USE flags; you can't do that with Arch binaries.

    • Agreed here, once you've had Gentoo, you dont go back until there is something better, but that something has a long way to go... Installing gentoo from binaries works for those of us who just donthave the time to compile, for others there is distcc if you have a few computers, or better yet a network that is not being used. If you really have no time for your Linux distro, you might as well go with one of the bigger and more well known distros. I also think that many slackware people will get off of slack
  • I use Ubuntu as a stable base and chroot into Gentoo to run other stuff.

    I haven't scripted it yet but will do soon
    (chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/change-to-gentoo-and-bash)

    I may check out this distro to replace Ubuntu ...maybe.
    • Seriously, why? What do you gain with adding more overhead?

      I'm not trying to troll. I just want to know why anyone would do this for performance? I understand things like VMWare that allow multiple virtual machines on one physical machine, but why add Linux onto Linux "to run other stuff"?

      • chroot only uses extra disk space, like running a program off another harddrive only different libraries etc are used; I didn't mean something like vmware
  • It's called "etc-update". It goes with Gentoo's (apparent) philosophy of forcing the user to manually go through some post-installation steps such as updating config files and restarting services, after everything is done. Unfortunately, there's no really good way to tell it to restart all services which have just been updated.

    I would argue that etc-update is significantly easier than debconf, but maybe that's because I don't know vimdiff at all.
    • etc-update is a really easy way to hose your system. The recommended way to deal with config changes is to use dispatch-conf. This has the option of storing old versions of config files with RCS, and is much more intelligent at merging new files with old.

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