Arch Linux First Impressions

Having become rather tired of reinstalling Ubuntu every six months or so to keep current with releases, I recently decided to give Arch Linux a whirl. I was feeling impulsive so I decided to just jump right in without the benefit of a install guide or anything of that nature, I figured I’d get a better feel for what Arch was all about this way.

Install process

Initial install was pretty smooth. I made sure my homedir backup was current, downloaded the 2009.08 ISO, booted up into a live CD environment and ran through the (console mode, so you know we’re serious) installer pretty quickly. I should note that right away that the impression I got was, “Hey, we’ll let you install in a nice ncurses installer app, but after that you’re on your own.” However, even running the installer was not something I’d be comfortable recommending to a inexperienced user.

First boot

Okay, so install was relatively fast and easy, at least for a highly experienced sysadmin. I logged in, ran df and noticed I was only at around half a gig usage for the root filesystem. Hmm. They weren’t kidding when they said it was minimalistic. In fact, upon boot I’m not getting to init 5. All I’ve got is console mode. Right, no problem. I know the package manager is called pacman, and man pacman yields predictably useful results. Good job, Arch nerds!

Configuration

So, I’ve got a console and I know how the package manager works. Well, theoretically. It takes me about a minute to figure out that I need to uncomment some repositories in/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and run pacman -Sy to sync package databases. So, first order of business is to install X. Obviously, I need xorg-server, some fonts and my video driver. They install, bring in all my dependencies and I’m really starting to warm up to pacman at this point. Some fiddling with xmonad, dmenu, xmobar and related window manager packages later, I’m theoretically up and running.  Oh wait, xorg keeps crashing when I try to launch it. Time to install elinks and hit the forums. No really, that’s what I did.

Troubleshooting

After a little googling, I find that I need a graphical login manger and some tweaks to my inittab. However, I’m in luck. There’s a lovely graphical login manager called slim that’s lightweight and crazy configurable and some wisdom on Arch’s gotta-configure-it-yourself init process. Arch uses a BSD style init, so 99% of the relevant bits are in /etc/inittab and /etc/rc.conf. The last line in /etc/rc.conf looks like this:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal alsa !network netfs wicd crond slim)

Window Managers

I run xmonad because it is awesome. I needed xmonad-contrib and the related dependencies, and my existing configuration Just Worked, which was nice. .xinitrc works as it should. I did need to add eval `ssh-agent` to it in order to get ssh-agent going.

Conclusions

So far, so good. I’m now running current but very stable versions of everything (Hello, kernel 2.6.32!) and performance is great. My intel video driver finally is performing like it should, and overall I’m quite happy. Rolling releases are great and I’m way impressed with the package manager. So, give Arch a shot. You won’t be disappointed.

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One Response

1. 

   James

   April 1, 2010

   ¡Empollon!