1st crack of the whip - back for more later

Question

well, that was harder than i had expected!
i've not come here to flame so don't flame me - i just wanted to share my first arch experience.  The install was easy – i still use Vector Linux – and the install is very similar.  I chose the 2.6 kernel and just the base packages and i think this was my initial downfall!
The 2.6 kernel has ppp as a module, ppp_generic, which stumped me for a bit (i didn't get ppp to work either as it is very hard to get support when you have to boot into another distro every 2 seconds to look something up and i guess i have been spoiled for ppp config in the past).  I also found the wvdial package didn't create a default wvdial.conf, which i thought was a bit weird.
The other thing i had probs with was pacman and local packages.  I was adding them with pacman -U till i figured out i could add the cd pkg dir to pacman.conf and use pacman -S, which saved a lot of hassle.  If you only have a modem i recommend you install more packages during the system install to avoid this situation – you are prolly going to install more packages off the cd if you don't have broadband anyway!
One thing which i was expecting but shouldn't have been (and i know i shouldn't cos i did read the docs but it just never hit home) was arch to set up a simple X based wm and app suite – it nevers says it will but i just thought it would.  Not that i really need it to – it's just nice to get you started.
I have given up for now – it seems likely that 0.7 is about to appear so it may be best to wait for that now rather than spend time downloading packages that are all about to be included on the CD

Answer 1

dibblethewrecker wrote:The 2.6 kernel has ppp as a module, ppp_generic
A bit of a trick to get 2.6 working with ppp.  There are some docs in the wiki describing how to do this.  One thing about installing Arch the first time is to try to guess which of the docs you really ought to have printed out but forgot to. :-D
The other thing i had probs with was pacman and local packages.  I was adding them with pacman -U till i figured out i could add the cd pkg dir to pacman.conf and use pacman -S, which saved a lot of hassle.
This is documented in the man page, but wasn't mentioned in the install doc, IIRC. I'll add it to my todo list, thanks for bringing it up. 
One thing which i was expecting but shouldn't have been (and i know i shouldn't cos i did read the docs but it just never hit home) was arch to set up a simple X based wm and app suite – it nevers says it will but i just thought it would.
In a few years, they're planning on making an Arch that will read your mind for which packages to install. However, until that time, the installer just doesn't know what window manager (or even what X package) you would want installed.
The basic Arch philosophy is 'keep it simple'. Nothing is done for you because it's hard to know what needs to be done to undo something that was done automatically, but much easier to figure out how to do something or how to undo something you did yourself.
I have given up for now – it seems likely that 0.7 is about to appear so it may be best to wait for that now rather than spend time downloading packages that are all about to be included on the CD
It's a good plan, but remember that most of the big packages aren't on the CD because they are in the extra repository, not current.  xorg is on the cd for 0.7, but stuff like Gnome KDE, OpenOffice, etc still have to be downloaded.
It's not as bad to download stuff on dialup as you would think. OpenOffice took me over a week, but I just ran it for an hour or so a day... pacman recovers broken connections and stuff.
See you again soon, when 0.7 arrives.
Duty