Considering Arch

I'm considering giving Arch a tryout, because I want more control over customizing a distro. I have a two questions about Arch:
Question One
There seems to be a small amount of packages compared to say Mint/Ubuntu. If a package doesn't exist, is it easy enough to get the source and compile for Arch? If so, is there a specific Arch how-to?
Question Two
My primary goal for a customized distro is intended to be run live and remastered for personal updates. (I'm doing this now with Remastersys with Mint.)
I want to build three custom distros:
1. An security oriented custom Live disk for browsing the Internet securely.
2. A Live environment where I can work and save my work encrypted.
3. If enough time exists, create a distro dedicated for Artists (based on my own existing start).
Is Arch Linux the right place for my goals?
Last edited by Live (2012-01-30 05:46:16)

Live wrote:
I'm considering giving Arch a tryout, because I want more control over customizing a distro. I have a two questions about Arch:
Question One
There seems to be a small amount of packages compared to say Mint/Ubuntu. If a package doesn't exist, is it easy enough to get the source and compile for Arch? If so, is there a specific Arch how-to?
If the AUR is not enough for you or your desired piece of software is not not yet available there, you can create your own Arch package for it by writing a PKGBUILD.
This is the Arch way of installing software.

Similar Messages

Considering Arch For My New Home Server

My wife and I both use Arch full time on our desktop and two laptops, and we enjoy it a lot. Right now our current home server also runs Arch and works very reliably. In fact I don't think I ever had a problem with it. The server we use has some major hardware on it that would probably make it better off as a standard desktop and not a server (it has a great video card, for example) so I decided to buy or build a new server to replace it. (The current server is over four years old). The server will be responsible for SSH, Unison, DNS, and Samba.
I have decided to have three hard drives. One will be dedicated to the root and swap partitions. The other two will be dedicated to /home and will be on a software RAID1. The reason for this is because redundancy on the OS is not important to me (a Clonezilla image that I'll have stored will quickly restore the OS if I ever need to recover it) but redundancy on the data is really important since it will house all of our media (over 500GB worth). I have an offsite backup too so that's not an issue either. Also notable is the fact that the server will not have any GUI at all. Just the kernel and whatever is required to facilitate what it serves.
Anyway, here is where I'm wondering if Arch is still a good choice. My current server uses Arch and works 100% reliably, but is also not on any form of RAID either. Considering how often Arch changes, I fear that maybe an update would come along that would break the RAID, and that's the last thing I want to have happen. How reliable is Arch on a server from a RAID standpoint? I am also considering Debian, however, Debian packages rarely match the versions of our computers (especially Unison) so I don't think Debian serving an almost primarily Arch Linux household would work well.
Last edited by jlacroix (2011-02-25 17:33:08)

jdarnold wrote:It's a perfect choice and very much the way I have my server set up.
That's well and good until 12 months later when you decide you want to install new package X, which depends on lib A, which means lib A has to be updated, but packages Y, Z, R, T,W,Q and V all need to be updated because they also depend on lib A and you end up with a big borked box.
Yes, experience has learnt me that
There's always ArchServer (Full Disclosure: I'm the project coordinator )
Last edited by fukawi2 (2011-03-18 13:05:53)

Arch or CloudLinux, RHEL, SLES, Oracle Linux, CentOS, Debian, Gentoo

I use Arch as my everyday OS but I've been developing a few sites with Django and Ruby on rails and wondering what OS would be best suited for a server environment.
I'm building a custom dedicated box as well I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars per month for dedicated hosting in which if you know what you're doing you're better off on your own + it's free once you have your box.
I've used Gentoo, Arch, and SUSE(OpenSUSE) as OSs and Suse seems very stable as SLES is generally OpenSUSE with it's server tools but updates aren't as quick which is ideal for a server environment.
With Gentoo or Arch you have to constantly update every month or every week, with gentoo I don't want to deal with mainly because of it's compile times which offer..really nothing over arch in terms of performance and even stability at this point which begs the question. Is source compiling even worth it? Even compiling from source with Arch is 10X quicker then gentoo.
For Servers though I would consider Arch but the constant updating freaks me out as an IT, Gentoo makes me want to jump off the ledge, Suse, CentOS, Oracle Linux, or even RedHat have less frequent updates and are made for the server and oh forgot about CloudLinux(cheap compared to suse or redhat per year. 14/mo 168/yr.) I've heard good things about Cloud Linux as well.
For a server is Arch a good option?

Rukiri wrote:
I use Arch as my everyday OS but I've been developing a few sites with Django and Ruby on rails and wondering what OS would be best suited for a server environment.
I'm building a custom dedicated box.....I've used Gentoo, Arch, and SUSE(OpenSUSE).....
For Servers though I would consider Arch but the constant updating freaks me out as an IT, Gentoo makes me want to jump off the ledge, Suse, CentOS, Oracle Linux, or even RedHat have less frequent updates and are made for the server .....
For a server is Arch a good option?
My experience with Arch suggests that it would be a poor choice for a server; it'll break. Sure, if you're competent you'll fix it. But it WILL break.
If you are comfortable with Arch I would consider CRUX. It is pretty darn sweet. Simpler. Much simpler. Custom built no-modules kernel. Source-based ports system, prt-get is nice (when you do have to update some software doing it from source will allow you to keep a stable core, i.e. you "backport" new versions). pkg-get could serve binaries to your server from your build machine.
Consider this minecraft server done with CRUX, http://minecraft.codeemo.com/index.html. There's a CRUX live CD http://cruxex.exton.net/. I know that Judd Vinet had wanted Arch to be useful as a server but even he questioned whether his team would be able to invent a way to spin off a stable release. Well, there is no stable release and Arch has become quite baroque compared to those early days. CRUX would be the pure Arch of yesteryear that can make an awesome server.

Do many FPGA/embedded developers use Arch?

I was wondering, since I'm a developer and considering Arch for my workstation, are there many FPGA, embedded etc. designers/developers in the Arch community or at least using Arch for their work?
I don't know, if Arch is as popular among software developers of many kinds (or should I say languages), as i.e. Gentoo is, but looking at the whole distro concept (minimalism, simplicity, configurability etc.) it should draw a lot them.
So.. it would be good to know, that, besides Arch/Linux specific support, help for that kind of development speciallity is also not far away

Anthony Bentley wrote:
In a general Unix sense, the biggest advantage over Windows for embedded development is definitely package management.
At a previous job, I wrote code for some Olimex ARM boards, to help a grad student with his thesis. He had set up a development environment on his home Windows PC, but later could not reproduce the installation on the lab computers: finding a cross‐compiled Windows ARM toolchain, compiling OpenOCD in Cygwin, and then configuring Eclipse to tie it all together.
On my OpenBSD laptop, I did “pkg_add openocd arm-elf-gcc”, wrote a simple Hello World in C, and got the board blinking an LED in no time at all. He was impressed.
So a great and simple way to make your distro more usable for embedded development is to create packages when they don’t exist. It’s pragmatic (because really, nobody wants to remember the right configure flags and recompile GCC again). Arch seems to have packages for quite a few embedded toolchains and/or communication software, which is nice.
I've packaged systemc to arch. I would like to have it on AUR. Thou I dont have the will to write all the flags of the package. I have something which works perfectly to my needs. I would happily hand the code if someone would like to place it properly in AUR.

Incorporating both Arch Linux and a package repository onto one DVD.

Dear Arch Linux community,
I would like to tell you a little background information about myself before I start to talk about my actual subject. I know that this part of my message does not belong here, but it is my own ritual to do it like this in my first message in every community. I hope I can make friends with people here and try not to harm this community in any way. Thank you for reading this.
I am a 16-year-old male student from Finland and addicted to GNU/Linux and freeware / open source software. My previous experience with GNU/Linux is fairly large; from thin client Debian GNU/Linux administrator to kernel hacker and software developer. My delight is music, particularly writing and composing my own music tracks which vary from classic chiptunes to acid trance and dance beats. Arch Linux seems to be a great GNU/Linux operating system for me, because I am looking for a GNU/Linux distribution that does not focus on desktop, but rather on simplicity and lightweight solutions. I also do not fear "bleeding edge" software which is a positive point for Arch Linux compared to Debian GNU/Linux. As you can probably notice I have been using Debian GNU/Linux before I considered Arch Linux. However now I am here hoping for a totally new experience from Arch Linux.
Enough with my foreword, I would like to now go back to the actual subject. Usually I use DVD media for GNU/Linux images to have both the installer for the GNU/Linux distribution and the main package repository to make installations faster and to have the possibility for an offline installation. As I see, Arch Linux provides only CD images which are approximately 160MB in size, making me to think about incorporating Arch Linux's "Core" and "Extra" package repositories to fill up the remaining 4GB on the DVD. If the "Core" package repository is already included in the Arch Linux CD image, please forgive my lack of information as this is the first time I have ever entered to the world of Arch Linux.
My question is as follows: Is it possible to incorporate Arch Linux and a package repository onto one DVD while retaining the ability to install Arch Linux from that DVD? If positive, how should I go on to do it?
Thank you in advance!
Last edited by Amplify.EXE (2007-11-09 20:53:44)

No niin, tervetuloa arch-mailmaan.
Ok, I better stop at one sentence before someone gets mad at me :roll:.
To answer your question, yes. It is quite possible to put something like that together, heck I think someone suggested we should distribute those some time, but we decided not to (don't quote me, I'm too lazy to read the archives right now) since in most cases pacman will get the job done will job done with less bandwidth waste, and distributing huge snapshots isn't really too conducive to the whole rolling-release thing.
You might want to check out archiso [1], the install scripts [2], and one of my sample archiso configurations [3] that effectively creates an install CD. Now, keep in mind that archiso isn't the *current* way installers are created, but I think it's much more straightforward to work with than what we're using right now. That said, we currently use archboot to create the CDs, so that may be worth taking a look at as well. There is also a really old installer remastering wiki article [4], though not terribly relevant, you could still use a similar technique to pull apart one of our recent install iso's and remaster it with whatever packages you want. Anyhow, if you'd like help with this, I'd be more than happy to give you a hand (I need some more test-cases for archiso...), or if you look at it and go "gee, this is dumb", don't be afraid to send patches. Just get in touch with me through email, jabber, irc, or whatever.
Good luck
[1] http://projects.archlinux.org/git/?p=ar … a=summary)
[2] http://projects.archlinux.org/git/?p=in … ;a=summary
[3] http://code.neotuli.net/gitweb/?p=archi … stall-conf
[4] http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rem … nstall_ISO

One of the best

Well I consider myself an "Intermediate" Linux user. I appreciate the Open-Source nature of linux and how most of the things are free and donations suffice. I appreciate the fact I don't spend a few hundred dollars to get an OS and Office Suite (I could have abbreviated that as well but we can imagine the confusion). I recently moved from RHL based distros to Arch by a recommendation of an internet acquaintance. He was an avid LFS user for quite sometime and was using Pacman, he realized that he simply built a system mirroring Arch. I was always dabbling in LFS while running Fedora as my main distro (As well as a current Windows dual boot for gaming reasons). So after he made the switch and bragged for a while I decided to burn my ~ to a CD and jump on the Arch bandwagon. Now heres where my story really begins.
I was pleasantly greeted with a down to earth text installer which I found quite easy to use and partition and install the boot loader (Grub by the way). I then got to my command prompt, which sparked a bit of fear for a moment because as a Fedora user I was used to being greeted by a wonderful GDM login screen. So I jumped on my Windows partition and I asked him what to do next, he told me it all had to be installed manually. That sold me, the fact that *I* controlled the packages right then and there from a base system brought a certain joy to me, of not bloating my ever precious system. I then dug around read the man for pacman and I -Ss'd for the xorg and gnome stuff. I installed what I want then I installed my video drivers, configured X and fglrx all in under 30 minutes of download/install/configuration. I'm getting ahead of myself though actually, I should mention I had a wireless card, Microsofts MN-510, which I still use today simply because I cant afford to upgrade. Now unlike other distros it was painfully hard to setup this particular network card. Not arch's fault though, as ndiswrapper was installed and ready to go, but I had a hard time locating the drivers for the card. Well I got it installed and then proceeded to get Gnome up and fully running. Then I was greeted by a less attractive, but very friendly GDM login screen. I then proceeded to click the internet icon, which is Epiphany. Only to find out my network was no longer working, so I tried the lwconfig to find out wireless extensions for wlan0 were not present. So during my install I found a slight flaw of a minor version change in the kernel happened in my gnome installation and the module for ndiswrapper was no longer present. I simply fixed it by moving the modules folder over to the new kernel folder (I cant remember exact paths, sue me). Did a reboot and it all ran fine again, but a slight annoyance none the less. After I moaned and complained about it I remembered that Arch Linux isnt even version 1 yet. So I chalked it up to pre-gold bugs as it was easily fixed. I then proceeded to install all my favorite software via pacman and aur and I have a gorgeous system running using less then 200 megs of my ram.
Small hiccups aside, I'm very pleased with my Arch install. I will be recommending this distro to all the Linux enthusiasts I know, simply because it has a similar principal as Gentoo - you control everything. I appreciate the hard work and dedicated the development team has given to this project and I consider Arch to be a better overall choice to RHL flavors, as well as the Debian flavors (I have always disliked debians package manager). I would rate this distro in its current form to be a C+, your above average, but more work needs to be done. Please Arch developers keep the system unbloated and do not ship it with a window manager - ever. You have won the hearts of Linux enthusiasts everywhere with your approach to packaged linux distros.
Some technical specs of my install and grades on everything.
Hardware Support - B+ (ndiswrapper problem)
Software Available - A (aur and pacman are amazing)
Ease of Install - A (Flawless after I figured out I had to install gnome manually)
Verbose Configs - A (Everything was labeled correctly, and I like your rc.conf)
My System
AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Dual Core
2 Gigs DDR2 5400
250 GB SATA150 HD
DVD+/- R/W Combo Drive
ATI x1300 256mb Video Card
Logitech G15 Gamers Keyboard
Microsoft MN-510 USB Wi-Fi Card
Microsoft InteliPoint Mouse
Native 1440x900 Wide screen monitor
To anyone thinking about using Arch, I recommend it as there is a fuller and richer rewarding experience when your finished.

Interesting post, I enjoyed it.
However, keep in mind, Arch is not Fedora. It is not Red-Hat-esque, not newbie-friendly, nor will it ever aim to be so.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way
The way Arch does things is different in that it strives to use the most elegant and simple methodology. Note that simple does not mean "user-friendly", it means just that, simple. System configuration is left entirely up to the user. There are no GUI configuration tools; system resource controls are handled through configuration files and from the command line. This is unlikely to change.
What you may see as unfinished or raw, is actually the way Arch devs and users prefer the system to be, so your assumption that Arch has not reached version 1.0 is not quite accurate in this sense.
"It is what you make it." In other words, you build it, but it won't hold your hand along the way.
Take advantage of the excellent documentation in the wiki (especially the beginner's guide) and the community. When you adopt the Arch way of doing things, I am sure your C+ rating will go up, as you will have gained the knowledge of how truly elegant and powerful Arch can be.
Welcome to Arch!

Archlinux.log EOF.

Well, I guess this is a goodbye.
All in all, archlinux was a pleasant experience. Yet, there were points that were not satisfying me. Some were related to Arch, some others not at all, and some not even related to linux and computing.
Basically:
- Due to various reasons, I can't cope anymore with the rolling release model.
- Recent progress in various areas (init, gnome, gtk, X, udev, hal, dbus, kernel, etc...) make some other distros attractive again (features, or lack of it that made me lean towards bleeding-edge previously).
- Not to sound paranoid, but the lack of package signing in pacman makes me feel uneasy.
- I like to experience some other things from time to time (and to their full extend, not just popping a livecd in, or in a VM)
- Blah, blah, blah.
So I picked up Ubuntu, which I installed (successfully) on many (both tech-savvy and computer illiterates) people computers beginning in the linux world, but never really used myself. I decided to take a look at 7.10 Tribe 5 and was really surprised to be able to match my current Arch in terms of technology. Surprised enough to stick with it.
That said, I consider Arch an excellent distro, both a young one and one that will without a doubt thrive even more in the future, certainly matching the other big names. And I will certainly come back in a bunch of years...
To close this post of mine, I'd like to thank both Judd Vinet & the devs, and the community altogether, which is a rather unique one, at least for its flameproofness. Oh yes I really enjoyed reading/asking questions like what's the best FS & the likes and actually get useful, educated answers, and 100% pollution-free.
Thank you all, and see you later.
Last edited by lloeki (2007-09-18 12:54:46)

delphiki wrote:Its funny how after getting comfortable in slackware and coming to Arch how things that seem 'complicated' or 'too difficult' for some users seem 'natural' for me where what those users consider 'natural and easy' seems 'complicated and difficult'. I guess its just one of those things that KISS does to you after a long time
So true, so true

What's the difference between reguler KDE and KDEmod?

Hello all,
In two weeks I get my new laptop, which will be capable of running Arch and KDE ( as my current computer isn't, somehow it only runs Fedora w/ Gnome)
Since I really like Arch and already got it working on Virtualbox, I want to install it on my new laptop. I'd like to get it working with KDE, but I noticed Arch also has KDEmod. I already searched the forums but couldn't really find an answer to my question: What is the difference between regular KDE and KDEmod and which one is better for me to use?
Thanks in advance!

Allan, i forgive you for your poor paragraph construction and sorry for me being a bit peeved
However, i know you have read more from the IRC log than just that one sentence by me...
Allan wrote:
From the IRC log, I do not think that conclusion is too far off, especially if you are considering Arch-Stable as your base... So saying "plain wrong" seems... well... plain wrong. Especially given the irc log:
<funkyou> in one sentence: to do what we really want to do, we need a stable platform.
So why not showing the whole picture and clear this up:
<funkyou> ok, to start: i think at least some of you have noticed that arch linux is a fine platform for what we want to deliver, but there are some little "annoyances"
<funkyou> mainly:
<funkyou> -.so bumps every few weeks
<funkyou> -the general "freshness"
<funkyou> -a lot of manual interaction needed (sometimes)
<funkyou> everyone can see these problems when looking at the forums, _most_ of them are related to updates
<funkyou> in one sentence: to do what we really want to do, we need a stable platform.
Makes more sense now? Its not that Arch is too unstable, its just that we cant keep up will all the changes... And this is not Archs "fault" nor anyone elses fault, its just going too fast for us. Most annoying or severe bugs in our tools are there due to upstream updates. And the reasons are not really the .so bumps (which are mostly solved by a simple rebuild) but also constantly changing apis and stuff. This is not a big problem in KDE (they keep their apis clean), but a big one when it comes to other stuff like parted, to give an example. And this is our main problem, we need to constantly adapt our code to upstream changes.
This even resulted in a repo with modified or "frozen" Arch packages just to keep our liveCD going, and now we are looking for solutions for this problem, and "stable" snapshots seem to be one way... Oh, and if we would do this (there is nothing announced yet), we would do our own snapshot every X months because ArchStable seems to be a dead project. We also considered cooperating with the ArchServer guys, but their stuff is really made for servers, so even while their project is really nice its not really an option for us.
Well, we'll see what we will do during the next months, now we are still testing and evaluating some solutions... Oh, and people, please stop any "we dont need another ubuntu" complaints...

Repositories Management Suggestion

Arch has quickly become my (favorite) distribution, but I had not noticed until yesterday, that there are quite a few easily usable repositories besides the 2/3 official ones: "Trusted User Repos" as well as privately hosted repos of not (yet) trusted users.
I like this idea a lot and am amazed, how Pacman allows such flexibility. And as I consider Arch as a distribution with a lot of potential, I have thought about optimizing this (already great) repo system with the following goals:
· increase the number of packages available to Pacman
· encourage users to contribute to the community by providing packages instead of just "configure, make, make install"ing.
· reducing the administrational work for the user submission of packages (kind of automation of the user submitted packages, enhanced TUR system) and thus give the main developers more time for important things
· still providing a good quality assurance of the packages in the TURs and of course in the official repos
Thus I suggest the following enhancements:
· There should be three quality levels: Official Repos, TUR (Trusted User Repos), OUR (Open User Repos) -> nothing new
· Everybody who wants should be able to sign up (e.g. with his forum login) for an OUR at some central package management interface (like an enhanced packages.php on archlinux.org). She/He would have to provide own hosting. His repo (repo.db.tar.gz) gets scanned regularly to be included in the packages.php interface and a package voting facility is added to packages.php, so that all registered users (e.g. of the forum) can vote about this OUR.
· As somebody has votes above a certain number and quality level, he gets promoted (fairly automatically) to the TUR level and gets hosting on the official server. Setting it up like this takes stability of the packages into account as well as demand for them.
· With every new Pacman release the following repo lists will download: current, extra, release, unstable, TUR, OUR. But in pacman.conf only the official ones are enabled by default. This gives every user the stability and security of the current Pacman plus the possibility to easily use either the TUR-quality packages or even the OUR-quality packages.
If these suggestions sound good to the Arch community, I would offer to work on the necessary php/sql (?), of course closely cooperating with the devs. If you want this to be done in any other programming/scripting language, I am sorry that I can't help because of too little experience.
Your thoughts?
Edit: I just (grr... now that I have written this already) found a post saying that Eric (?) is working on a new repository management. So that's great news... is there any more information available? Maybe he can use one of my ideas as well.

just a couple of observations:
hugelmopf wrote:
I have thought about optimizing this (already great) repo system with the following goals:
· increase the number of packages available to Pacman
· encourage users to contribute to the community by providing packages instead of just "configure, make, make install"ing.
· reducing the administrational work for the user submission of packages (kind of automation of the user submitted packages, enhanced TUR system) and thus give the main developers more time for important things
· still providing a good quality assurance of the packages in the TURs and of course in the official repos
to the first point ..... i have never thought that there were too few packages. Whe i installed arch there were only about 300 packages and never found that limiting. I look at something like Debian and think that there is a distro that has become burdened with too many packages and "flexibility" of the developers to offer not only so many packages but variations of packages. Think of how long it takes Debian to release a new version and you get the idea.
You also need more developers and it is REALLY HARD to find good developers Arch has had too many "developers" with "eyes bigger than their stomachs".
to point two .... when i read that people are not using ABS to build their own packages i get frustrated. the whole reason of having a good package management system is to have user use it for making packages and not just for installing/uninstalling packages.
to point three .... i think having easy and not well monitored access to user contributed packages is stupid an dangerous. sorry to be harsh but for every tom dick and harry to have access to the package repos is signing a death warrant for arch. it is an incredible security risk.
to point four ... worrying about TURs when there are not even a public statement on what one needs to be a TUR or even an Arch developer is a liitle silly i think.
hugelmopf wrote:
Thus I suggest the following enhancements:
· There should be three quality levels: Official Repos, TUR (Trusted User Repos), OUR (Open User Repos) -> nothing new
· Everybody who wants should be able to sign up (e.g. with his forum login) for an OUR at some central package management interface (like an enhanced packages.php on archlinux.org). She/He would have to provide own hosting. His repo (repo.db.tar.gz) gets scanned regularly to be included in the packages.php interface and a package voting facility is added to packages.php, so that all registered users (e.g. of the forum) can vote about this OUR.
· As somebody has votes above a certain number and quality level, he gets promoted (fairly automatically) to the TUR level and gets hosting on the official server. Setting it up like this takes stability of the packages into account as well as demand for them.
· With every new Pacman release the following repo lists will download: current, extra, release, unstable, TUR, OUR. But in pacman.conf only the official ones are enabled by default. This gives every user the stability and security of the current Pacman plus the possibility to easily use either the TUR-quality packages or even the OUR-quality packages.
If these suggestions sound good to the Arch community, I would offer to work on the necessary php/sql (?), of course closely cooperating with the devs. If you want this to be done in any other programming/scripting language, I am sorry that I can't help because of too little experience.
Your thoughts?
Edit: I just (grr... now that I have written this already) found a post saying that Eric (?) is working on a new repository management. So that's great news... is there any more information available? Maybe he can use one of my ideas as well.
well as you know AUR is being worked on. As I mentione dabove i think even AURs will require constant monitoring and administrating because a freely accessable system is just too dangerous. I think that having user contributions is extremely important but all contributions HAVE to be secure and only monitoring such submissions is very very important.
personally I do not use unstable, TURs or Staging and will not use any similar repos. I only use current and extra because i "expect" that those packages have been scrutinised enough (though this is not always true). as well, i don't like all sorts of extra crud in my files. i like arch because it's conf. files are not cluttered up with a bunch of stuff i don't want and having several repos i have no interest in falls in the cruft catagory for me. I am sure others have that view.
voting .... i don't agree with voting to include packages in official repos or URs if a package is built and contributed then SOMEBODY thinks it is necessary and as such every effort should be made to include it, eventually, in the official repos. there are alot of excellent applications out there that are not well used but every bit as good as popular counterparts. In fact when i was a package maintainer i added a bunch of packages that alot of people probably would not have even have thought of building or using but like. They may not be wildly popular but in the end they helped draw people or keep people with arch.
i hope i did not come off too harsh. i think most of your ideas are already planned to be a part of the new AUR. i just wanted to offer some concerns that you may not have considered. as you will notice many people will question qulity control throughout the year (me included) and having a loose user contribution system certainly does not help to dispell such complaints.

Long time Gentoo user on the fence...

So, Gentoo's kind of fallen off the wagon. I don't have any problems with the compile times -- but I do have issues with compiling. I love portage, I love ebuilds, I love useflags. But it's all gotten so horribly broken lately that I'm strongly considering switching to a binary distro next time I reformat. I'm sick of dealing with arcane gcc errors that I can't trace back to anything or bizarre blocks and dependency breakage.
I keep hearing, "well, if you like Gentoo's customability but you're sick of screwing with compiles, then switch to Arch."
I want to know if they're right. I would like to give Arch a shot.
But binary distros and me tend to not agree much of the time. It's not so much that their binary based -- I have no issues with binaries. I just don't like their methodology of "since you're using a binary distro, you must be a recent Windows convert and want the computer to hold your hand.". So I need to know some things from some users with first-hand experience.
- Pacman & package selection: better than apt (please god say yes)? No dependency hell? Is it easy to switch to testing/unstable versions and back? Can I compile select things if I so choose? Is package selection as good as with Portage? Can I find smaller apps and libraries that are useful in a niche in the Pacman reps easily? (like Nitrogen, tint2, pypanel, etc.). It'd be REALLY annoying to have to hunt down 500 tar.gz and compile stuff -- it'd be like using Gentoo without Portage.
- Kernel selection: Good selections for laptops or certain builds of computers (i.e AMD or Intel?), as opposed to a huge 120 MB kernel with every option enabled? Possibility of easily foregoing Pacman and letting people compile their own (i.e zen-sources, mm-patchset based kernels, etc.)?
- Sensible defaults: None of this "you're forced to use Gnome with an ugly default themeset and you can't uninstall it" Ubuntu crap, I do hope. If I wanna use Openbox and KDM, I use Openbox and KDM.
- Sensible core config file locations: This one is a big one for me. For Gentoo, all of the system config files/init scripts were easy to find (/etc/conf.d and /etc/init.d). I used Ubuntu for a while and the damn things were strewn all over the place (stuff like /etc/local/user/net/config/heresanotherdirforsomereason/symlinktohell/config makes me cry).
- Hands-on-edness: I want to use bash. I want to get in and get a little bit dirty. I don't want GUI-based Windows-esque nonsense ALL of the time. This is my primary complaint for Ubuntu: it shields you for everything, so that you spend more time undoing it's "ease of use" automatic crap than you do actually using the system. I can forgo all of this if it's in Arch at all, right?
I realize I'm being a bit preening and overbearing, but I just want something that doesn't break every 3rd package due to compile errors, but still offers a bit of leeway for experienced Linux users instead of this "let's make Linux more like Windows" idea that seems to be ever-so-pervasive in distros today. I really hope Arch can do this.

mm23 wrote:.- Pacman & package selection: better than apt (please god say yes)? No dependency hell? Is it easy to switch to testing/unstable versions and back? Can I compile select things if I so choose? Is package selection as good as with Portage? Can I find smaller apps and libraries that are useful in a niche in the Pacman reps easily? (like Nitrogen, tint2, pypanel, etc.). It'd be REALLY annoying to have to hunt down 500 tar.gz and compile stuff -- it'd be like using Gentoo without Portage.
It is better than apt. Dependency hell is a lot less painful then apt.
You can't easily switch to testing and back, but Arch Testing and Gentoo/Debian Testing are very different. Currently all that's in Arch's Testing (besides all the Xorg 7.4 packages) is like really new versions of stuff that's a bit too unstable to go into Core/Extra so unless you want to help test stuff, or really want Xorg 7.4, there's no real reason to run Arch's Testing branch.
You can easily compile stuff if you choose with the abs (think of it like FreeBSD's ports tree).
I'd say with the AUR, package selection is better than in Portage, without the AUR, not so much...and yes, all those small things you mentioned...I know for a fact they're either in the AUR, Extra or Community.
mm23 wrote:- Kernel selection: Good selections for laptops or certain builds of computers (i.e AMD or Intel?), as opposed to a huge 120 MB kernel with every option enabled? Possibility of easily foregoing Pacman and letting people compile their own (i.e zen-sources, mm-patchset based kernels, etc.)?
The default kernel is VERY small, but it has most of the stuff you'd want enabled, however, there are plenty of extra kernels in the AUR. I believe Zen is in there, the latest 2.6.28 RC is in there and i think mm is in there among others.
mm23 wrote:- Sensible defaults: None of this "you're forced to use Gnome with an ugly default themeset and you can't uninstall it" Ubuntu crap, I do hope. If I wanna use Openbox and KDM, I use Openbox and KDM.
Everything is configurable and nothing is set unless you explicitly set it for the most part.
mm23 wrote:- Sensible core config file locations: This one is a big one for me. For Gentoo, all of the system config files/init scripts were easy to find (/etc/conf.d and /etc/init.d). I used Ubuntu for a while and the damn things were strewn all over the place (stuff like /etc/local/user/net/config/heresanotherdirforsomereason/symlinktohell/config makes me cry).
Most config files are in /etc or a subdirectory of /etc (usually only one layer down) and all init scripts are in /etc/rc.d
mm23 wrote:- Hands-on-edness: I want to use bash. I want to get in and get a little bit dirty. I don't want GUI-based Windows-esque nonsense ALL of the time. This is my primary complaint for Ubuntu: it shields you for everything, so that you spend more time undoing it's "ease of use" automatic crap than you do actually using the system. I can forgo all of this if it's in Arch at all, right?
Everything is manual. I'd consider Arch (in this case) a cross between Gentoo and Debian
mm23 wrote:I realize I'm being a bit preening and overbearing, but I just want something that doesn't break every 3rd package due to compile errors, but still offers a bit of leeway for experienced Linux users instead of this "let's make Linux more like Windows" idea that seems to be ever-so-pervasive in distros today. I really hope Arch can do this.
Just a suggestion, you should really Just Try Arch and browse the AUR and do some package searches. You'd probably have found all the answers to these questions yourself if you did that (mind you, i'm not complaining).

Ext2 redux

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31568
"The ext4 supports ext2/ext3 FS so no need to activate the old modules."
Yes. So why won't Arch mount ext2 without help? Legacy fstab files across the universe say 'ext2' or 'auto' - so for end users, Arch just breaks.
mount -t ext2 ... should work
mount -t auto ... should work for ext2 like everything else
ext2 in fstab should work
What happens instead: Arch reports it doesn't know any such thing as an ext2 filesystem.
Me, I don't care how ext2 support is accomplished, but Arch should supply it, not end users. Unless a sysadmin hip to obscure ext4 capability details is on call, then what an end user sees is a very standard Linux fs which won't mount, so Arch seems crudware.
Make Arch use ext4 for ext2 fs behind the scenes. Don't bomb over an ACCURATE fstab that says ext2. Right now, Arch reports ext2 as an unknown filesystem.
Needless breakage gives Arch a false public image of instability. Old ext2 is too important to write off. By the way, even Tso himself wishes to dump ext4 for btrfs. Today's "cool" is tomorrow's "has been." And ext2 doesn't the carry patent problems of FAT, which can affect its appearance in commercial settings. Biz people care little about fs quality, but much about time to market, embedded memory constraints, and breadth of os / tool support. We'd all like to see FAT disappear, but it's running on half the devices in your home, I wager. And hilariously enough, FAT is the single most cross-platform capable fs between the 3 big OS platforms (Mac/Win/Linux). Such is life. Of all the non-MS, Linux filesystems, the one with the most Win/Mac support is ext2.
P.S. I hope the netiquette is ok? It seemed more reasonable to post than reopen a ticket. The bug board needs some way to folloup closed items. Anyway, thanks to all for giving a hearing. I still of course consider Arch the best *nix distro bar none. Just trying to help the cause here!

(jasonwryan, calm. Netiquette meant whether to reopen, not speak. Arch is touchy even flattered. If I scored unsettling points, well, ahem....I've sysadminned for donkey's years. The ticket desk won't allow followups and I was trying to be good by not reopening.)
To those who asked,
Linux <hostname> 3.5.3-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT <timedate> x86_64 GNU/Linux
failed on a udev hotswapped ext2 USB drive
mount -t ext2 ...
with message that ext2 is an unknown filesystem.
The same ext2 booted another box fine. I wasn't saying everything about ext2 is broken, but that Arch should never report ext2 as unknown filesystem. Both 'ext2' and 'auto' tags should 'just work' in all possible usages (fstab, manual console mount, DE auto-mount, whatever).
If I have some weird config causing a message others don't see (very possible, I just didn't think of it that way after ticket closure), then I would like to learn what. The sys is well maintained and standard. Stock Arch kernels all the way. If Arch devs never intended such a message to appear, then I may have found a bug and need to file a report. It may need some backtrack, as I already reformatted to UN-journaled ext4 just to use the device with Arch boxes.
Thanks all!

[Solved] considering switching to arch

I am considering switching to arch as i have heard good things about this distro. however before i do I'd like to ask a few questions. firstly how does one install software on Arch. secondly what actually makes arch so great? and thirdly will WMs like KDE run faster on Arches bare-bones design?

dante19992 wrote:from the looks of it i wont be switching after all. tht thread seemes like just a bunch of fanboys saying "arch rules" over and over and over.
Unless you know someone in person that uses Arch, and that person knows how prolific you are when it comes to Linux, and he recommends you to switch, I wouldn't switch. The biggest fanboys are the ones that were on Ubuntu a week ago. They may be really enthusiast, but they barely know how to handle their system, which makes them totally unfit to tell you whether you yourself should switch or not.
No flame intended towards Ubuntu, by the way.

Wanted to know a thing about Arch before considering installing it

Hi,
i come from the Debian world and before making a distro change to Arch i need to know about if it is possible to start/stop services or run a script automatically when an interface is up/down (in Debian, ifup/ifdown commands) manually without doing anything hackish in Arch.
Thanks in advance.

Don't think it's easily achievable with current network scripts, but should be possible with netcfg.

My thoughts (and yours too!) about Arch (I'm in love already!)

Hello all! I suppose I would be called a newbie to Arch, but certainly not to Linux. I've been running Gentoo for five months. If I were running, say, Ubuntu for five months, I would probably still be considered a newbie, but five months of Gentoo has made me pretty proficient at Linux.
I (if you haven't guessed yet) am a Gentoo user , and it seems like there are a lot of Gentoo users who go to Arch. That's how I heard about it, through the Gentoo forums. I am currently looking for backups in case Gentoo comes crashing to the ground. I was perfectly content in my little bubble of happy compiling until I learned about the unrest inside of the Gentoo community. I never realized that things were in such bad shape... like a downward spiral. The result cannot be good. I feel like I'm on a sinking ship and am praying for my life here. I've seen a lot of threads at the forums lately like "If Drobbins fork Gentoo, will you follow him?" and "Will you stay with Gentoo if the Foundation is handed over to a 3rd party?" I find these a little unsettling! I understand that the Foundation is a terrible state right now, and the founder's attempt to get it back has failed, so now I don't things are going to head up. So I've started to face facts, that I better have some backup plans so that I'm not starting over from square 1 when this all burns to the ground (hopefully if, not when, because I like Gentoo and really don't want to have to give it up). Now I admit that I don't like EVERYTHING about Gentoo, but I like almost everything, and Arch seems to be like Gentoo in many respects.
Some of my personal desires in a distro:
1.Bleeding edge with rolling updates (and thus no need to ever reinstall the distribution)
2. A large repository for the package manager
3. Not a newbie distro... a distro for those who like the command line and to do things themselves
4. Good community
5. Customizable
6. The ability to choose between a stable and unstable package on a per-package basis
7. Install from source
Arch seems to satisfy 1,3, 4, and 5 correct? And pretty well satisfies 2, though I can see its package manager is not as big as Gentoo (though bigger than like Slackware).
I guess for the most part it doesn't satisfy 6 and 7 though, right? I realize that AUR is source-based, but on the whole, Arch is binary, so I'm referring to the overall tendency of the distribution.
Is there the ability to choose between stable and unstable packages though, to be as bleeding-edge as possible? (I'm thinking no but thought I'd ask)
Many other distributions such as Ubuntu probably wouldn't meet my needs at all. They seem to have a great repository and community, but I just don't want a GUI-based distro. The truth is, I want to feel like my computer needs me. It's my baby. XDDDD Okay, that's pretty sad, especially because it's a Pentium II (I can't WAIT to get my new laptop!!!!!!!!!!!), but I appreciate my Gentoo box way more than our Windows box upstairs, a lot of that having to do with the work I had to put into it to get it working correctly, and all that I had to learn. It makes me appreciate it a lot more, and it makes me a lot better at solving problems. (If it ain't broken, why not break it so you can fix it? XD)I don't want a distro that does everything for me; I won't feel needed anymore. Plus, I'm addicted to the command line. I have a window manager, sure (Thunar with Xfce), but I mostly still use the command line to view my files. Sometimes I don't even start up X (I never start it up by default) and am just as efficient as when I have it open. I insist on knowing how to do everything manually... when I wanted to make keyboard shortcuts for X, I chose to use xbindkeys rather than use the GUI with Xfce, so I could do it manually and still have it working if I ever switched desktop managers. I manually edit pretty much ALL my config files and, like I said, I am just as efficient without the GUI as I am with it. I can't go five minutes in GUI without having a virtual terminal open. So I think, in these respects, Arch would meed my needs quite well, just as Gentoo does now. I have deiced to try out Arch now anyway, regardless of the state of Gentoo, because you know, i might just like Arch better. I know a lot of Gentoo users have said they've gone to Arch. I'm trying to get my friend Evan to let me use his 8 gb hdd to try it on, because my current 6 gig drive for Gentoo is like... 99 percent full (I swear, I'm not kidding, I have 100 mg left, I REALLY have to prune XD), so once I get it, I'm going to install Arch (after unhooking my /home hard drive because I only have two slots for hard drives, and they're both already filled! I will probably end up moving the /home directory onto that 8 gig drive anyway. I realize it's hard to share things between distros, but I will at least be able to have a place to put files for both distros in the same place and would probably end up symlinking some same location to my desktop for both distros
Okay, now I'm just ranting. Back to point! I'm definitely going to try out Arch, and so far I like what I see. I even recommended it to a friend who is also thinking of leaving Gentoo (for Ubuntu, so he can support his amd64 processor). I pointed out Arch64 and he's considering it. I don't think he'd like Ubuntu any more than I. He originally used Slack and only switched to Gentoo because Slack really doesn't have a good package manager. I think he'd like Arch as well.
I've also done research on other distributions someone like me might like (especially coming from Gentoo).
This is my current list:
Arch Linux
Frugalware (based on Arch, right?)
Zen Walk
Vector Linux
CRUX (I'm leaning away from this one, as of now)
Lunar
Source Mage
Sorcerer
FreeBSD (but I've decided not to go with FreeBSD, as much as I like installing from source, because their philosophy of stability over currentness (like not having flash 9 because it's not "stable") just doesn't fly with me.. Linux is better for me, I think)
LFS.. okay, not really, but if I ever have a weekend when I'm REALLY bored.........
I've used Slack before but I would prefer to have a package manager, so I'm steering away from that direction, as much as I liked Slack.
Have I missed any other distros people in this sort of mindset like us might like? ^_^
My primary focus right now is Arch, and it's definitely my first preference as far as switching goes.
I think my biggest problem with Arch is that I REALLY like to compile everything from source (or at least, have Portage do it for me :-p), so I"d miss that. Especially USE flags. However, Source Mge/Lunar/Sorcerer don't sound as good as Arch, and FreeBSD just... isn't my thing. Their package manger seems great, it's their overall philosophy I disagree with.
This post really isn't asking for help with anything, but isn't that fine? This is just the Arch Linux General Forums, right? I just wanna talk about Arch as compared to other distros. I've wiki-ed it some, but I just think it's a fun thing to discuss.
So what things do you guys like better about Arch, and what things do you like better about Gentoo, or maybe about some other good distros?
I can't wait to try out Arch; I'm so excited! No Xubuntu for me! ^___________^ (Gnome and ESPECIALLY KDE would lag far too much for this computer)
-Megan M-

Well, I technically have 14 gigs... I have the 6 gig and a 4 gig which has /usr/portage (the portage tree probably takes up so much space it would outweigh any space saved through USE flags XD) and /var/tmp, since that can get huge while compiling and I don't have space on the 6 gig for the fluctuations in space... I had to install the binary for OpenOffice just because the temporary space required to compile it was bigger than the space I had on my hard drive!!!!and I actually have so little space left I am permanently using a ext3 formatted flash drive as my ~/Desktop (it's in my fstab and everything XD!) This gives me 4 extra gigs for all my stuff.
But anyway, just you people answering this thread so nicely confirms my feelings about the Arch community. I can easily see a thread like this simply being ignored on the Gentoo forums, or just merged with other threads. >.<
Actually, to be honest, most pakcages I am running unstable on Gentoo had to do with compile errors and such, or some feature not working correctly in the older version. The only ones that I just wanted to run unstable are.. lemme check my /etc/portage/package.keywords... Skype and Pidgin. And possibly Mplayer too, I was thinking of. Everything else was either because of problems or of it being in the Sunrise overlay (everything in there is masked as unstable since it's not an official part of the Portage tree).
How easy is it to get an older version of a package? I ask because I want Flash 9.0.48.0-r1, NOT 9.0.115.0. The newer one made my Firefox commit suicide and just close with an error when I viewed certain pages (youtube, etc. was fine, but even going to www.adobe.com made it crash *irony*). Gentoo forum users told me that then newer one was unmasked because of a security flaw found in the older one, but for me, I'd rather take my chances with the hole than have firefox crash every five minutes!!!! Is there any way to specify not to update a package either, for when you do a world update (or whatever they are called in Arch)? This also has to do with Flash... I'll give the newer one a try... maybe it was just a Gentoo issue... but if not, I'm DEFINITELY downgrading!
I like how easy it seems for Arch users to add packages to AUR so they are available to others... this is harder to do on Gentoo, despite that everything is source-based. It's most like there is a wall between the users and the developers that cannot be broken easily. This seems like a good way to let users have a little fun in the developer's world without *being* one.
One last question while I'm here.. my other friend who I sugested Arch to... I just want to confirm that Arch would support his CPU. He said to me:
"Oh, and my CPU arch is amd64 / x86-64 / emt64-t
thechnically its em64t since its an intel CPU but i am running a k8 optimized system (because I used to have a opteron)"
^_^
PS: Your forums may be smaller than those of Gentoo, but that is not necessarily a disadvantage. There is like a perfect size, I think. You can be too small OR too big... with bigger forums, it is so much easier for a thread to just get buried if no one can answer it right away, even though someone else might be able to but will never see it because it's already buried. This happened to me in the Ubuntu forums. I obviously do not run Ubuntu but posted a question there regarding mtpfs with a particular MP3 player, because I figured the forums were large enough that I'd get at least a few people with the same mp3 player and they could tell me their experiences with the program. HA! Instead, I just got 0 replies and it was simply buried. With forums, bigger isn't *always* better, imo.
PPS: What is your policy on patching the source code? For example, GTK+ recently deprecated a few features that TiLP(1 and 2) depends on. The source code will now not compile. I made a patch for it to fix it (I was supposed to submit that ebuild two days ago... grah, I really should do it tomorrow!), for otherwise it just gives errors. If it is TiLp2 you have in the repository, it is literally as simple as adding one line in the source code (and is the fix the developer himself recommended), but Gentoo did not even notice and kept the source code in the tree the same even though it would no longer compile! @_@ This kind of ticked me off, personally, which is why I have to submit that patch tomorrow! ha ha
Last edited by violagirl23 (2008-01-24 06:00:10)

New to Arch(64), with a few questions about Xorg and more

Hello and Happy New Year everyone,
I'm a user that has just recently decided to try and switch to Linux as the main OS for all things that don't concern gaming. I've been using the "server side" of Linux at work for a couple years now, but when it comes to its desktop part I consider myself not fully competent yet. Under recommendation of a friend I decided to give Arch a shot, and I can say that it really suits my philosophy on how an OS should be like.
I have a few issues I'm currently struggling with that I couldn't seem to solve by looking on my own: as they are mostly minor and shortly described, I thought about packing them up in one single thread to avoid making too many. I've used i686 as testing grounds and am now using x86_64, but most of my problems apply to both.
Here's my hardware, for reference:
- Intel E8400 CPU (3GHz, dual core)
- Asus P5Q-E motherboard
- 2 GB DDR2 800 RAM.
- nVidia 8800GT video card with 512MB memory
- Samsung SyncMaster 713BM flat panel, connected via DVI cable
- Creative SBLive! 5.1 OEM card (dug up for the occasion since it has hardware mixing)
I'm using the latest Xorg from the repos, nvidia proprietary drivers, ALSA, Xfce4 + compiz-fusion, and SLIM as my login manager.
And here are my headaches:
- (32/64) A similar issue to the one I just mentioned: compiz-fusion doesn't seem to stick around as my window manager, even though I manually set it as per Method 2 from this wiki page. Although it did work for a while, after some time (perhaps after installing some package? but I didn't really install anything X related) it simply stopped working. To get my windows, I have to manually run fusion-icon after login.
- (32/64) I'm using MPlayer with libass to watch my favourite anime, but sometimes MPlayer freezes up, forcing me to xkill it. Disabling ASS embedded subs yields error message 11, something about unsufficient resources. Disabling subs entirely prevents MPlayer from crashing. Oh, the errors only happen on specific points of certain videos, and all the videos work just fine under WinXP with MPC or VLC.
- (32/64) Why do anti-aliased fonts under Linux still look so bad, even though I installed the appropriate packages suggested in the wiki? I don't mind disabling anti-aliasing entirely and just using Verdana, but is there some trick to it besides setting sub-pixel hinting under rclick->settings->user interface?
- (32/64) My SBLive might be 5.1, but I'm only using the front connector as I use either two stereo speakers or headphones all the time. But the volume setting in applications (such as MPlayer) seems to affect the PCM meter of ALSA's mixer, putting it over 0 dB gain and generating sound distortion.
- (64/don't know if 32 too) Why does Compiz's framerate drop so badly when I push alt-tab? I'm using the default application shifter, hardware acceleration, and there should be no reason why the framerate should drop like that (expecially considering that wobbly windows or cube rotating don't affect my performance at all). I've read around the net about very similar occourances with the task switcher, but I've found no real solution.
- [SOLVED] (32/64) The first obstacle I came across was that I couldn't set my screen refresh any higher than 60Hz when I actually wanted 75Hz: I solved this by setting the vertical refresh to 76.0-76.0 in xorg.conf. However, for some reason this setting doesn't stick on reboot: I have to log in and manually run rclick->System->NVIDIA X Server Settings for it to apply.
- [SOLVED] (64 only) The 32 version of Xorg was fine, but for some reason I'm not getting the correct keyset (Italian) under X, while everything works in vc. I think I read something about disabling a module called "keydev", but is this really the way to go?
- [SOLVED] (64 only) Although I can hear sound in just about every application, the 64 bit version of Pidgin doesn't "ring" on received messages even though the associated option is enabled.
I kindly thank you in advance for your assistance: I will provide any configuration files that might be needed to help me out
Last edited by Akaraxle (2009-01-03 21:25:43)

xisal wrote:
Take a look into /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi. This works with portuguese layout:
<snip>
The file did not exist, so I created it and changed "pt" to "it". Thanks a bunch, that fixed it!
Try SMPlayer.
Ah, I'd rather not involve Qt. Besides, isn't SMPlayer simply a frontend to Mplayer (who already has GMplayer integrated into it, IIRC)?
Mikko777 wrote:
Why would you want to use 75Hz with lcd display?
Does it make a difference?
On my monitor, from my point of view, it appears to make a difference. It's that simple
azleifel wrote:In gmplayer Preferences -> Audio -> (assuming alsa selected) -> Configure driver and change the mixer channel to something other than PCM, e.g. Master.
For all the three combos, I have "driver default" selected. The other option is "default"; I tried to manually type "Master" into the mixer channel field, but then gmplayer's windows and my Xfce taskbar started blinking, so I knew I had just "crossed streams".
Regarding NVIDIA X Server Settings, running "usr/bin/nvidia-settings --load-config-only" at login is the only way to apply the settings "automatically".
I've slapped that on my ~/.xinitrc before "exec startxfce4". Thanks in advance, going to test it now!
About the refresh and non-decorated windows issues (which *appears* to be solved after I've wiped the xfce-session cache), I've been thinking: could they somehow be related the login manager I've chosen, SLIM?
P.S. New question: is there any way to enable the ALT+num126 for ~ keyboard behaviour I'm used to under M$ environments?
Last edited by Akaraxle (2009-01-03 09:43:02)

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