Fellow Arch Enthusiasts, I might be a new Arch user and thought I'd introduce myself. Forgive me if I ramble a bit. I'm excited about Arch. I've found the answers to most of the questions/problems I've come across but still have a couple of questions. Feel free to just point me to the appropriate documentation.
I'm Kevin. I've been in the market for a "new" distribution for quite a while. I've tried many. I started out with Slackware back in the 1.x kernel days. From there I went to Mandrake. The past couple of years I've been using Gentoo and liked it pretty well but recently a few things about it have been getting on my nerves. To complicate matters I used to work in food service, I only have three nerves left. So, recently I've been trying other source based distributions. A while back I saw Arch but overlooked it thinking I wanted to stick with a source based distribution. Why, oh why didn't I try Arch sooner? It looks like Arch has the best of both worlds. It has binary distributions that install quickly but can be easily rebuilt via ABS if any tweeking is needed. And, creating new packages via ABS also appears to be a snap, even for packages with bizarre build procedures. I hit a few snags with the install/upgrade process but found most of the info I needed in the Arch wiki and/or Arch forums. Fortunately I started testing under vmware as I probably would have been cut off from online resources otherwise. I'm still running Arch under vmware. I have a little hard drive cleaning to do before switching my main box over to Arch. I installed via the 0.7.2 cd and ran into a few kernel panic problems after upgrading. The root of my problem was not changing initrd26.img to kernel26.img. After a second install attempt I did see the warning message go by. I found some info online saying that the warning should be written to pacman.log but I wasn't able to find it in my pacman.log. The only message related to kernel26 I found in /var/log/pacman.log was: upgraded kernel26 (2.6.16.16-1 -> 2.6.19.2-1) Is there another log somewhere I'm missing? Or, do I perhaps need to change a pacman config parm somewhere to have the warning messages written to the log? I've already used ABS to "version bump" one of my favorite applications - Hercules. Does Arch have a "version bump" procedure for packages already in the official repository? I didn't find anything in the wiki searching for "version bump." I might have a few packages to contribute to the AUR before long. I'm an old-fashoned kinda guy and prefer text console based apps. I have several apps that I've written using clip, a Clipper/xBase compatable compiler. I didn't find clip in the official repositories or in the AUR so I'm working on creating my own packages for it, which has been a little challanging. The authors apparently like to go in circles. The build/install process is basically accomplished with one command: ./make system from the source directory. The above installs clip and all it's optional libraries in /usr/local. The base clip package and it's optional libraries should be provided as separate packages for Arch. I think I finally have the build process disected enough to figure out how to build the various pieces separately with a more traditional configure->make->make install style process. The make shell script mentioned above issues a "make system" command. The Makefile just issues a "./mklocal -release" command. The mklocal shell script changes to the clip directory and does the traditional "./configure; make; make install" from there, depending on some environment variables set by the above scripts. Why didn't they just do that to begin with? Chihuahua. Anyway, I have the base clip package and a couple of optional clip library packages created already. The package creates several directories under "CLIPROOT" such as bin, charsets, etc, include, lib, etc., etc. I'm currently using /opt/clip for $CLIPROOT. Is that the best choice? Or, should I us something like /var/lib? Binaries and libraries get simlinked from $CLIPROOT/bin and $CLIPROOT/lib to /usr/bin and /usr/lib. Kevin http://www.RawFedDogs.net http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org Bruceville, TX Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes. _______________________________________________ arch mailing list arch@archlinux.org http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
