On 05/12/2014 04:32 PM, Chris Knadle wrote:
On Monday, May 12, 2014 14:47:05 Gary Mort wrote:
Was wondering what others experience with Archlinux is?
I'm running it in a VM on top of Windows, and I wanted to look into an
alternative distribution that wasn't DEB or RPM based. So far, I like it.
It isn't as easy to install as others -- there's no graphical installer and
there are more manual steps than most. The Pacman tool takes a bit of getting
used to as it has command line switches that are different.
I cheated and used bbq linux to get a headstart. :-)
http://bbqlinux.org/ That let me install via a gui and gave me a
desktop right away. I did eventually switch desktops to cinnamon after
trying mate, gnome 3, and a few others.
I also add http://www.blackarch.org/ to my /etc/pacman.conf file but
keep it commented out except when I want to grab a package from them.
But other than those minor quirks, I like it.
I'm working with someone else that uses Arch as his main distribution, and he
also likes it but says "I wouldn't want to use it to run a server", because it
seems to be dedicated to keeping the installation "at the bleeding edge",
which is mostly good but has a couple of downsides.
One thing you can do is copy all the installed packages into a directory
and create your own local repo, see
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_tips#Custom_local_repository
So once you have a fixed set of packages you are happy with, switch to
using your local repo and only check their repos when you need them.
Mainly for me, this allows me to use some packages I want the latest
of[kernel packages and such] while hopefully at the same time I can set
my custom packages and update them as I want.
Their package format is extremely simply compared to ubuntu. Plus
depending on the server, sometimes I really do want it to run at the
bleeding edge[when running HHVM, Facebooks version of PHP, it is being
updated so recently that I really do want to pull in their nightly build
ever week or so - and building it requires a lot of up to date librarys
for string handling, event handling, etc.]
The final straw for me though was systemd. For PHP development with
clients who want the "cool" web stuff, I need a lot of up to date
libraries. Debian and CentOS are way out of date for a base. Ubuntu is
up to date, but their not switching to systemd for a few releases and
their going to be sticking with a downlevel kernel for the next few
releases.
I'd rather not continue to master their "upstart" system only to have to
change in a few years. Arch linux is using systemd NOW.
[And with systemd having a kernel module being released into the kernel
soon - I really want to keep up with the kernel. At the moment,
anything below kernel version 3.11 is too low for me - way too many
network performance enhancements have been added recently]
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