Arch Linux...

[sedrosken]

...is one of the most difficult operating systems to set up and use in this day and age, period.

But I did it. I won't lie, I had help from a tutorial, if that lessens the victory any.

Installing everything had to be done through the CLI, and pacman saw a lot of use (and abuse).

I had go-rounds with LightDM and GDM, and MATE and GNOME 3, and all of this because I didn't have XORG. In the end I went with MATE and LightDM.

 

[Bozo]

Ever try free BSD?

 

[Chewy509]

...is one of the most difficult operating systems to set up and use in this day and age, period.

Umm, no it's not... Try minix or Plan9... (Their fdisk programs require you to manually work out the correct LBAs yourself to get the best sector alignment, and some scary moments with installing their boot managers).

I had go-rounds with LightDM and GDM, and MATE and GNOME 3, and all of this because I didn't have XORG. In the end I went with MATE and LightDM.

I don't see how that happened since all the DE's and login managers have XOrg as a pre-req in the package list? Current versions of XOrg are really good at device detection, so it's unlikely you even needed an xorg.conf to get started... (I assume you were using the FOSS AMD drivers and not the fglx drivers, due to having an ATi R300 GPU)....

When installing did you follow the tests on ensuring X.Org was installed correctly before choosing a DE and login manager? (that is running XOrg with TWM and a single xterm from a standard users login).

 

[CougTek]

Linux From Scratch might be interesting for you. It is time consuming though. Once completed, you could end up with Sedrosken Linux.

 

[sedrosken]

When installing did you follow the tests on ensuring X.Org was installed correctly before choosing a DE and login manager? (that is running XOrg with TWM and a single xterm from a standard users login).

No, I did not. That right there is where I went wrong. I guess X.Org wasn't a listed prerequisite, as I was able to install the lightdm-gtk2-greeter and accountsservice packages without it. Needless to say that they wouldn't run without it though.

Wow, that whole thing about LBAs went right over my head. You can calculate those? I know what they are, they're what the BIOS uses to communicate with the HDD because going directly through BIOS calls the max amount of storage space one can have is something like 500 MB. It uses an arbitrary amount of heads/cylinders/sectors that usually calculates to far less than what the actual drive capacity is... I'm starting to confuse myself...

 

[sedrosken]

That Linux From Scratch thing is very interesting, perhaps I might take a crack at it over the summer. For now I think just getting Arch set up how I want it will be enough of a victory, though. Maybe the Linux From Scratch project will be the reason I keep that old 1.7GHz P4 around...

 

[Howell]

The one and only LFS install I made it half way through was on a PII. Be prepared for a lot of waiting around.

 

[sedrosken]

That'd be why I'd be setting it up on the ancient one.

On another note, testing out a minimal install of Ubuntu server (Arch is good, very good; however, it can't handle .deb packages), had many go-rounds with the partitioner (I had to remove my GPT table on both drives, and start anew with an MBR table... setting up a software RAID on GPT disks is a pain, especially when it comes down to GRUB installation...). I plan to install MATE 1.8 (worry not, I have instructions on how to add the repository from a bash prompt) and my usual suite of useful programs (chromium, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-impress, vlc, gstreamer plugins, rhythmbox, you get where I'm going...).

One thing Ubuntu server has over Arch, other than being able to use .deb files for installing programs, is its installation process: beautifully simple, particularly when compared to Arch's rather daunting (for me at least) task of manually installing everything...

 

[CougTek]

If you want Ubuntu + Mate, why don't you try Mint instead? Version 17 just came out and it's quite mature.

 

[Mercutio]

For a good education about what things do and how they work, go salvage a Pentium 2 or the like and try to make it run a pre-Linux 1.0 Slackware. then look at what it takes to upgrade to successively newer software.

 

[CougTek]

Or...

Stab your forearm with a knife and play in the wound for a few hours until you faint. Almost equally painful.

 

[Mercutio]

Sure, but also definitely educational. You have to start with transitioning from a.out binaries to ELF binaries. You'll go through two or three boot loaders. You wind up changing C libraries, Windowing Toolkits, disk formats and of course kernels. if you can manage all those changes and maintain a machine that actually boots, you can honestly say you've mastered Linux.

But yeah that is probably right up there getting circumcised with a pair of toenail clippers on the amusement scale.

 

[Chewy509]

One thing Ubuntu server has over Arch, other than being able to use .deb files for installing programs, is its installation process: beautifully simple, particularly when compared to Arch's rather daunting (for me at least) task of manually installing everything...

Actually I would consider Ubuntu's (and by extension Debian) starting of services automatically upon installation before the user can configure them correctly to be horribly, horribly broken on multiple levels.

I'm sorry I don't see how using pacman is any more difficult or different from using apt-get from the command line? Other than pacman will only install hard-dependencies by default (soft dependencies are listed during installation telling the user there are optional components to install), where as apt-get in Ubuntu/Debian will install both hard and soft dependencies by default (which can break things).

 

[Bozo]

Or...

Stab your forearm with a knife and play in the wound for a few hours until you faint. Almost equally painful.

Don't forget to add salt.