into the arch
I’m trying out Arch GNU/Linux, with an eye toward switching my desktop to it from Slackware. Arch is supposed to give vanilla installs of software and leave it up the the user to configure however is wanted. Arch has a package manager which resolves dependencies and can work with build scripts. And Arch uses a rolling release model.
The Arch installer worked fine, with a minor glitch. The kernel on the Arch installer disk switched the names of my drives, so that what every other kernel calls /dev/sda was /dev/sdb and vice versa. This caused it to set the root partition in grub incorrectly, but that was easy enough to fix by changing the line from root (hd1,7) to root (hd0,7).
The first hurdle was getting my dial-up connection to work. The Arch install CD doesn’t contain a dialer app or even a tool to help configure ppp. The Arch way to make dial-up work didn’t work for me, and there weren’t any helpful log messages to troubleshoot it. I stuck with it for a day, tweaking it and referring to the ppp options Slackware’s dialer tool had set up for me. Then I gave up and grabbed wvdial from the Arch repository. After installing it and running wvdialconf, dial-up works.
Now with a connection to the net, I was ready to sync the package database with Arch’s current one(s) and update the system. The list of downloads was about half a GiB, so I just generated a list of URLs and fed them to wget on a machine with a broadband connection; this is my plan whenever there’s a lot of downloading to be done.
Bringing the package files back to the Arch machine and then having pacman update the system went fine. And then pacman wouldn’t work any more. It turned out that the updating had overwritten a working configuration file with one that doesn’t work. So I learned that pacman’s handling of new config files is very rudimentary compared to Gentoo’s portage system. The error pacman gave was “unexpected error”, not much to go on. Luckily, this Arch forum thread had the problem description and solution.
I’m going to try to document the process of setting up my Arch system as I go, with blog posts; I’m going slowly, so maybe I can make myself do it.