HR Geeks

llrighty!   Well my new machine just arrived about a week ago. With plans of myself jumping-ship to Australia, I have been also wanting to put a reliable distribution on my new lappy. Mid-life crisis? Well at 27 it still seems like it, as I have been a curmudgeon and have tended to get stuck in my ways. The big jump here is, well, choosing a new distribution. Like a new pair of undies, I want something that’s clean and inviting, it’s a big decision, and change is hard for me. As I mentioned, I’m kinda a curmudgeon, so something not venturing too far from my old distro would be well, my other personal machine runs Slackware (been a Slackware guy since 2003 or so).

Anyways, I’ll cut to the chase here. Like Slack, I want a distro that doesn’t blind me to the internals of Linux, and keeps things intuitive, isn’t that how we learn? Personally, I feel that using a ton of GUIs evades how things work. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but why not add another crinkle to the brain, like a wrinkle of knowledge. With that said, me changing my digital undies from Slack to someother distribution might add a few more wrinkles to the noggin. Also, Matt requirement #2 for distros is this: I don’t want to have to run the equivalent to a digital enema after install, lets keep the undies unscathed and free of stains. I like lean distros that do not imbibe the user with a ton of fluff; If I want it, I’ll install it. As being at a job that encourages develoeprs to use the same OS, or very similar, to what the customer runs, I have been babied with some reasoable package management. I used to be opposed to package management, as some of the earlier implementations (I’m not talking Slack here), seemed kinda confusing, but that was years ago, and a personal opinion. The newer stuff seems to me that package management is pretty up-to-par; however, I don’t really like being blinded to the build of the packages, it is nice to build what you want. I liked Slack packs, they were simple, but I always kinda just like building from scratch; however, the latter not always resolving dependancies and not always the fast thing to do if you just want to try something out quickly. The distro I have been using for work has frequent updates and such, and I can just dowload something rather fast if I need to see if a utility is for me. Quite simply, all I want is sleep and a minimalistic distro that provides simple, effective, frequet dependancy resolution package management, and has a strong developer base (I don’t want the distro to go moot in a few weeks).  Like undies (I wear boxers), a distro becomes something rather close to you, a friend.  They know all your personal details. I also want a non-corporate based distribution. I don’t care what the shareholders say, I care about what the poeple who develop for the project have to say!

Well, give it was Memorial Day weekend, I had some time to play around. As I was about to go insane with distro choices, hey take a look at distrowatch.org, I finally found my new buddy… Arch Linux. Having heard of them before, but never paying much attention, I was really hesitant, as I mentioned earlier, I want a well-established distribution that won’t disappear in a few weeks. Well, thanks to their website, Wikipedia, and Distrowatch.org, I must say this seemed like the golden pair-of-nuthuggers I had been looking for, quite possibly I could rest and get some sleep. Ok, well the golden pair of boxers (I don’t do the tidy-whitey-crunchers).

But how can I verify that this distribution is reputable? Sure, distrowatch.org had it ranked pretty high on popularity, and well Wikipedia and the Arch site mentioned the project was established in 2002, which is great, but how many hackers do we have that are currently running or trying to run it… lets check IRC. Yup, 800+ in freenode.irc.org #archlinux. I have arrived! By the way, another thing I wanted to make sure of was that there was some body of persons that make the overall decisions. And…. check, yep they do.  I didn’t delve into the politics so much, but I was told so in #archlinux, not that I really looked/googled/checked-their-wiki. Likewise, with such a simple question I was not even flamed in the IRC room! What, no flames? Ok, I like these guys! Arch away!

Arch uses pacman, which is an incredibly easy-to-use package management system that resolves dependancies. Other distros are leveraging this system as well, but I believe the roots of pacman are from the Arch project. Since the Arch philosophy is to evolve (after all, nature usually has things tested-out for us), there are no major releases of Arch, mainly evolving, constantly updating packages. And one can update their system, with a flick of one command to pacman. If one choses to use a ports-like system: download-source/build/install with package manager, then that can be accomplished as well.  Hey, it evolves, nature evolves, seems the logical approach to me.

It was encouraged that I write about my virgin experience installing Arch from one of the hackers in IRC. With that said, I did jot down a few notes. As this post is quickly approaching the TLDR lower-bound, I will make this quick. First thing that set off my awesomeness-meter was that I didn’t need to run syslinux or format my USB jump-drive to get their install iso to boot. Merely, a ‘dd‘ of iso to jump-drive was all that was needed. With that accomplished in just a few jiffies (yes a jiffy is a cycle of kernel time), I was ready to reboot to install. But before I even ran ‘dd’ I was thinking, should I ‘dd’ to /dev/sdX or the first partition, /dev/sdX1? As I was thinking such a question, I decided to look in their install guide, and low-and-behold it does mention this, as if it read my brain. By this point, I was utterly frightened, it new what I was thinking, and answered me!

The installer is well, in one word, elegant! I liked it, and install of the core-system was fast and pretty straight-forward. No GUI, just some ‘dialog‘ based menus to navigate, straight-forward.  Well, it looks like ‘dialog.’  The base-partitioner is cfdisk, which is not overly complicated. This, coupled with their installer, works pretty nicely, it took a few tries to see what was going on, but after a few minutes, I was ready to select which binaries I wanted to install for the core system.  I really like their beginners guide on the Arch wiki. Also, the hints/notes that the installer has per ‘dialog’ is helpful. But in all honesty, you really do not need a guide to install this, but it does help.

Another word of mega-positiveness towards Arch: Most devs seem to forgo or dislike documentation.  However, what also shines about Arch, aside from simplicity, elegance, and a friendly IRC room is their wiki documentation. It’s well written, in a manner that is guided to teach the reader as to why they run a certain command/edit-a-file. And it seems to have all the answers, if not most.

So my overall take here is that I am thoroughly impressed by this project, and it is now my distro of choice. My undies (boxers) are clean, and sleep can commence.

Up the Arch!

-Matt (enferex)

Sources:
My Brain
http://www.archlinux.org
http://www.distrowatch.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archlinux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacman_(package_manager)
#archlinux on irc.freenode.net