So far I have used Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, and Slackware. Slackware has definitely been the best, and I've stuck with it the longest. However, Arch has intrigued, mostly because it is specifically for i686 and they have the new 2.6.3 kernel. I'm contemplating converting to Arch and giving it a shot, but I do not see Gnome listed in the packages that come on the disk. So my main question naturally is, does it come on the disk but it's just not listed? Or would I have to get it through pacman? I looked at the list of extra packages and saw several gnome packages available for download, is there a way that I can download all gnome packages and have them installed with one pacman command or would I have to download them all??

as far as I know, gnome isn't a part of the iso disc you can download from Arch's site, so that it isn't on the disc you install Arch from (correct me if I'm wrong or this is outdated). Gnome can be obtained with pacman through the Extra package reposity, and it's easy as eating an icecream:

$ pacman -Ss gnome

gives you (among others) the following:

extra/gnome-desktop 2.4.1.1-1
The GNOME Desktop

this means, that by making pacman get "gnome-desktop" it solves the dependencies and gets all the packages you need for gnome, and then installs them - of course, asking you whether you want to get the packages it needs (a list is shown) or not, before starting the actual operation.

the "magic" command switch is S - it tells pacman to search for the given package, check what it needs, list them, ask your opinion, download and install. example:

$ pacman -S gnome-desktop

and there you go. just remember, if you want to get the latest, to do a

$ pacman -Sy

from time to time, to keep your databases updated. and if you wish to be able to get development (unstable) versions too, just edit pacman's config file to accept these too (the Unstable reposity).

I haven't myself got gnome, because I prefer fluxbox to it...but dependency-solving is a part of pacman's job, so whatever the gnome desktop needs, should be pulled from the net and installed by one command. that's one of the sides I like in Arch...RH was a true dependency-hell for me back in the days

and yes, Arch has proven to be the best distro for me, at least for now. and altough it's young, it keeps on developing and becoming better and better... I've got nothing big to complain about, and all the small things I do, are being fixed quickly as new versions come

Thanks, I think I'll download Arch now and give it a shot. Did you ever use Slackware??

no, not actually... I did think about it some time ago, but never made a move towards.. altough my friend has a slackware-type distro, which even uses slackware's package management (I don't know about that too much either, but it is what I've read and self tried out) so I've had a bit of it too...at least on some level but pure slack I haven't tried. perhaps one of the reasons was, that I didn't want any "big" distro, but a smaller one instead..

still, you never know what's going to be happen in the future..if I happen to buy another pc, laptop or something.. but anyway, arch rules.

well I downloaded Arch and was putting it on my slave HD, I got through it okay. Until I got to a screen after it installed the packages, and my only option was to continue. So, I selected continue, I saw a banner that stated it was partitioning. I wondered why it was partitioning again, and when I looked a little closer I noticed it was partitioning my other drive! This drive held Windows, and it's second partition held about 30 GB of stored data. I finally got my 60 G HD working again today and later I will be trying to recover my 30 GB of data with my recovery tools. Maybe I didn't read something careful enough and all might have gone smoothly, but to avoid something like this happening again I think I'll stick to Slack......

Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. I switched from slack about a month ago, and so far I'm finding it a very smooth ride. A few things to find out every so often, but generally very good. As simple solid and fast as slack + pacman + ABS + a very elegant init system (+ new kernels like you said). When you next feel up to it, and have the time, I'd recommend it. The forums at www.archlinux.com are very good too if you run into problems.