DeusExLinux....

Itś been about a week now of exploring Arch, and I have to say I am suprised that this distro has not gained more notoriety. It is a terrific, simple, stable, extremely usable Linux distro. I haven´t found anything I don´t like (with the possible exception that I still have not been able to resolve CD sound because of very confusing permissions problems, though I know I will eventually figure it out.)

For anyone interested in learning ¨naked Linux¨, itś a perfect choice. I have never used Gentoo, but I know it has a reputation for being extremely customizable. However, I cannot imagine a more customizable Linux dstro than Arch (well, Slackware is equally customizable, IMHO).

Glad I found it.

Bob

Hey, Bob. Can you elaborate on the above?

I beleive it is one of the best distros.

As to your permissions problem, do you have yourself in the audio/optical group?

There also is some issue where you might have to patch your kernel (or download the newest one if you're using the stock kernel) because udev now relies on uevents (which isn't in, I beleive, kernels under 2.6.15).

Hi,

Thanks for the responses. It seems to be very odd. I have two sound sources in this machine. One is a PCI C-Media card and the other is onboard AC '97 Intel. I want to use the C-Media as default. Alsamixer finds it, sets it up, and I have system sound just fine. However, it will not play cd's.

1. I am (as a user) in the audio group.

2. The /dev/cdrom is symlinked from /dev/hda. I did

chmod 666 /dev/cdrom

3, At that point, I temporarily have cd sound. But on reboot, it returns to the previous condition.

I am searching now for which file in initrc I have to amend to fix this. If you know, I would certainly appreciate a little guidance.

Thanks

Bob

what does your /etc/fstab look like? did you add "users" to it?

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto users,defaults,noauto 0 0

does it look something like that?

Hi

Yes:

That's why this one has me a little baffled, everything looks normal.

Thanks

Bob

I agree with you. This distro is highly customizable. I also tryed Gentoo, and found it equally to Arch in many ways, but the speed was better when i used Gentoo. Usually I wouldnt bother for a few seconds here and there, but Gentoo was just allround faster. Somehow it felt smoother.

Now im using both distro's and they are still running stable, despite all the adjustments and usermade errors I created :D

Have fun

Hey, Bob. Are you also in the 'optical' group?

I had the same problem with k3b - I had to keep using chmod to burn cds until I made myself part of the optical group.

Didn't know there was such a thing as the "optical" group. I'll check it out now.
Thanks for the information. Funny thing is, I have not had a problem with k3b, not CD sound requiring me to change permissions after each reboot. Also, if anyone knows, I prefer to use gnome as my desktop over kde. When I installed it, it does not seem to include the administration (root activities) section from the desktop for GUI things like services and time and date settings. I cannot seem to get the time to set correctly. It is on Pacific time and each time I attempt to change it, it returns to Pacific time on the next reboot.

Also, startx simply takes me to xterm window. Is it possible to add /opt/kde/bin/kdm to my regular user path to start the desktop? Right now, I can only do it as root and I must enter the whole path to start the desktop.

Thanks in advance for your help

Bob

I have not read through al of the replies... but I was surprised by the 38 second boot time in these specs... i a LAPTOP with similar specs... Compaq Evo N180 PentiumIII 1Ghz with 512MB RAM (some shared for video) and it boots a small arch install in about 19 seconds... less if I'm not using the wifi...

I do like the review... it's honest for the first install... i remember my first install... it went okay for the most part, kind of like his... i did have a little bit of trouble configuring X because i didn't know about hwd at the time...after using it for quite some time though, I can have an arch system up and running faster than absolutely any other OS... I even keep the ndiswrapper and ndiswrapper-utils on my tumb drive... so I can do a base install from CD... copy files over and get my wifi up without ever having to be hardwired... i times it about a week ago.. and from the time i booted the installer CD, to logging in to the console took just less than 5 minutes... and another 10 minutes and I was up and going with xorg7, openbox, firefox, irssi, etc.

Did you edit the rc.conf file to put yoruself int the right time zone?

Also, check out the arch wiki, there's great stuff on there on how to get yoru favorite gui to work on boot (you can make the default runlevel 5/3, whatever you want.

I use GDM, as it's easier to get running (it's just a daemon)

funny. Arch was the fastest for me, from power up to login, it takes 12 seconds on my P4. 16 with cups and hp-lip

I have been fooling around with arch linux for a few days and I am impressed. It is probably the fastest out of the box, static, distro that I've used. It's running on an older asrock board, 512 Mb pc2100 kingston ram, stock xp athlon 2100. I'm using gimmick with xorg 6.8. I've tried several distros and found slackware and debian sarge suit me best from the linux family. pacman does what it is supposed to do. burning cd's and playing dvd is easy. In my opinion arch is a well constructed distro, and I wish the best for its' author and users

here, here

I've just installed Arch and I have it up to almost the same useability as Ubuntu. Apart from the package management probably not being as good as apt-get it's done me fine so far.

No way am I switching, but when I no longer need a 32-bit version of Debian on my primary Desktop, I may install another distro in it's place. I keep hearing encouraging things about Arch. From a recent Distro Watch editorial,