Let me preface my post with a little bit of backstory. I am a 10-year IT veteran who's cut his teeth and career in the Novell/Win 3.x/95/2000/XP world both as a hardware tech and network admin. I'm quite frankly sick of what I see as lack of responsiveness to user concerns re: Windows, not to mention ridiculous aspects like forced upgrades and installation of packages nobody wants (can you say IE?) The biggest beef I have is that there's no longer direct command-line control over the hardware. So it's time for me to say buh-bye to Windows and move on to linux. (Not to mention that it may be a good career move to learn it as well).

Sooo....that leads me here. I've got exactly ZERO experience in UNIX or Linux. I have two systems at home: One is a Celeron 2GHz Dell 2400 I intend to configure as a server/firewall and the other is a hand-built a64 3000 1.8 GHz system that I want to use as a workstation. I've been looking for a distro and I came upon the quizzes in pljvaldez's signature. According to said quizzes, Arch seems to be the best distro for me.

I want fast. I want minimal OS interference so I have maximum room on my hard drives. I really want a system customized to my needs, without any of the stuff I don't need. On the desktop system, I intend to run Fluxbox with maybe a word processor and spreadsheet as well as firefox and thunderbird (or some other mail app). As far as software goes, that's it, really.

I briefly attempted an Arch install, but balked at setting up my config files and what-not. The documentation on Arch's web page seems a little...light. Are there any resources out there to help me with a first-time Arch install? I don't want to use a graphical installer. I want to really LEARN linux. So, any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

Besides the installation guide, two other webpages come to mind that are invaluable to maximizing your Arch experience: Arch Forum and ArchWiki.
For Linux related stuff in general, I can recommend Linux: Rute User's Guide and Exposition and The Linux Documentation Project. And of course LQ.org ;-)
Hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply! I'm going to set up a test system here at work just using a CD to see how it goes.

Hi,

I got a good 'first time install' link:
http://wael.nasreddine.com/Articles/...rch_Linux.html

I used it for my first installs. It really gives you a good introduction to arch

Have fun.

Sincerely, Jorgen

I installed Arch with 3 months of experience in Linux and am using it since then. I have to say that i love it!! You will not get dissapointed.

I noticed you own an Athlon 64, so i would suggest to install Arch64 instead of the official i686 one. However, i never tried it.