Installing

How hard is this to install?

It is medium-hard to install. There is no gui to guide you through the entire thing. The base install just leaves you with a linux box booting to the command line. You need to edit 2 or 3 text files to get everything working and then use pacman to install x, kde, etc to your liking.

I followed the example given on the following review and it worked very well. I have since installed to 3 other computers.

http://www.linuxlookup.com/modules.p...wcontent&id=58

Previously I had been using Mandrake and a little SuSE, Fedora, Debian (+ Mepis, Knoppix, Xandros,...) and Conectiva. I think it is easy to adapt to Arch due to the simplicity. I find it much easier to work with than fedora and I understand it a lot better than the Debian knock-offs I sometimes use.

One of the big advantages is the pacman repository is usually updated within a few hours of a package release. It is very leading edge. The repository is not as big as Debian, so for some things you might be on your own. If a problem comes up. it sometimes takes a day or two to get fixed, but you can usually revert to the previous package version in the mean time.

Ok thanks!

Before installing Archlinux, I had only used Redhat and had no previous experience of installing the more complicated distros, however I followed to documentation, and I now have a wonderful system running. It's really not that hard . Great distro.

That's what found when I installed Gentoo. Works great! Arch has had a romance about it, though, as its binary. That would give the cutting edge without the long compile times. I may be here asking questions soon...

I am downloading it now.

What is the current version 0.6 or 0.7 I noticed they finally gave 0.7 a name

Will it add windows to the boot loader automatically

The version is still 0.6, but one the packages (initscripts? whatever updates the /etc/rc.sysinit file) is showing 0.7, so it must be comming out very soon. The 'release' is just a set of package versions that will be included in the iso, so if you install 0.6 and then 'packman -Syu' to the newest stuff, you will have 99% exactly the same system if than if you wait for 0.7 and then do it.

I don't think it adds the windows partition to the boot options, check out the forum for the details:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.p...l+boot+windows