Wanting to give Arch a try, but having installation issues
 

I have the base and base-devel installed on my drive and arch boots up fine. I get logged in without problems, but I can go no further. If I try to install any of the desktop environments, I can't. I did pacman -S gnome and get an error about api-linux-headers conflict with kernel headers and it wants to know if I want to remove kernel headers. If I hit yes, it gives another error about e2fsprogs conflicting with something else. (sorry can't remember them all, going from memory). It asks if I want to remove e2fsprogs. If I say yes, is gives errors saying a bunch of programs require e2fsprogs. I get other errors, with KDE, but still the e2fsprogs conflict error. Most of the programs requiring e2fs are filesystems, openssh, smbclient and one or two more. Nothing out of the ordinary. Trying to install xorg and gdm also spits out conflict errors with e2fsprogs.

open to suggestions.

There are some quirks....:)

On thing I learned recently is that the maintainers/experts urge you to always do a system upgrade before installing anything.

Semi-related: I recently configured one system using the "rankmirrors" utility (See the arch wiki page on mirrors.) I think it was in the same article that they talk about using "pacman -Syy" to ensure that everything syncs properly.

So, from a fresh install:
setup the mirrors
run "pacman -Syy"
run "pacman -Su"
Then try to install desired SW.

I'll second everything Pixellany said. As as an FYI, I highly recommend adding Xyne's repository right at the beginning and install a tool called bauerbill. (Xyne has written a number of great tools for Arch.) Bauerbill is an extension of powerpill which is a wrapper for pacman, which can significantly speed up downloads. When you're first installing X and a desktop environment and all that, it's profoundly useful. Also, it gives you easy access to the AUR.

Just add
to /etc/pacman.conf.

Then (after you've updated as above)

thanks guys, I'll give it a try

well, I agree with there being a few quirks. I ran pacman -Syy and pacman -Su. That updated 3 packages. tried to install gnome and got same errors. Looked around on google and the Arch wiki and ran pacman -Syu. This updated the entire system. ran pacman -S gnome. So far so good. Still downloading the packages. So fingers crossed :)

This should have been the same as
Which is the same as except that it forces a refresh of all the package lists even if it thinks they are current. (The two 'y's instead of one.)

So it's odd that the first only updated a couple packages and the second time it updated everything.

But glad things seem to be going well. As I said, if you use bauerbill or powerpill instead of pacman, it uses reflector to generate a mirror list and aria2 to segment downloads and connect to multiple servers, cutting down your download time.

So now we all agree that Arch has quirks...

Over the weekend, I was looking for my list of "quirkless" distros, but I can't find it anywhere.....;)

@reed9;
Thanks for the info on the alternative package managers---now high on my todo list.

I just noticed that I linked back to this post and not Xyne's repo above, so that is corrected.

There is also another fairly new pacman alternative, packer. It's good for the AUR, but doesn't do segmented downloads like bauerbill/powerpill. But it's a little simpler. Bauerbill you pretty much have to alias it to simpler commands, or it gets a little obnoxious.

And I always thought those weren't quirks in Arch, they were features. :)

I would rather have quirks than than the alternative :)

well, looks like I have a working Arch desktop. Thanks for the help guys