Greetings,

I took a intro to UNIX/Linux class in my undergrad and was determined to dive into a distro after graduation, and now here I am!

I chose Arch, because I like the terminal and the simplicity of the architecture. At least I though it was straight forward.

My question is, can anybody direct me to some literature on setting up Arch on a laptop. Partitions do not usually scare me, but when I could possibly leave out a critical /swap file I get a little cautious.

Any direction would be appreciated.

How much disk space do you have?

What type of CPU?

What type of GPU?

How much RAM?

What type of wireless card?

Do you want to do full disk encryption?

Those are pretty much the big questions that will indicate if you need any special considerations.

What's wrong with the links on the front page of the site ?.
I would suggest the beginners guide; then the wiki.

thats Spam safexiaoyi
Mods, get'em!

smturner1; ARCH is a good choice if you like a simplistic, cool distro
but, as with Slackware, you must do some preliminary system setup
to get it how you want
it aint ubuntu

However; you could try up to 4 pre-made ARCH derivatives that are installable to hard drive
and are already setup
from best to just-good

ArchBang 2010.10
http://archbang.org/

very nice; I did a short review of it yesterday
Openbox window manager
http://www.linuxcritic.com/archbang-...010-10-review/

Chakra
http://chakra-project.org/

archiso-live; which is really for remastersing,etc
XFCE4 window manager
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Archiso-live

http://godane.wordpress.com/

and my own nFluxOS ARCH Testing with Fluxbox
http://multidistro.com/

However; I dont yet have a true hdd installer and thus you must use the nflux-installer
which can only install Lilo with or without Windows
or you can install it to hdd using the "manual-install" method
which is easy too

so, I vote you either try ArchBang, etc or read alot of docs and install ARCH via netinstall, etc
you gotta read some docs either way
hope that helps some...?

ArchBang is really nice; as I only added the "Cons" because the editor said every distro must have a downside
but its downside is very small