ujjwal said:
But I think i'll try and get hold of slack from someone, and try out arch after gaining some experience.
I just downloaded (via BitTorrent) and burnt the Arch Linux 0.7.2 (Gimmick) I. S. O. image onto a re-writable C.D..(the full I.S.O. image,not the base/F. T. P. version).
Installation surely is not meant for a newbie........you are expected to know what you are upto.
You ARE given a brief idea though of what you must be doing at that point of time.Besides that,the installer is very useful in terms of usability.No graphics here,but I found far more functions than the likes of other installers like Anaconda.
I initially selected all packages for installation.But there were few conflicting packages as well as one which failed the package integrity test,although the I. S. O. image's MD5SUM was verified to be intact.Nonetheless,I installed only the base set of packages,which took just a few minutes and later added the remaining few hundreds of packages one-by-one through Pacman after rebooting Arch Linux in my system for the first time.(Hey......it solves dependency problems pretty well ........I mean it.......
)
Support for bitmap fonts was disabled by default.I could not enable it.Also,the X.org /X-server (X11R7.0)'s installation was modular,owing to which I had to refer a couple of pages in the Arch Wiki to get things done in the right way.
Although few G.N.O.M.E./K.D.E-related packages can be found in the package list,you cannot actually go and launch G. n. o. m. e./K. d. e.,simply because neither gnome-session nor startkde commands are present,because their containing packages are not installed.Not even gdm/kdm(found in kdebase) is present.Just plain xdm.After logging in,you would either have to use WindowMaker/Enlightenment/T.W.M./Blackbox/IceWM/FVWM as window managers to start a user session.I use FVWM by default as getting screen-savers to work was very easy there.
The package list should atleast satisfy those who have worked with Linux only through a command-line interface and have never used G. n. o. m. e./K. d. e.
But the best part is,the optimisation has done it's job really well........I mean.........I never thought that my nearly 6-year old desktop system would boot-up so quickly even after being loaded with the latest stable versions of software.
It is indeed a commendable G.n.u./Linux distribution,nice effort there...........and it just works
Yours faithfully,