Anyone here use ArchLinux?

[hellyt6]

I just installed it on a spare 40GB WD drive I had lying around and I was wondering who else used it and what opinions you had of it? So far, I can't stand Windows Managers, and I can't figure out how to just run a desktop environment. But besides that? Very snappy and I love it.

[jscho]

If I recall correctly, @alpenwasser uses Arch in his storage server, he'd have some experience  :lol:

[hellyt6]

I finally got it to work without the Windows manager showing its ugly face and causing issues. So far I'm liking this a lot actually.

[lutzee]

Im also an arch user, use it on both my desktop and laptop. And I don't feel like I could use any other distro for any extended period of time

[JeromeGB]

archer here too

[hellyt6]

Update: I got it working without Xorg's ugly face all over everything. But I can't get a regular user account set up to be able to run xinit or startx... Halp?

 

archer here too

 

Im also an arch user, use it on both my desktop and laptop. And I don't feel like I could use any other distro for any extended period of time

[emusan]

I've been running arch for a few years now myself, both on my desktop, laptop, and server, it's amazing .

 

As for your problem, did you install the required packages? And what errors are you getting? You may need to add your user to the video group.

[Crabtr]

I use Arch on my laptop and servers, welcome to the club. 

 

Update: I got it working without Xorg's ugly face all over everything. But I can't get a regular user account set up to be able to run xinit or startx... Halp?

Did you give the user proper permissions when you made it?

useradd –m –g users –G wheel,storage,power, video,audio –s /bin/bash <username>

 

Also make sure you've got your .xinitrc set-up properly otherwise startx will start x and not the WM/DE: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/xinitrc

[lutzee]

Also make sure you installed xorg-xinit package, otherwise anything in xinitrc will not do anything.

[hellyt6]

I installed everything and went with Gnome, finally got it to work with uncommenting Gnome in the xinitrc file. Too much work to get it installed on my SSD though and the Adata SX900 has a weird glitch with Trimming, so, I'm just going to keep using Windows 7 on my main desktop and use Arch in virtual box. Thanks for replying and helping though, guys. You're the best.

I've been running arch for a few years now myself, both on my desktop, laptop, and server, it's amazing .

 

As for your problem, did you install the required packages? And what errors are you getting? You may need to add your user to the video group.

 

I use Arch on my laptop and servers, welcome to the club. 

 

Did you give the user proper permissions when you made it?

useradd –m –g users –G wheel,storage,power, video,audio –s /bin/bash <username>

 

Also make sure you've got your .xinitrc set-up properly otherwise startx will start x and not the WM/DE: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/xinitrc

 

Also make sure you installed xorg-xinit package, otherwise anything in xinitrc will not do anything.

[Guest Gazzer96]

I tried using Arch and yeah, things went kinda wrong, like wiping out GRUB completely along with Windows and Ubuntu.

[alpenwasser]

Sorry I'm late to the party, had a case of the flu (headaches, fever and such).

Anyway:

If I recall correctly, @alpenwasser uses Arch in his storage server, he'd have some experience  :lol:

Correct, it's also been my daily system for almost three years now. I had one

case of a completely borked system (meaning it was easier to reinstall than

solve the issue), which had its root cause somewhere in a Gnome update (not

sure exactly what it was, but the error came from somewhere there).

Regarding installation and X server troubles, I haven't really encountered any

issues in quite a while actually, and I did a few installs in the past year.

But I'm aware from experience that this can be a bit of a case of luck, I recall

having quite a few problems with Nvidia's drivers in the past (not currently

running an Nvidia card, don't know if things are still buggy).

Despite having done a few installs in my time, I usually go to Youtube and

have a look at an up-to-date install video. Luckily, Arch is a popular enough

distro that there are quite a few tutorials on there, and most of the time

there's at least something usable among them.

I can very much recommend the approach (just make sure you pick a good tutorial,

you might need to have a look at a few to find something that suits you),

it has made the last few Arch installs pretty straightforward for me.

[rashdanml]

As of 2 hours ago, I am now an Arch user too. Base system installed, purely on WiFi (figured out how to do it properly). Installed on a 120GB SSD on my new Thinkpad.

I'll be looking around for different desktop environments and window managers (I've had awesome in mind for the longest time). Only other thing I need to worry about is power manager features (Thinkvantage has some awesome features).

[Hikaru12]

Im also an arch user, use it on both my desktop and laptop. And I don't feel like I could use any other distro for any extended period of time

 

How would you compare it to Mint?

[alpenwasser]

As of 2 hours ago, I am now an Arch user too. Base system installed, purely on WiFi (figured out how to do it properly). Installed on a 120GB SSD on my new Thinkpad. I'll be looking around for different desktop environments and window managers (I've had awesome in mind for the longest time). Only other thing I need to worry about is power manager features (Thinkvantage has some awesome features).

Welcome to the club.

Re window managers: I've been using i3 for little more than a year now and am very

happy with it. But awesome is nice too from what I've heard.

Power management is definitely an area where Linux could use some improvements in

general in my opinion, although things aren't as bad as they used to be.

[Turkatron]

Openbox is a decent window manager that doesn't seem to require much configuration out of the box and is somewhat light weight. Tiling window managers require configuration to get it how you like them.

[alpenwasser]

Openbox is a decent window manager that doesn't seem to require much configuration out of the box and is somewhat light weight. Tiling window managers require configuration to get it how you like them.

Actually I had to change rather little to set up i3 to my liking. Over time I have

added some bits and bobs here and there, but the initial config was rather easy.

The only thing I really needed to change was moving their movement-keys to

Vim-like bindings (they're one to the right by default 'jkl;' instead of 'hjkl'),

move the command which was on 'h' to something else and bind the volume command

to a key combo, and that was pretty much it IIRC.

Overall, i3's default's are very sane except for that one detail (and if you're not

into Vi/Vim then that probably won't even matter to you).

In case anyone is interested, you can find my current-ish config on my site.

Regardless of that, I've heard good things about Openbox, if you don't want to go

with a tiler, it's probably worth a look.

[Turkatron]

Actually I had to change rather little to set up i3 to my liking. Over time I have

added some bits and bobs here and there, but the initial config was rather easy.

The only thing I really needed to change was moving their movement-keys to

Vim-like bindings (they're one to the right by default 'jkl;' instead of 'hjkl'),

move the command which was on 'h' to something else and bind the volume command

to a key combo, and that was pretty much it IIRC.

Overall, i3's default's are very sane except for that one detail (and if you're not

into Vi/Vim then that probably won't even matter to you).

In case anyone is interested, you can find my current-ish config on my site.

Regardless of that, I've heard good things about Openbox, if you don't want to go

with a tiler, it's probably worth a look.

I'd like to see your screenshot. I normally use DWM/Awesome.

[alpenwasser]

I'd like to see your screenshot. I normally use DWM/Awesome.

Sure:

This was my 'general info' screen on my old rig (currently not running Conky due to

some bugginess ).

Desktop 2 and 3 usually have browser windows open, desktop 4 my file manager (PCManFM)

and everything from 5 to 10 usually has whatever I need it to hold for what I'm working

on. I rarely go up to 6 or higher though TBH. My screen is 1920x1200.

The shell is ZSH btw.

(click for full res)

And this is how it looked when I was doing web-dev (the web browser oviously had the

site displayed, which I've edited out in the screenshot). This is what actually made

me switch to a tiler, it really shines at this sort of workflow, truly brilliant, especially

if you don't have a multi-screen setup.

(click for full res)

And finally, the equivalent of the 'general purpose' screen on my laptop:

(click for full res)

On a side note: As a login manager I'm using GDM on ZEUS currently, but I don't

use one on my laptop (I just log into the terminal and 'startx'). But since ZEUS

is running both Gnome and XBMC for other people as well, I might as well use

GDM for logging in.

EDIT:

As a side note, I do a lot of work from the shell, and I use tmux to make my

life easier in that regard. It's almost like another tiler for the command line.

[rashdanml]

Welcome to the club.

Cheers!

 

Already managed to break it trying to install LightDM (which didn't seem to want to work properly, but maybe that was due to installing it before a desktop environment), so I disabled it. Got it up and running with Cinnamon instead. 

[alpenwasser]

Cheers!

 

Already managed to break it trying to install LightDM (which didn't seem to want to work properly, but maybe that was due to installing it before a desktop environment), so I disabled it. Got it up and running with Cinnamon instead.

Hehe, it happens. Cinnamon seems pretty awesome from what I've heard, I've actually

been considering replacing Gnome on ZEUS with it for "normal" users of the machine.

[rashdanml]

Hehe, it happens. Cinnamon seems pretty awesome from what I've heard, I've actually

been considering replacing Gnome on ZEUS with it for "normal" users of the machine.

Mmhm. Really liking the look and feel of Cinnamon, but not so much LXDM. 

Ran into wireless issues with dhcpcd, netctl and networkmanager clashing. I like Arch for that reason - it forces me to learn. 

[alpenwasser]

Ran into wireless issues with dhcpcd, netctl and networkmanager clashing. I like Arch for that reason - it forces me to learn.

Ah yes, networking... :lol:

For some reason I still can't get netctl to properly work on my desktop, I always

need to use dhcpcd (and funnily enough, sometimes the wired connection comes

up automatically on boot, and sometimes it doesn't).

Ah well, such is life. Luckily, netctl works without issues on my laptop, where

it's much more important anyway.

And yes, I quite like the learning curve of Arch. It's barebones enough so that

there's lots of stuff you need to do manually, but it's not as hardcore as a

distro you need to compile from source (which, you know, is interesting and all,

but rarely worth the effort IMO, unless you have some ridiculously exotic setup

that can properly take advantage of some correspondingly extravagant compile flags).

I did that too, once upon a time (in fact, Gentoo was the distro I started with

back in 2004, now that was a learning curve :lol: ), but for daily use I prefer

a binary distro. Although I might give Gentoo another go once I have HELIOS up

and running, who knows.

[lutzee]

I was going to reply to this sooner, then an odd problem cropped up again that I can't seem to fix.. will detail at the end.

Anyway, like Alpenwasser I use i3, love it and again also made very few changes to the config file. Only adding border profiles for apps and such, and a couple of keybindings (for i3lock, duplicating the current terminal session etc)

Likewise, I also use zsh, and again the configuration is pretty much perfect from the start. Just a couple of UI changes for colour and CWD look.
I use SLiM for the login manager, as I'm the sole user of my PC and laptop, nothing fancy is needed and only one WM/DE is installed.

Anyway, back to that odd problem... my cursor is massive.. Xcursor settings are set in .XResources, have been some time to fix the issue, due to me having 3 screens in a triangle orientation, Xcursor thinks I have a really high DPI single screen, causing the cursor to grow to double the normal size. Before, I just set Xcursor.size in .XResources, which fixed it.. but now its back and .Xresources hasn't changed... not sure what to do now...
 

My current desktop setup, scrot doesn't capture the Xcursor though.

 

[rashdanml]

Ah yes, networking... :lol:

I dabbled with Gentoo a little bit on a dedicated server. Scary stuff. Didn't have to do too much, since it was entirely commandline. Arch/Slackware are excellent middle grounds. 

 

Netctl works fine for me, except it didn't want to work well with the Netctl system tray indicator for Cinnamon. NetworkManager worked for that, and I think Netctl and NetworkManager cooperated with each other. -shrug- 

 

Linux From Scratch, perhaps?