I’m been running Arch Linux for about six months now, and I constantly
amazed about how easy it is to configure and maintaine, and how simple
consepts make it powerful and flexible.
The package manager, pacman, is quite fast and easy to use. There is
also an alternative or extention to pacman called yaourt, which have
the ability to download and build packages directly from their version
control systems. Just type “yaourt emacs-git” to get the latest
version of the great editor. If you don’t want to have the package
automatically build and installed, there is also the possibility to
download the PKGBUILD file to build and install in manually.
Lately I have been installing Arch on some older machines, which don’t
have the fastest processor or the most RAM. Installing Arch is fairly
quick, and once it’s up and running I clone some git repositories to
get my complete environment setup. An instant computing environment
ready in 10 to 15 minutes depending on the amount of software you
need to install.
As I said, it’s running extremely fast on my computers, which isn’t
the latest and greatest, and everything is easy to maintain and
administer. Head over to http://archlinux.org to read more about it.
May 29th, 2009 at 7:20 am
What is your opinion on Gentoo?
It is the type of distro you would be interested in, but why Arch over Gentoo? I prefer the Gentoo community personally ( I would not say I am really a member yet).
May 29th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I used to run Gentoo some time ago, guess I wanted to see what kind of other solutions that was available. Perhaps it is time for me to install Gentoo again.
One might say that Arch Linux is a mix of Gentoo and Debian, but don’t quote me on that. It is possible to install pre-built binaries but also to easily custom compile packages from source as well, so it’s the best of both worlds, I think.
But I’m always interested in different solutions to the same problem, and this is why I think the Free Software community have a better starting point then commercial software vendors. When we solve a problem or develop several solutions we can pick and chose the one that best fits the situation.