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Arch Linux – Do it yourself

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Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#21

Post by spaar »

ekimekim wrote: post #18

Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions. What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI? And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough R…

I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone.

And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#22

Post by digi_owl »

baldfat wrote: post #11
digi_owl wrote: post #4

Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Linux from Scratch = Orange Arch Linux = Apple Arch "Learn more about Linux" is a indirect effect of running Arch and well LFS whole purpose. Arch = Great Linux Distro (My second favorite to my distro home OpenSUSE) LFS = Learning tool that is not necessarily for production machines.

The ALFS side-project may be a nice way to bootstrap a new distro though. Basically it automates the process of building a LFS install via the use of scripts that parse the LFS book markup.

I'm following a distro, Gobolinux, that used that to bootstrap their latest release. And supposedly it took more time to get the Consolekit+polkit+whatever rigamarole working so it could offer a desktop.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#23

Post by lloeki »

tomswartz07 wrote: post #19

For myself, I appreciate the fact that almost all of the Arch packages are 'un-fooled-around-with'. Very often, I've run into issues with Ubuntu packages solely because they have their own strange versioning, and roll certain patches into weird versions. I think it boils down to the management philosophy: Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take it up with…

> Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take it up with that program's developer'.

Arch says 'as vanilla as possible'.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#24

Post by Charles__L »

ekimekim wrote: post #18

Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions. What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI? And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough R…

There are a few reasons they split off home and root. It makes recovery simpler, and allows you to share the partition between multiple environments - which is useful if you dual boot.

I personally rarely make a second partition for home, but I always make a separate partition for /boot. GRUB requires an separate EFI partition to install (which is kind of dumb), and if you decide to encrypt your disk, the boot directory cannot be encrypted.

I think the reason they put swap in these tutorials is that many times people install linux on low-powered machines that require the swap because of limited memory. It's not a requirement to install linux, though. I never run it on installation.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#25

Post by Nullabillity »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #14
spystath wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how th…

> Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc). Gentoo offers even more freedom of customization than Arch. Choose your init system, your udev variant, your main Python version, set around 100 build time options for ffmpeg and so on. LFS is great for learning and looking under t…

If customization is a goal I'd look into Nix(OS) as well. Source distro with binary caches for the default build options. Oh, and your setup becomes trivial to reproduce (just copy the config files). Oh, and you can easily revert your machine to a previously known working state if you screw something up.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#28

Post by FreeFull »

spaar wrote: post #21
ekimekim wrote: post #18

Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions. What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI? And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough R…

I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone. And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.

I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my /home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#29

Post by digi_owl »

Arguggi wrote: post #15
TuxLyn wrote: post #6

I've blogged about Arch Linux back in 2014. If anyone interested; http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-linux-2014-install/

TFA and your blog post both mention SLiM as a login manager, according to the Arch wiki[0]: "The SliM project has been abandoned (the project homepage is down, leaving a github mirror), and is not fully compatible to systemd, including logind sessions. Consider using a different Display manager or Xinitrc." Lightdm [1] seems to be a better alternative. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM [1] https://wiki.ar…

Slim still works if you don't go the systemd route though. Guix use it for instance.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#30

Post by incision »

ekimekim wrote: post #18

Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions. What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI? And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough R…

> I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions.

The classic reason is preventing space / inode exhaustion of / by user accounts and preventing time of check, time of use vulns. Tough the latter have since been addressed in other ways [1]. There's also a certain amount of convenience and cleanliness to separating system and data that way.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security#Preventing_lin...

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