Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Arch Way

dgeex.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 82 posts

Re: The Arch Way

#51

Post by atweiden »

graycoder wrote: post #46
raziel2p wrote: post #27

If someone made an Arch installer that automatically set up networking and persisted the setup, as well as partitioning/mounting, I would be on board. The argument I've heard against this is, "but it's simple, it's only like 10 commands to set these up". The problem is, it takes like an hour to read through the entire wiki page (and you need to read it all in case there's an important detail that may screw your syste…

I think ArchBang tries to do that. It might be a nice in-between for a new arch user's first time. Then again, I think I had a set of other problems when I tried it. I have spent a decent amount of time trying to understand all the steps of the process just so that I can troubleshoot without immediately needing to access the arch-wiki. The knowledge is nice to have, and building familiarity with the system one uses s…

I second the recommendation of ArchBang. It's a very lightweight LiveCD (~500MB) with a GUI installer that works pretty well. If you're comfortable on the cmdline, you could search the official archlinux forums, though. There are quite a few arch setup scripts floating around. You could try this one for btfs on luks: https://github.com/atweiden/pacstrapit

    ./pacstrapit start --bundle    "full"                \
                       --username  "newusername"         \
                       --hostname  "yourhostname"        \
                       --partition "/dev/sda"            \
                       --processor "intel"               \
                       --graphics  "nvidia"              \
                       --disk      "ssd"                 \
                       --luksname  "infinity"            \
                       --locale    "en_US"               \
                       --keymap    "us"                  \
                       --timezone  "America/Los_Angeles" \
                       --concealed

Re: The Arch Way

#52

Post by FreeFull »

deelowe wrote: post #8

I'm not a huge fan of recommending yaourt. Users should really learn more about the AUR before just letting yaourt automate it all. I recommend cower until you get the hang of things (or maybe just use cower full time). Cower automates only the downloads and updates without completely abstracting everything away with regards to the build and install process.

Some AUR packages won't build with yaourt for some reason too, in which case you still have to use cower or download them from the website, and run makepkg yourself.

Re: The Arch Way

#53

Post by luser123 »

yuvadam wrote: post #38
raziel2p wrote: post #27

If someone made an Arch installer that automatically set up networking and persisted the setup, as well as partitioning/mounting, I would be on board. The argument I've heard against this is, "but it's simple, it's only like 10 commands to set these up". The problem is, it takes like an hour to read through the entire wiki page (and you need to read it all in case there's an important detail that may screw your syste…

You're asking for something Arch will never provide. Having a "next > next > next" installer defeats the entire purpose of Arch. I once shared the exact same wish, and I never truly adopted Arch until I installed it 3-4 times on one of my secondary computers. It is only by taking that path and practicing that I truly learned to appreciate what it is that Arch gives. I'm sure you'll have that experience too, some day.

Well arch did have a menu system that was pretty close to next > next > next before the new pacstrap way of installing was done. You still had to do quite a bit more work than say installing ubuntu but it was quite a bit easier to get started with than it is now.

I don't really see that the current install way is any better, most users will just blindly follow the beginners guide and either give up if it doesn't work (or since it is likely to work) have a system setup with very little understanding of why they did what they did.

Re: The Arch Way

#54

Post by semi-extrinsic »

nextos wrote: post #48
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why emacs and then vimperator? And why not pentadactyl?

I prefer emacs for editing text, but modal vim-like interfaces for simple tasks such as browsing a document (zathura) or the web (vimperator). I switched back and forth between vimperator and pentadactyl many times. Pentadactyl is a bit more complex, and used to break often. Perhaps it is no longer the case?

I haven't seen pentadactyl break anything in a long time, but then I run a very vanilla setup. I'm the current maintainer of pentadactyl-git on AUR; if you try it and have trouble you can always ask in the AUR comments.

Re: The Arch Way

#55

Post by GmeSalazar »

I had been using Debian-based distros since 2010 -- Debian itself and the Ubuntu. Switched to Arch a few weeks ago and it's been a quite nice experience. While installing, I wrote a brief installation outline (based off of Arch Wiki); if someone is interested, it's available at [1].

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByEPyxMys7A6T19Qc25JWTNKRE0...

Re: The Arch Way

#56

Post by nextos »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #54
nextos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer emacs for editing text, but modal vim-like interfaces for simple tasks such as browsing a document (zathura) or the web (vimperator). I switched back and forth between vimperator and pentadactyl many times. Pentadactyl is a bit more complex, and used to break often. Perhaps it is no longer the case?

I haven't seen pentadactyl break anything in a long time, but then I run a very vanilla setup. I'm the current maintainer of pentadactyl-git on AUR; if you try it and have trouble you can always ask in the AUR comments.

Sounds great, I'll give it a try again very soon.

Re: The Arch Way

#58

Post by davidddavidson »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #17

A bit OT, but: > http://www.dgeex.de/2015/04/17/why-i-dont-like-java/ About halfway through, when it got to the "No preprocessor" section, at first I wasn't sure if it was serious or ironic.

You missed some more good reasons after that like:

"It's not suitable for big projects"

"No global variables"

My takeaway from the article is "I [the author] don't like Java because it is not C/C++"

Re: The Arch Way

#59

Post by GutenYe »

deelowe wrote: post #8

I'm not a huge fan of recommending yaourt. Users should really learn more about the AUR before just letting yaourt automate it all. I recommend cower until you get the hang of things (or maybe just use cower full time). Cower automates only the downloads and updates without completely abstracting everything away with regards to the build and install process.

In case you haven't tried pacaur, you should give pacuar a try. From my experience, pacaur is better than yaourt.

pacaur: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacaur

Re: The Arch Way

#60

Post by hobarrera »

zxcvcxz wrote: post #32
wz1000 wrote: post #19

I use Arch because its the only distro that "Just Works" for me. I like to use the latest version of every software I use, and this is almost impossible on non-rolling-release distros. Installing from source almost always ends up breaking something on distros like Ubuntu. Also, Arch is predictable. There are no weird quirks and distro-specific patches. Almost everything that is on the system is something that you con…

>Installing from source almost always ends up breaking something on distros like Ubuntu. Example? I've never once "broken" something by installing a program from source.

If you install form source, you lose all the advantages of a package manager (updating, clean uninstallation, dependency management, etc).

pacman (and makepkg) make creating your own package stupidly simple. (not to mention that the official repos + AUR have an immense amount of packages present already).

Post reply on HN