TheCaptain said:
It sounds like the OS source is a repository you can pull from to update. If that's the case, that sounds awesome. I wish everything used some form of SVN or CVS system. Since learning about that I've been blown away by how much sense it makes. Seriously, everything could benefit from that.
Yep -- that's essentially how it works. I was sceptical as it was a new concept to me at the time, but it works
so well. If there are any major changes requiring manual intervention, they'll be listed as an announcement at the top of the Arch home page.
The installation process is interesting too. There is no "installation program" that guides you through. Instead, you follow the steps in the wiki to boot a live CD, which takes you to a bash shell, where (essentially) you can set up your partitions, use
pacstrap to install packages to them,
chroot to the new installation, then finish up by configuring fstab and a boot manager.
It's
really handy to understand what
chroot does. If you ever have a problem that means that Arch is unbootable, you can boot the live CD again, mount your partitions, fix the problem, then
chroot to test and fix boot problems. This is another reason that makes it very unlikely that you will ever need to reinstall Arch from scratch.
After that, I'd make sure you have the right SSD settings -- enabling periodic TRIM, updating firmware, and generally making sure that you don't have any errors.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives
Don't be put off by the installation process. It all helps you learn how to control, maintain and fix a (mostly) rock-solid system. Again, it's a lot easier than it looks. And everything is set up exactly as you want! The wiki is really comprehensive and well-written. :smile:
-------
The Arch forum can be a bit daunting, though. They don't tolerate fools, and if you post a question, you're expected to explain all the steps you have tried to fix the problem, along with the relevant logs or settings. And you're expected to have searched the forum, wiki and internet for solutions first.
But... once you get used to it, this is what makes Arch so good. The wiki is comprehensive without being tediously bloated, and there are no "stupid" threads on the forum -- you can skim through and find solutions to problems quite easily.
When I have gone to post a new thread on the forum, the effort of trying to explain myself and supply the relevant information usually leads me to solve the problem without needing to post anything!
I once had a major issue when Arch moved from using
init to
systemd, and
/usr had to be on the same partition as root (
/). Due to the limited storage space on my old netbook, I could only fit the installation onto the two internal SSDs if I had
/usr on its own partition. I posted this problem, others confirmed similar issues, and the Arch devs created some "hooks" that could be added to
/etc/mkinitcpio.conf to completely fix everything. Awesome!
More recently, with the ubiquity of 64-bit CPUs and software, Arch decided to drop support for 32-bit machines. This means that developers can concentrate their efforts to supporting modern hardware, but again, my 10-year-old netbook has a 32-bit processor, and is far too slow to run even Windows XP. Fortunately others had this issue and the Arch32 project was created to provide ongoing support for old 32-bit machines. I was able to migrate my existing (no longer supported) multi-bit Arch installation to the 32-bit fork without having to reinstall anything. Too easy! :smile:
https://archlinux32.org/
Arch is very-much led by the community. If you want something sensible, then there's a good chance other people will want it. And it shall come to pass in the Arch utopia!
It's recommended to install
pkgstats. It's up to you (and I can understand the privacy concerns), but it sends back a list of all the packages you have installed to the Arch developers. They focus their time on making sure that all the most popular packages get the most attention, and that they are aware of the kind of obscure set-ups that might be used by specialists -- such as audio producers.
TheCaptain said:
I want my media organized in a more logical way as well as include a "projects" folder as opposed to only a "music, pictures, videos, documents" directory...
Er... Can't you do that in any OS? The silly virtual Windows directories like "My Music", etc. are just extra features that you can ignore.
TheCaptain said:
Well, you get the point, I always end up tweaking my environment to my liking, with Arch, that cuts out the middleman. I don't tweak the environment to my liking, I create an environment to my liking . So ya, control, knowing what's going on, and only having relevant processes take place sounds nice lol
Yep yep yep! Oh, boy! From what you've said, you are going to
love Arch!
TheCaptain said:
I think I gotch ya, GNU is what helped Unix evolve into the "Linux" we know and love today (except it's GNU/Linux).
Well... Unix is the multi-tasking, multi-user proprietary OS developed in the 1970s. It was beautiful and elegant... but expensive, restrictive, and controlled by a single corporation. In 1980s, Richard Stallman started working on a project to create a free OS based on the Unix philosophy. He called it GNU (GNU's Not Unix). Lots of people got involved, and GNU was almost a complete operating system; it just needed a kernel... eventually after some time and a few attempts by others, Linus Torvalds came up with the Linux kernel.
Everyone involved knew GNU, and that GNU was incomplete. When Linux was added, people would refer to the new OS as "GNU/Linux", emphasising the fact that this was the new complete OS with the Linux kernel. Linux became a bit of a buzz-word, to the point that the masses heard about this new thing called "Linux", and... suddenly everyone was referring to the complete OS as "Linux" instead of "GNU"!
Many people (wrongly) say that Android is a Linux-based OS! But it isn't; it's based on GNU. Google wrote their own Android kernel, so perhaps it should be called GNU/Android, but Linux has nothing to do with it.
Sorry -- I'm such a pedant! I just feel sorry for GNU who did almost all of the work in creating an OS, only to be forgotten and to have their creation called "Linux". :frown:
TheCaptain said:
All I know, is that I have tons of programs installed on both my PC and Apple computer. If we're including plugins, we're talking upwards of around 1000 or more. I think that's one of things causing my PC to be less stable and having "a lot of programs" installed is no excuse IMO, the OS should be designed for that after all. My OS X system works wonderfully despite having many of the same programs installed, and when the programs are running they run more efficiently. For example, I get significantly less CPU usage and pops, clicks, and drop outs when running audio unit plugins within a DAW on my Mac vs running VSTs on my PC. And my PC has similar specs, an i7 (albeit an older generation one), SSD, 16gb or RAM.
Oh, I feel your pain! This is what drives me to insanity with Windows. I feel like I'm wrestling against that talking paperclip with artificial intelligence, instead of telling my computer to jump and watch it do so! Just
what is it trying to do in the background without asking me?! Grrr!
Windows has always been a rushed-out compromise. MS developers prefer to hack code to maintain backward-compatibility rather than writing an OS with a coherent philosophy from scratch. It's an absolute mess of spaghetti code with security as a very low priority after-thought.
But at least my non-techie friends can install and use it without having to wear a "systems administrator" hat. :-/
TheCaptain said:
This sounds pretty spot on. I wanna customize the heck out of it, but I don't wanna reinvent the wheel...yet lol. Besides, bash is the only CLI I've got experience with and it more or less makes sense, not to mention it's friggin everywhere. I do wanna take a crack at zsh at some point, but for now I use and like bash and think of all the CLI's that are out there, it's probably the best one to understand imo
Yeah -- I used bash at uni in the mid-90s, and it's still the go-to shell. It's dead easy to have multiple shells installed and run scripts in whichever shell you fancy, or switch to that shell in the command line.
A lot of shell scripts use the bourne shell (sh). Having the command "sh" at the top of the script means that the rest of it will use sh instead of bash. Simples!
TheCaptain said:
So when you install X and a desktop manager, do you pretty much select a default directory for the desktop and navigate from there? Of all the things involved, implementing a GUI seems the most foreign to me.
GNU/Linux uses a fairly standardised directory hierarchy. You don't choose where to install programs or where the configuration files go -- the OS takes care of that. I
think binaries go in
/usr/bin, global config files go in
/etc, and there's sometimes a . (dot) hidden file in your
/home/username directory with user-specific program settings. In theory you could install stuff wherever you like, but... just... don't! Keep it simple! It's this way for a reason!
Anyway, the first thing you'd need to do is install a graphics driver. Then install Xorg. Then install xfce and (probably) xfce-goodies (assuming you want to use XFCE).
The wiki goes into a lot of detail in setting up a GUI, but you probably don't want (or need) to customise anything much yet. You don't want to do anything with any xorg.conf file -- systemd and udev (?) take care of everything. Just "keep it simple" and test it to see if it works before trying to tweak it.
Personally, I use xinit to manually start X. (This is all covered in the wiki.) This means my PC boots to a bash shell, where I login and run "startx" to load the GUI. I like it this way because it makes it easy to boot my PC and fix problems if there is a problem with X or the graphics driver.
It's easier than it sounds, honestly! But (as you probably figured out) I'm always happy to answer any questions you might have. :biggrin:
Oh -- you might see a few benign error messages after you install XFCE. Bear in mind that not all "error" messages actually indicate an error! If I remember correctly, once you've gone through the general recommendations and tweaked the basic installation, all of these "errors" will be resolved.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/General_recommendations
TheCaptain said:
I don't know why, but this surprised the heck out of me. Sudo was just always "that thing that worked that way" lol, but I guess that can be applied to every digital function till you break it down to the machine code or ¿microcode? heheh. Conceptually, I've hard time picturing the abstraction of how sudo would be implemented (unless it's just a privilege sort of thing), but I'm not too worried about it. Once I start really cracking into the Arch wiki and piecing everything together it'll workout or can be made to work out.
Arch is great because you do everything step-by-step... a bit like Lego! But, yes -- sudo configuration is just a matter of priviledges. When I started using GNU/Linux, I don't think most distros contained sudo. I only started using it regularly with Arch.
Sudo is configured by the file
/etc/sudoers, but for security/stability reasons, you can't edit that file directly -- you need to run
visudo (which opens the file in the
vi text editor by default, and performs sanity checks when you save the file). If you're a Linux geek, you probably know vi inside out... otherwise its arcane key-combinations make it impossible to use, and you'll probably want to use nano instead (all linked to from the wiki installation guide).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/nano
The wiki entry for nano looks complicated, but you don't need to do anything other than install it with pacman. You don't need things like syntax highlighting unless you want to use it to write code. But the "tips and tricks" section shows you how to use (the very simple) nano instead of (the very complicated) vi by default (with
visudoers, for example) by setting the EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables.
The only modifications to
/etc/sudoers that I made (using
visudo) was to the "User privilege specification" section:
Code:
##
## User privilege specification
##
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
tiny ALL=(ALL) ALL
That simply allows user tiny to use sudo by entering their own password to run a command with root priviledges. All the other settings are fine left as they are, and this is a fairly standard set-up.
TheCaptain said:
Okay, I'm gonna be honest. I think the fact the package manager is called pacman is probably gonna be my favorite part of the entire system lol.
Ha ha! I know! It makes me chuckle every time I think about it! I actually use
yaourt now (which is just a front-end for pacman. It additionally allows you to install packages from the AUR (Arch User Resource) repository without having to manually compile anything and "getting your hands dirty" (but don't worry about that for now!).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_helpers
Oh, and packages are signed using PGP keys to prevent tampering and man-in-the-middle attacks (regardless of whether you use pacman or yaourt), which is pretty cool.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Package_signing
TheCaptain said:
And thanks for the heads up about updating and the quick command references. I haven't gotten my system to install it on yet, but now I really can't wait. I wanna start getting my hands dirty asap!
Ha ha! No problem! I'm so excited for you! From everything you've said, I think you're going to love it. It's weird booting into a system where there's nothing to tweak because everything works exactly as you want it to! :-D
Expect a few baffling moments where you have to patiently read the wiki and look up things you don't understand. Make sure you have a second working computer to search the internet during installation! Don't rush things. And don't overcomplicate things. Just get all the basics working before trying to tweak stuff.
TheCaptain said:
I'll look it up more, but it sounds like ext4 will be it then. The stability issues are extremely important (none to surprisingly) and while I certainly love performance, there's gotta be a balance between stability and performance. Besides, I feel most modern software on most modern hardware won't cause any performance issues in 99% of circumstances.
Yeah, with an SSD and 16GB RAM... I don't think your choice of filesystem is going to have any impact on performance as far as the OS is concerned. But if you're dealing with very large media files on mechanical drives, it would be well worth looking into the alternatives to ext3/4.
Oh, and if you're dual-booting you'll need to "incorrectly" set the boot flag on your Windows partition. GNU/Linux doesn't care about the flag, but Windows Updates requiring installation after a reboot won't complete, resulting in failed updates. Stupid Windows.
It's worth considering how many partitions you want to have for Arch. I always have
/home on a separate partition so all personal files are in one place for easy-backup, and to make a reinstallation/migration easier.
If your SSD space is limited, it's worth considering whether to locate directories on a mechanical drive or SSD (
/home,
/usr,
/var,
swap, etc...).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Partitioning
I'm really not an expert on the optimal partitioning set-up stuff, but I wonder whether, for your audio production uses, you might want to think about the "best" swap set-up. In the old days, you'd need a swap file/partition to deal with large memory requirements on systems with limited RAM.
With 16GB RAM and an SSD, I'm not sure that a swap partition is necessarily useful. If you want to suspend/hibernate your PC, you will need a swap partition at least as large as your RAM size. Otherwise... I'm not sure... I've been running my old desktop Core i7 12GB system without any swap for several months without issues (possibly even a slight improvement in performance), but your needs are different to mine, so... I dunno!
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap
TheCaptain said:
I've been on vacation but I've been going over what you shared, I really appreciate all the info and links, thank you very much
No worries -- I've been away too. I hope the info and links have given you a bit of an insight/overview of how things work in Arch, without scaring you off! It really does sound more complicated than it is!
I've always found it hard to learn GNU/Linux from a book. But with Arch, you learn how it works by building it up, block-by-block yourself, always with a simple goal in mind. It's fun, and such a breath of fresh air compared to over-complicated OSes that slow you down trying to do things for you that you don't want or need.
One of the rookie mistakes I made was in how I read the wiki. If you look at the table-of-contents (the hierarchical hyperlinks at the top of each wiki page), it's easy to see which sections you can skip over because they aren't relevant. When you then scroll through the whole page, it's less clear and it's tempting to follow all the steps on the wiki page, when in fact you may be going into another sub-section that isn't relevant for your needs. (Does that make sense?)
Anyway, I hope I've whetted your appetite for creating the (almost) "perfect" OS without bombarding you with information or being too evangelical about the whole thing!
Have fun! :smile1: