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Arch In Depth

Posted by Zonk on from the walking-underneath dept.

The LinuxTimes Editor wrote in to alert us to a LinuxTimes article entitled Arch In-Depth, discussing the Arch Distribution. From the article: "First of all, let me go ahead and say I'm not approaching Arch with a completely clean slate. I've heard things about Arch Linux before. I've heard that it resembles Slackware in the way it was lean and meant for "advanced users". I've heard about its package manager called Pacman which is supposed to be all the rage. I've heard it's optimized for i686 by default which can arguably improve performance. I've heard it's Gentoo without "all that compiling". So when Arch 0.7 got out a few days ago I simply had to try it out."

27 comments

  1. Reviewing the review by IO+ERROR · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From the article:

    To apply the changes, I just rebooted and now the network worked!

    OK, so much for this reviewer.

    Oh well, at least Arch has it in pacman. I was just about to open up Gnome Terminal and get pacman to install netstatus but I look through all the menus and a terminal application! Wow...no distribution I've ever tried didn't have a terminal application.

    OK, so much for Arch. (Turns out you have to pacman gnome-extra to get everything.)

    Turns out that Arch is extremely minimalist; you get only what you asked for and sometimes less than you asked for. This is probably good for, say, embedded systems, but for most of us with our 100GB+, 200GB+, drives, there's not a whole lot of point to leaving things out. Though there are people who will be quite happy with this.

    I'm not one of them.

    As I have mentioned before, Arch feels a bit like a modern version of Slackware. I wouldn't be surprised if a few Slack users jumped ship to Arch.

    I wouldn't be surprised at all if every Slackware user dropped Slack and went to Arch. It sounds like a much better Slackware than Slackware. But, again, this approach is not for me. Ironically, my favorite distributions are Gentoo and Fedora (in that order). Yes, I'm weird.

    --
    How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
    1. Re:Reviewing the review by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Arch is not even good for embedded systems because pacman is slow as hell. On older/slow system expect to spend a lot of time waiting at 100% CPU while it does crap.

      People on RPM distributions might be used to that crap, but that don't mean it's fast.

    2. Re:Reviewing the review by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Arch is not even good for embedded systems because pacman is slow as hell"

      It really doesn't matter... too much.

      Arch is still 0.7 and pacman is mostly bash scripts (over a C core). I would say it is time for Pacman (and Arch as a whole) to test if it fits sysadmin-wise. If it does, then it won't be any problem to rewrite those slow pacman parts efficency-wise. But if the pardigm doesn't fit, no matter how fast, it won't success.

      The only thing I miss from pacman (and Arch) is the ability to seamlessly mix both source and binary packages, both remote and locally developed, that is, if I want, say Postfix patched and I compile myself, having a way for a) having that package properly managed by the package manager -that's it task after all, isn't it? and b) integrating that locally deployed package with the upstream repos, so when the next version of Postfix is added to the public repositories I will know and I will have the option of installing the binary public version or recompile locally with my patches. Currently *all* binary package manages leave you on your own when you locally deploy a package, and even Gentoo doesn't help too much to properly mix your local changes with whatever new versions come from upstream.

    3. Re:Reviewing the review by MobyDisk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Actually, I like that. One of my complains about Linux distros is that they install too much crud. The last Mandrake I saw in the stores had a super duper hyper-fighting edition which boasted 7 CDs and a bonus DVD. Do people have a fetish for installing stuff?

      Whenever I install some generic media package from the install CD, I get 5 image viewers and 3 mp3 players and 6 text editors. And of course, 1 image viewer scales up cleanly, 1 scales down cleanly, 2 have a slide show, and 1 plays movies.

      Compare that to Windows XP, which comes with one image editor (paint, yes, it sux.) one image viewer (Windows Picture and Fax viewer, which is excellent) one media player (Windows Media Player, which is okay).

      They don't have to be the best most whizbang - just give me one. Better yet, give me none and let me select one. But don't give me 5!

  2. More reviewing the review by Jerf · · Score: 1

    Bitmaps? Bitmap images? You voluntarily submitted an article to Slashdot that uses bitmap images? Every single image on that site is 800KB . Or more!

    And no, they didn't use actual thumbnails for the images, they link these monstrous images and resize them with HTML.

    I don't just not trust the reviewer, I don't trust the site! That is some seriously stunning incompetence for a website.

    (Of course, this will either be fixed, or you later "readers" won't be able to get through to the hammered server.)

    If you really want to read this and you are on dial-up, don't bother loading the images, they're just "screenshots" of console applications (yes, that's right, 2000 chars of text and some color information; we're talking an image that even with a really crappy 'bitmap' style encoding of the text would only have 4000 bytes was blown up to over a megabyte in some cases), that typically have almost no useful information anyhow.

    1. Re:More reviewing the review by wizbit · · Score: 1

      Relax, they're all perfectly reasonable JPEGs now. 30-40kb is still a bit much for a black and white terminal screen grab, but, well, they're passable.

    2. Re:More reviewing the review by Jerf · · Score: 1

      JPEGs.

      Seriously?

      Nope, that's not "stunning" incompetence anymore, but it's still incompetent.

      The correct format choices were ".gif" (864,054 -> 4961) or ".png" (-> 4370), and these are lossless.

      Still not impressed; it really only adds to my initial impression of incompetence, not removes it.

    3. Re:More reviewing the review by IO+ERROR · · Score: 1

      Indeed. I do screenshots in PNG format, and the 640x480 black-and-white shots come out between 4-8K. And all the shots look better, since it's lossless. The thumbnails look a lot better, too, since I used mogrify to create them. There's just no excuse for using BMP (or JPEG, for that matter).

      --
      How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
  3. Minimalism? Great! by MerryGoByeBye · · Score: 1

    I, for one, applaud that another distro has the balls to enter what is increasingly a saturated market for minimalist distros. There must be two dozen micro-distros for really tiny embedded/small-footprint apps and about the same number of the next-larger variety, which seems to be the target niche of this system.

    So, why do I applaud yet another entry in this gladiatorial matinee? Because it seems to be (as others have already mentioned) gentooish without being gentoo. As much as I love the ideology behind gentoo, it is a little self-defeating in the (ironically) places where it was meant to be most effective: weak systems. If you've ever tried compiling from a stage 1 on a pentium-133, you will know what I mean. Between the copying, set-up, compiling and post-config, it easily becomes a week-long install. (Well, if you only attend to it post-commute, that is.)

    Given that the only people who actually still use P-133s for anything are (usually impatient) techies hacking out a sideproject, it's nice to see yet another distro enter the competition and allow us to make another choice without needing to postpone the project by yet another week for testing.

    And yes, the review sucks.

    1. Re:Minimalism? Great! by Dh2000 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Since Archlinux doesn't work on the humble p-133 (i686 only, remember?) this point is moot.

    2. Re:Minimalism? Great! by yahwotqa · · Score: 1

      Indeed, I wanted to try Arch on a spare P166 (48MB RAM), but alas, it's just i586, whereas Arch has packages compiled for i686.

      I ended up installing Gentoo on the poor box - from stage 2, and it took just a bit over 24 hours (of course, with help of distcc and one other box :) ).

    3. Re:Minimalism? Great! by MerryGoByeBye · · Score: 1

      :o(

      [John Cleese in A fish Called Wanda, caught naked in someone's flat]:
      "Well, that changes things a bit..."

    4. Re:Minimalism? Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      arch has been around a while

  4. Not "Gentoo without all that compiling" by Dammital · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The reviewer twice referred to Arch as "Gentoo without all that compiling", suggesting that Arch's performance (with its precompiled 686 binaries) would appeal to Gentoo users.

    I doubt that those precompiled 686 binaries would appeal much to Gentoo users with AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS systems.

    And as for "all that compiling", Gentoo allows you to install from binary packages if you must. But I compile away some of the bloat via USE flags; you can't do that with Arch binaries.

    1. Re:Not "Gentoo without all that compiling" by niksoft · · Score: 1

      Agreed here, once you've had Gentoo, you dont go back until there is something better, but that something has a long way to go... Installing gentoo from binaries works for those of us who just donthave the time to compile, for others there is distcc if you have a few computers, or better yet a network that is not being used. If you really have no time for your Linux distro, you might as well go with one of the bigger and more well known distros. I also think that many slackware people will get off of slackware and install Arch, but there's no way Arch competes with Gentoo in speed. Also spealking of minimalistic, I'd like to take a look at the size of their minimalistic kernel and the possibility of control over it...

    2. Re:Not "Gentoo without all that compiling" by mhesseltine · · Score: 1
      But one of the points of Arch is making *very* easy to compile your own packages (thus, the "gentoo without gentoo" thingie). As I already told, it will be a *very* great hit if Arch manages to seemlessly integrate binaries from the public repos with packages locally compiled. The rationale of this is that usually from the whole bunch of packages you usually have installed (in the numbers of hundreds, even thousands) it only makes real sense to recompile a short number of them (because you want them with special flags, you need them patched or whatever) so you could have most of the benefit from Gentoo (having locally compiled well integrated packages when needed) without all the hassle about compiling the other 95% of the packages you really doesn't care about.

      Couldn't you do the same thing today with Debian by using a source package for a particular application and using pre-compiled .debs for everything else? And, this would be available to all the platforms that Debian is available on.

      Seems to me that this is a distro in search of a problem.

      --
      Overrated / Underrated : Moderation :: Anonymous Coward : Posting
    3. Re:Not "Gentoo without all that compiling" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Couldn't you do the same thing today with Debian by using a source package"

      No, you can't.

      Say you want package Foo-1.2.3 recompiled because you want to patch it with whatever.patch.
      First problem is that while not being terribly difficult it is not trivial to find the way to do it nor hack the package control files (deb packages are quite dificult to manage and quite dificult to manage; even rpm are a bit easier). This I find very easy to do with Arch packages (and some "relatives" in this regard like Lunar or the old-days Sorcerer, while they are source based).

      Anyway, let's say you have a locally compiled foo-1.2.3 now and you install it with dpkg.

      Now, Debian publishes its foo-1.2.3-1 since a bug has been discovered. What happens with your package? It will either be overwritten (since its version number is higher) or you will end up with a security-compromising package (if you rename your package to something like foo-1.2.3-local, or if you put it "on hold", so it is not upgraded).

      From now on, you are on your own regarding Foo maintenance.

      Of course rpm-based distros are no better in this regard.

      Gentoo is the one that could make such an integration easier (since it wouldn't need to deal with binary packages at all) but as I already told a distribution with no security updates has no interest for most of the professional envirnoments no matter how much you downmod me, and the fact that being 100% source-based and that makes very difficult to offer "out-of-the-box" support (since it's very risky for a company to offer support not knowing what will it find) doesn't help either.

  5. Combine distros by jago25_98 · · Score: 1

    I use Ubuntu as a stable base and chroot into Gentoo to run other stuff.

    I haven't scripted it yet but will do soon
    (chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/change-to-gentoo-and-bash)

    I may check out this distro to replace Ubuntu ...maybe.

    --
    A blog I run for the wealth
    1. Re:Combine distros by jpmoney · · Score: 1

      Seriously, why? What do you gain with adding more overhead?

      I'm not trying to troll. I just want to know why anyone would do this for performance? I understand things like VMWare that allow multiple virtual machines on one physical machine, but why add Linux onto Linux "to run other stuff"?

      --
      unf.
    2. Re:Combine distros by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I just want to know why anyone would do this for performance"

      Noone would do this for performance. Where did you read that was done for performance?

      "why add Linux onto Linux "to run other stuff"?"

      Because you wanna test without breaking your production system?

      Because you wanna give it a "sandbox" to run without breaking important things?

    3. Re:Combine distros by jago25_98 · · Score: 1

      chroot only uses extra disk space, like running a program off another harddrive only different libraries etc are used; I didn't mean something like vmware

      --
      A blog I run for the wealth
  6. gentoo's debconf? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

    It's called "etc-update". It goes with Gentoo's (apparent) philosophy of forcing the user to manually go through some post-installation steps such as updating config files and restarting services, after everything is done. Unfortunately, there's no really good way to tell it to restart all services which have just been updated.

    I would argue that etc-update is significantly easier than debconf, but maybe that's because I don't know vimdiff at all.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
    1. Re:gentoo's debconf? by DavidBlewett · · Score: 1

      etc-update is a really easy way to hose your system. The recommended way to deal with config changes is to use dispatch-conf. This has the option of storing old versions of config files with RCS, and is much more intelligent at merging new files with old.

    2. Re:gentoo's debconf? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then, why is etc-update still there? Why is it the recommended way (no matter what you say) at the install manual?