Arch Linux

[dedanna1029]

That's what I was saying. It's been in almost every one forever. It didn't just "occur two days ago." I stated in the post that it's been an ongoing issue.

June 5, 2012

May 23, 2012

Just to name a couple...

[viking60]

Depends on what you are talking about. There will always be some links to someone in trouble, but that does not necessarily qualify to explain my trouble.
True; we have in common that we had trouble but I like to be more specific.. In My case it was most likly a HW thing and a kernel without a patch that the old one had (something like that ). The 3.4 kernel fixed it beautifully, so life is good again.
I must confess that I do not know what caused it in the first place. But Atheros has not been super supported in the driver department, so maybe it is something there.

[dedanna1029]

Explain, please, how AMD Radeon could do it? It is a graphics card...

[viking60]

Atheros card not AMD I fixed it above. The driver I use is ath9
Now where did that whiskey bottle go....

[dedanna1029]

LOL.

Yeah, that's what I use, too. The atheros drivers in general, even for Windows I think are pretty poor all 'round.

[viking60]

Puh I just finished the most bumpy upgrade so far in my Arch history.
All Arch Linux packages have had their files in the /lib directory moved to /usr/lib and now /lib is a symlink to usr/lib
Theoretically it should be possible to upgrade like this:

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pacman -Syu --ignore glibc
pacman -Su

But that is only the marketing you will probably still have a lot of dependencies where other files than glibc own files in /lib
To find out we have to do this:

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find /lib -exec pacman -Qo -- {} +

And all programs owning files other than glibc must be uninstalled with pacman - DO NOT MOVE ANY FILES MANUALLY!!!
The instructions can be somewhat confusing on this point - but if you move anything YOU have FUBARED your system!
Just uninstall and run the command above again until you are stuck with modules they can most likely be deleted manually.

This thread has a lot of tips in direction of moving files manually and that is all crapola - it starts to make sense towards the end though:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=145006&p=1

Here is the wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/De ... iki:usrlib
And remember this must not be understood as you should move files manually.

I had to uninstall plymouth and some wifi stuff from aur.
I re-installed plymouth after the upgrade. I think this upgrade also broke e4rat so I removed that from my kernel line together with bootchart.

On the bright side:
My wifi connections are comming up like clockwork on every boot now

[viking60]

Arch has removed the AIF (Arch Installation Framework) install disk. So the the way it installs has changed dramatically. The iso is only a script for net-install.
The documentation is not all that up to date either.
So I would not recommend taking a job for Arch installations any time soon There is a lot more manual work involved in getting this thing up and running now.
To get my keyboard i have to do a:

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loadkeys no-latin1

Now you have to setup the network from CLI:

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ip link set eth0 up

then lease an IP from the router

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dhcpcd eth0

That will make you able to start......
I hope super-documentation will be in place soon.
Definitively not a distro for beginners this...

[viking60]

Ok so Arch has dropped the good old install iso and replaced it with a pure net install. Many are complaining but this is not a matter of good or bad - simply that no one has had the time to make a new install iso.
If there ever will be one again....

So I danced away to the Arch site and downloaded the new file and started to install it in my Virtual Box. The new Howto in the Beginners guide does work - I can report that up front!
But it will take way more time than the old method at least the first times you do it.
In many ways Arch has become closer to Gentoo in terms of installation.... And Gentoo is good, but it never was fast in terms of installation.

Also the famous Arch documentation is now falling behind due to the many changes lately, even if the most important ones are adjusted with impressive speed.

But as always it is a good learning experience. So I am now using systemd and I have left Grub for Syslinux.

So after chrooting and mounting and partitioning failing and chrooting partitioning and mounting I was finally ready to download base and base devel via an Arch script.
Installing Syslinux has to happen before rebooting too so naturaly I did that and set it up. You get really good at your /devs/sdas after a short while here
Well it is all in the Beginners guide as I said, and it works - but do read carefully
Finally I am in my newly installed Arch and ready to put some DE on it so I start with XFCE4 in installs as a group you only have to do a

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 pacman -S xfce4 

It went fine and after a

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startxfce4

I was in this impressive and lightweight DE....
I have to walk of my caffeine poisoning now so I have to go.
To be continued.....

Back again
So it turned out that there was some work in making the xfce start automatically so I also installed Gnome.
That went fine and the Gnome shell does work in VirtualBox! That is the first on any distro here.
After installing gdm and doing the inittab stuff I had everything up and running and the option to pick between Gnome and XFCE on the gdm login.

So life was good then? Eh well not quite I had lost my Valhallian keyboard on the way so I checked and tweaked all of the (new) Arch config files.
I checked the Gnome settings and it reported Valhalian Keyboard and even showed me a graphical map that was perfectly corect, but it was a lie. My keyboard did not work like that.
It turned out that I had to tweak my X as you can see here.

And now life is good.

So what do I think of it?
Well Arch is as good as ever and maybe even faster after the change in config files. And if you have planed to do two Arch installations tomorrow - just drop it. You will only have time for one

But I have done one installation, so I look forward to tell everybody else to pick another distro now, if they do not like it.
That is what the cool Arch guys do, and I do want to be cool....

[viking60]

Time for some update here then.
Lately one Arch dev must have lost his girlfriend so he gets fast and easily bored. So there have been some updates that require some time consuming manual interventions.
The last one was very smooth according to the cool Arch guys and that is why they have a 24 pages thread regarding the issue to show for it.

The instructions on the front page are kept relatively short and minimal:

First there is a warning that you will get an error warning during the next update then a recipe on how to go about it. The information is correct but maybe lacking some further explanations.
The libraries are getting moved from /bin to /user/bin and here is the entire content of the message.

So I do it in my VB first and had no problem. All those links to check came up empty so I could click my way through and that was it!

The I went for my wifes laptop and did a:

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pacman -Qqo /bin /sbin /usr/sbin | pacman -Qm -

to:

Fix any non-official packages with files in /bin, /sbin or /usr/sbin to put those files in /usr/bin. The list of packages that are not in a repo that need to be fixed can be generated using:

And this time it did not come up empty:

grub 0.97-21
e4rat 0.2.3-1
grub 0.97-21
dnscrypt-proxy 1.3.0-3
e4rat-preload-lite 0.1-3
initscripts 2012.10.1-1
nagios-nsca 2.9.1-2
system-tools-backends 2.10.2-2
tcp_wrappers 7.6-15
usbredir 0.6-2

So the message is to "fix" that before I can go on. On this particular point it would have been sensible with a link to a howto.
That way the support-thread would maybe only be 10 pages long.
Time to brew a lot of
I simply delete everything on that list and re-install after the procedure, in these cases rather than manually redirect.

Grub (legacy) is rather important to make any PC work - and in this case it was not in the official repos anymore. But Berserks do not care about that so I removed the entire enchilada (after which it is not a particularly good idea to boot).
I continued with the steps and everything updated nicely.
Then I had to install Grub 2 and convert from Grub-legacy (there are good wikis for that) and re-install most of the programs in the list above which are not all in the repos so I used

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yaourt -S e4rat chrootkit etc.. etc

After that everything was OK (I was not able to re-install all programs but they were minor). On yet another box I got a similar list but without grub (since that already has grub 2) and that went just fine.

I love the flexibility of Arch, but I really would like the devs to coordinate their boredom with my spare time .

Still I like the way Arch moves forward and that is why it is called bleeding edge.
Manjaro is the nice cuddly teddybear that simply fixes this for you and gives you a regular update - which makes it a great distro (and saves you time). It is only a week or two behind Arch - so you will get the very latest of every software there too.

Arch is still a favorite of mine though - I must be Archefied

[dedanna1029]

Ummmmmm,,, is there a reason why they don't just simply fix the updates?

[viking60]

It is the other side of being in complete control of your system. There were valid reasons so it is true you should not update your Arch right before you need the computer.

It mostly is well documented and goes true just fine.

Manjaro is a distro that simply delivers a functioning update. The structure is all Arch but they take care of stuff like this for you.

[dedanna1029]

That's my point though. Are they so centric on "control your own box" that they can't even push out an update that won't screw people around, that they have to figure out for themselves, when info is not exactly forthcoming except in a thread that is way too long to comprehend, and does not take time to have a place for condensed info? When there just might be a population of newbies running it? If Manjaro doesn't seem so centric on it, then why is Arch, to that drastic of a point?