Arch Linux

Ah, Arch Linux. You’ve probably heard about its intimidating installation process and its devout fans. Both are actually somewhat true. But hear me out right here: Arch might be difficult to set up, but once you do set it up, it is absolutely an amazing distro.

Overview

ArchLinux‘ philosophy is to make the user in complete control about the software he or she wants on the system. There will be absolutely no bloatware installed in your machine unless you choose to do so. This is achieved with a very verbose installation about which I will talk about later on in this post. ArchLinux is modular: pieces can be added to it to make it look good or do awesome things, but pieces can be taken away as well. It is important to know that ArchLinux is a rolling release distro – that means that you get updates all the time and that there is no real release cycle like we see with other distros (Fedora, Ubuntu). Once you install Arch and hit “update”, it will be as new as any Arch downloaded just now. That being said, they do occasionally release distro snapshots, but that is nothing more than an ISO with the software versions that were current at the point when the snapshot was released. In fact, the release snapshot they offer right now dates from May 2010. But as I said, once you update it, it’s as good as new. Click “continue reading” to…well, continue reading.

My configuration of Arch Linux with KDE4.6 on it

The Wiki and the BBS

The almighty ArchWiki is often praised as the most comprehensive wiki of all distros out there. If you’re Arch newbie, a definite must-read is Arch’s Beginner’s Guide. This leads you through the entire process of installation. If you want to install Arch, the best way to go about it is to have the Beginner’s Guide open on your computer/tablet/smartphone, and install the Arch on the other computer. I also recommend that you read ArchWiki’s General Recommendations. It is a collection of very good tips and tricks  and things to do once you have your Arch up and running.

The Arch BBS – Bulletin Board System – a.k.a. forums is another great resource for newbies and pros alike. Arch community is great, they are always there to respond to your questions and/or problems. I was recently looking for some help regarding custom keymapping for my keyboard; I posted it on the BBS and got a good response within 15 minutes.

Installation

Ah, the scariest part of Arch. To be honest with you, I can understand why this can be intimidating. There is no graphical installer available and no LiveCD like we see in almost all other distros out there. The distro is installed using a text-based installer, and you have to manually edit most of the configuration files. You will also have to manually add which kernel modules (in addition to those recognized by udev) you want to load, which daemons you want to start, what nameservers you want to use … all this using vim or nano. Actually, in the end, you will also have to install X server and the desktop environment of your choice. Again, if you’re just starting with Arch, I cannot stress enough the importance of the Beginner’s Guide on ArchWiki – RTFM! Albeit intimidating, if you follow the guide, you should have no problems installing this whatsoever.

The "Welcome" screen of Arch linux installation

After you had installed your system and the Desktop Enviroment of your choice, you’ll notice that Arch comes with everything set by default. GNOME uses the default GNOME theme and settings; so does KDE, OpenBox, AwesomeWM etc. There is no software installed atop of your rig other than the software that came with the DE.

General Use

First let me say, Arch is the distro of my choice. This distro is running as the main distro on the rig that will test all the other distributions for you. So I might be a bit biased. But I really do think Arch is one of the best distros out there. It is true when they say that it’s a pain to set it up, but once you do have it set up to your liking, it is simply amazing. Do I recommend it to a complete linux newbie? Absolutely not. You will still be using the Terminal quite a bit and if you don’t know a whole lot about linux commands, I suggest you use a different distro to learn, and then move to Arch. Being as that I picked it for my main distro, I obviously think that it is very good for general use – rock solid, great performance, very little issues, and very modular.

ArchLinux Pros:

One thing I really like about ArchLinux is its package manager (not the official one; the official one is pacman, which, albeit very good, is not the one I am talking about here) or rather this thing called AUR – the ArchLinux User Repository. This is something I have not seen with any other distro so far (bear with me, this site just started!) and it is insanely useful. What is AUR? Well, we all know how useful repositories are. Ubuntu comes with a bunch of them plus there is launchpad and PPA support, and adding a new PPA in order to install a new piece of software is a click or a command away.  AUR is, as its name implies, user repository: users submit software to the repository that they maintain. This is not the software that they created (although you can submit that too), but rather any software that you want. Well, what’s so good about AUR? Two main things: first, there are THOUSANDS of software packages available – I really can’t remember the last time I looked for an app and that it wasn’t in the AUR. Second, the fact that often these apps come with patches to make it work better on your Arch system. And even though it is users just like you and me who maintain this software of their liking, I’ve found that the software is usually very much so up to date. Of course, there are some apps that are “orphans”.

To best way to install software from AUR is to install a package manager called yaourt. Yaourt can search, install, and remove the software from AUR. Installing yaourt is easy – first, add this to your /etc/pacman.conf file (at the end):

Then just run pacman -Syu as root and finally pacman -S yaourt. Note that you need to have base-devel package installed to make this work.

This is just one of the ArchLinux pros, there are many. But in every post I’ll try to outline one thing that I really like about a distro and one that I don’t.

ArchLinux Cons:

ArchLinux does not come with a support to install .deb or .rpm files. While this is not a problem most of the time due to the wide range of software available from the AUR plus the fact that most of the software comes as a tarball as well, it can be a problem sometimes. I mean, sure, I like messing around with linux stuff, but I don’t want to compile every single program out there. A good example would be Chromium (development version) – it is not available as a tarball but rather only as .deb and .rpm. It is available in the AUR which is where I installed it from, but it literally took me 2 hours to compile – and this is on a relatively good rig. Firefox4 also took me about an hour to compile.

However, on the other hand, the dpkg package (the .deb installer) is available from AUR and users have reported success with it, but I could never make it work. Also, the rpmextract is available as well.

Another bad thing about ArchLinux (thanks Archuser for pointing this out!) is the lack of package signing. Now you may be a person who doesn’t care at all about this, or the one who cares quite a bit about this. With other distros, this is how it works: all the packages uploaded to repositories are digitally signed. If they are tampered with, the signature is “lost”, and your system will refuse installation (asking you for a different key). This is not the case with Arch, where digital signing does not exist. What that means is that potentially someone could upload malicious packages to the official repositories and incidentally “hack” your computer if you download the package. While this seems like a huge issue, I have never heard of anyone who has had problems because of this.

Conclusion:

ArchLinux is a great distro and the distro of my choice. I like the fact that it is very modular, very lightweight, and very stable. I also agree with ArchLinux philosophy that everything should be user’s choice – no software should come pre-installed. As I said earlier, I do not recommend it to complete Linux newbies, but if you’ve already experimented with Ubuntu or any other linux distro and gotten tired of it, I urge you to try ArchLinux. Arch is one of those “love it or hate it” distros. To recap:

Distro name: ArchLinux
Version: n/a, rolling release. Occasional snapshots provided
Base distro: none
Pros: stable, modular, completely user oriented; package manager, user repository
Cons: a PIA to install for a newbie, requires a bit more terminal knowledge, lack of digital package signing
Rating: 8/10