Arch?

Soldato
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I'm looking at replacing my Ubuntu petition with Arch, as I keep hearing great things about it! I was just wondering a few things. Firstly, how easy is it to partition your drive correctly during the install? I definately don't want to screw up my Vista install!

Secondly, how easy/hard is the install itself? I keep reading reviews saying that Arch isn't really a "geeks" distro, but these tend to be written by people with more Linux experience than myself! I can blunder around Ubuntu and generally get things right more by luck than judgement-could I do Arch, or should I stay away?
 
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I would say if you aren't confident with a text based partitioner then you might struggle with the rest of the install.

This isn't, however, a reason not to try. The wiki is very good, and after the install you will be much more competent with the CLI. I would recommend trying the install on a non-mission-critical PC first, where you can afford to make a mistake, or better yet, install virtualbox OSE from the ubuntu repos and try to install arch on a virtual machine (that's what i did first time!)

Working through in a VM with the wikis is probably the best way to learn the skills you would need for a proper installation, as it is just a practice run of the real thing :D
 
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OK cool...any chance you could give me a quick run through of how to use a VM? Again, it's something I've blundered through before but didn't really get!!!!
 

Bes

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pfft it's not hard.... I introduced myself to Linux on the desktop via Arch. You won't screw Windows up if you are careful and read the wiki properly :)

Arch is excellent though- definately give it a go!
 
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OK cool, I've read up a bit on Virtual Machines and am now downloading an Arch ISO-will try it in VirtualBox first!

One question, when you have the option of selecting a virtual hard drive during the virtualbox setup, having done this, is this all that the virtual OS will be able to see? So if I give Arch 10gb of my physical hard drive, it won't be able to touch anything else?

I'm asking because I am wondering whether it is safe to let the Arch installer auto prepare my hard drive. I figure that it will be safe if all it can see is the virtual hard drive, but if it can see the rest of my C drive is it possible that it will wipe that too?
 
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I suggest that you do not use the auto prepare hdd. I recommend you to make 4 partitions like this:

1. "/boot". Make this 64 MB, that should be plenty. It is only used for the kernel, and I suggest you use ext2. (THIS PARTITION NEEDS TO BE MADE BOOTABLE!)
2. "swap". Make this as big as you want. A thumb rule is about the sime size as the amount of physical memory you have. (e.g 1 GB ram = 1 GB swap)
3. "/". Make this as big as you want, although 10 GB should be plenty for all the apps you need.
4. "/home". Not really necessary, but this is nice for storing personal stuff. If you ever reinstall Arch, you can keep the /home partition. Make it the size you want to.

When you set filesystem mountpoints, you choose the correct mountpoint and filesystem for each partition, easy as that :)


If you do as I described above, you will not mess up your Vista install. Just make sure you do not touch the windows partitions.
 
Soldato
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OK cool, sounds the same as what I did for my Ubuntu install earlier in the year. Just wondering if you've taken into account the fact that Im using a virtual machine- you havent mentioned it if so ;)

Also, when using a virtual hard drive, how easy is this to delete? Does it create it as a seperate partition, or is it just a group of files somewhere? If you want to uninstall a virtual machine, how do you delete the virtual hard drive?
 

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The virtual drive will just be a bunch of files in a folder. You can either delete it using VirtualBox, or by manually deleting the folder.
 
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K, that's what I thought. So if I manually partition during installation, it will only touch the virtual drive? It wont be able to touch the remainder of my harddrive at all?

EDIT/UPDATE!: Right, I've taken the virtual machine plunge!!! So far its all going ok, I've partitioned the hard drives well enough, and am trying to configure my packages. However, despite downloading the "core" ISO I only seem to get the option for the base packages; I dont get support, devel or lib categories. Anyone have any idea why?
 
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However, despite downloading the "core" ISO I only seem to get the option for the base packages; I dont get support, devel or lib categories. Anyone have any idea why?

The new ISO is slightly different from the one in the guide. Anyway, if you want to do it the Arch way you want to keep it simple. Hence, you don't want the rest of it. Pacman will take care of all dependencies anyway, so you only want to install what's absolutely necessary to begin with.
 
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K, I've found a "newbie" guide online which is proving to be pretty useful in deciding which packages to keep and which to lose. It's a bit out of date but good with most packages. Is it best to install the ones which I'm not sure about?
 

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I wait until something goes wrong and actually requires a package in general, but if you're not sure, you can always get everything and nuke 'em later...
 
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K, I've found a "newbie" guide online which is proving to be pretty useful in deciding which packages to keep and which to lose. It's a bit out of date but good with most packages. Is it best to install the ones which I'm not sure about?

arch is all about keeping it simple and minimisation, install less to start with if you're not sure and go from there......stick with base packages for a fresh install.
 
Soldato
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arch is all about keeping it simple and minimisation, install less to start with if you're not sure and go from there......stick with base packages for a fresh install.

Yea, I've done that- I was more asking the question in terms of the base packages.

Anyway, I've been away for a couple of days of job interviews (yay!) but am back to Arch fun now! Currently got as far as configuring my desktop, probably start on that tomorrow. Will let you know how it goes!
 
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