6 ms·

I recently started using Linux again and installed Arch Linux. This was the first time I had used it since the init system was switched to systemd and its speed

I recently started using Linux again and installed Arch Linux. This was the first time I had used it since the init system was switched to systemd and its speed is impressive. Both booting and shutting down are very fast and I really like the journal feature. That said, when I installed a virgin system on Monday, I was sad to see that systemd is creating a .local directory in the home directories of users (even root). This is on a system with no Xorg what-so-ever. Call me old fashioned but I don't think an init system should be creating directories in a user's home directory.

rfnslyr 13y ago
Is Arch Linux still near impossible to install flawlessly on first try? Reporting in @ 7 tries here before I finally got it working.
- ihodes 13y ago
  I've installed it about 7 times, and never had a problem. Haven't had to deal with drivers, though, as I always use it on server only.
- andypants 13y ago
  3 tries here, although I broke some things by the time I rebooted the next day.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Describe your desired setup. For a simple xorg / xmonad / emacs / chromium[1] it's a few traditional commands and a few arch specific commands[2]. [1] single GPT partition, no lvm, no encryption, no fancy devices. [2] simple unix tools : disk, mkfs., *chroot. arch : netctl (network setup), pacman and a bit of systemd (not traditional yet ;)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- klrr 13y ago
  You mean human-errors, or do you mean that Arch breaks itself mistakenly? If so, it might be worth reporting the problem. I used Arch a year ago or so(but switch to CRUX due to systemd), and I've never had any problems that wasen't me messing up things.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    If it wasn't for the Arch guide for my specific laptop I found online holding my hand through every single step of the way there would be no chance in hell I would get it working. I feel like you need to be a linux guru just to get it working. Yeah human errors that threw the entire process off. However the journey was really fun, I learned a lot, and I highly recommend other to try the same as once you get it running, it really is amazing. My crappy netbooks boot time went from 2 minutes with win7 to 14 seconds with arch.
    - nawitus 13y ago
      >If it wasn't for the Arch guide for my specific laptop I found online holding my hand through every single step of the way there would be no chance in hell I would get it working. I feel like you need to be a linux guru just to get it working. Really? I find it pretty easy to find instructions to configure a particular device or install a certain software. If you want to install a DE, just Google how to install a DE to Arch Linux, or if you have a Broadcom wireless, you can Google how to install the wireless card. There's little laptop-specific instructions you'll need, and you don't need to be a guru since there's very good instructions available, especially in the Wiki.
      - rfnslyr 13y ago
        It's more like the happy path from start install to finish install is one of a million paths. Throughout each installation I'd hit a new detour, which in turn led me even further astray, and so on, and so on, until I never got back on the happy path and had to restart. That was my situation.
    - voltagex_ 13y ago
- groovy2shoes 13y ago
  They used to have a decent menu-driven installer. Why they threw it out and said, "here's zsh and a wiki page, go install," is beyond me (not to mention the default environment of your installed system is pretty different from the environment on the live disc). Even OpenBSD is easier to get up and running. That said, I still contend that pacman is hands-down the best package manager in existence. I just prefer to use it on Frugalware nowadays.
  - bluetech 13y ago
    Feels like the developers said, "hi, we're starting to get too many of those pesky users, let's make each of them run a bunch of obscure commands just to get started". Well, I'm not being fair here, the commands are not really obscure (except the ones they made up), and I'm sure they had a reason. But I just recently had to reinstall Arch after many years, and found the new "installer" strange and kind of daunting compared to the old one.
  - yogo 13y ago
    Yea I'm not sure why they got rid of the menu-driven installer and zsh sucks imo. I can still live with the installation process though, it boils down to: partitioning your disk, setup filesystems, /mnt and /mnt/boot (for my desktop), use pacstrap for base system, install bootloader. After one installation with the manual process you can still install Arch in 30 minutes, plus you can thank it for somewhat forcing you to understand how you are setting up your system. Pacman is really the best. I had to be reminded of that recently when I had the luxury of dealing with a Ubuntu system. Granted I don't have to deal with that system everyday but having to use apt, aptitude, dpkg to accomplish different things? What a fucking mess.
    - ce4 13y ago
      apt vs. pacman: Could you elaborate a little? What's your main reasoning for this? I have tried Arch on three machines (old netbook, laptop, desktop) and all went fine during installing (all LUKS cryptorooted). What made me mad was when some stuff broke on two of them due to infrequent updates this spring (didnt use both netbook+desktop for a longer time). Alas, I can't remember details any more. Made me switch back (to debian) I almost never use aptitude and dpkg only for low level stuff (e.g, when there are errors). Apt alone is in almost all cases sufficient.
- Tanner 13y ago
  I've recently installed Arch on two different laptops. The first one was an old netbook. I hadn't done an Arch install in a long time (I've been spoiled by the simplicity and convenience of the Wubi installer) and wanted the learning experience. I also wanted the HDD to be encrypted using dmcrypt and LUKS. The main problem I had was wrapping my head about the various partition schemes. This was made more difficult by my insistence to have the HDD be encrypted which meant I needed a separate /boot partition along with the special 1MB linux boot partition required to use GPT with BIOS (I missed that in the instructions and it tripped me up for quite a while). Altogether, it took three fresh installs before everything was exactly the way I wanted it but the last one was quite quick and was really on a fresh install because I wanted to make absolutely sure I had everything nailed down. The second laptop was a midrange, 2 year old HP "media"-style laptop. With my new knowledge, partitioning and installing was easy even while maintaining an existing Windows install. But this laptop has both Intel and Nvidia graphics shared via PowerXpress whereas the netbook has simple Intel graphics. I still haven't taken a stab at the proprietary drivers but using the open source intel and nvidia graphics in tandem (after some fumbling around but it seemed counterintuitive to simply install both drivers side-by-side) it works well enough for what I'm using it for. I don't really relish the prospect of installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, though. I've probably spent 20 hours installing Arch on both of these machines but I've learned a lot in the process. It's been good.
- blueblob 13y ago
  Depends on your hardware I suppose. I got it working the first try but had the unfair "advantage" that I had already had experience with installing Ubuntu on a laptop with sli before the Nvidia drivers included support for it and also ran the archlinux menu-driven installer before doing it the manual/script based way. The nice thing is that, as long as you keep updating, you don't really have to reinstall.
- axaxs 13y ago
  If you want to try arch with an easy install, have a look at Antergos(www.antergos.com). Sorry to self-promote, I do some work on the team when I can, especially on the installer. I'm very proud of it, and of the team. Once installed, although it does install some extras(drivers, codecs, etc), you are left with a vanilla arch system. It does, however, take away from the fun of your first successful arch install :).
- Tyr42 13y ago
  I got it on my second try, once I found out I was supposed to use arch_chroot instead of chroot or something like that.
- RexRollman 13y ago
  Since the last time I had used Arch, not only had they added systemd, but they had also killed AIF (Arch Installation Framework). Most of it is easy, like partitioning, but I had to figure some stuff out that I really didn't want to figure out, like the command for getting Grub working. But between the official and unofficial install guides, I got it working.
- SCdF 13y ago
  Wait really!? I hadn't installed a linux distro that wasn't a *buntu since Gentoo ~8 years ago when I started a new job a couple of months ago. They gave me a Lenovo laptop, and when it came to picking a distro I thought I'd try Arch. I just followed the beginner's guide[1]. Apart from the first bootmanager I tried (uefi is a new experience for me) not working right everything just worked as easily as you'd expect. Wifi worked ootb, graphics acceleration was as easy as installing the right driver package. For anything else I wanted to install (eg xfce) I just read the wiki page for that particular package on the arch site, and did what they said. I was actually blown away at how easy it was to install a command line "do it yourself" distro. I'm guessing from your comment that's not the standard experience then :-/ [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide
- hrkristian 13y ago
  In my opinion: Far from it, I find it hilariously easy. I've done it some 20 times at least but I got into a Gnome environment flawlessly the first time around (following the Beginner's Guide.) The majority of those installs have been on my main computer (a laptop) because I couldn't find the source of my issues with X not initializing. You could argue full re-installs are overkill, but I say no. Fun-fact, Turned out to be a fault with GDM (I use Gnome Shell), and I finally fixed my pains with a total of three commands.
qznc 13y ago
Enforcing the XDG data path via systemd seems weird. http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s02.html http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s02...
andrewaylett 13y ago
I don't have access to an Arch system to test, so: are you sure it's systemd that's doing that? It seems more likely to me that it would be from /etc/skel/, but I could be wrong...
- RexRollman 13y ago
  It certainly is, although I will check skel at my next chance. I also found a bug report about it (it was causing some kind of conflict with MySQL) here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1012842 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1012842 In any case, I know it is for systemd because if I dig down into the directly, it eventually ends into a dead systemd symlink for a directory in ~/.config, which doesn't yet exist. I think it is suppose to provide the ability to add and run end user units, but I am not sure.
leeoniya 13y ago
got it running in 1 try on my BeagleBone Black following this: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/ti/beaglebone-black http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/ti/beaglebone-black though i did have to screw around with uEnv.txt for a while to get it booting as seamlessly from eMMC rather than external SD card. this has since been fixed (as of 9/21) [1] btw, it's much much smaller and faster than the distro BBB comes with, Angstrom. Arch boots in a quarter the time and also has many more up-to-date packages. Embedded nginx stack ftw! [1] https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/issues/554 https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/issues/554 [EDIT] sorry, responded to wrong post. should have been this sibling post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521531

rfnslyr 13y ago

Is Arch Linux still near impossible to install flawlessly on first try? Reporting in @ 7 tries here before I finally got it working.

ihodes 13y ago
I've installed it about 7 times, and never had a problem. Haven't had to deal with drivers, though, as I always use it on server only.
andypants 13y ago
3 tries here, although I broke some things by the time I rebooted the next day.
agumonkey 13y ago
Describe your desired setup. For a simple xorg / xmonad / emacs / chromium[1] it's a few traditional commands and a few arch specific commands[2]. [1] single GPT partition, no lvm, no encryption, no fancy devices. [2] simple unix tools : disk, mkfs., *chroot. arch : netctl (network setup), pacman and a bit of systemd (not traditional yet ;)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
klrr 13y ago
You mean human-errors, or do you mean that Arch breaks itself mistakenly? If so, it might be worth reporting the problem. I used Arch a year ago or so(but switch to CRUX due to systemd), and I've never had any problems that wasen't me messing up things.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  If it wasn't for the Arch guide for my specific laptop I found online holding my hand through every single step of the way there would be no chance in hell I would get it working. I feel like you need to be a linux guru just to get it working. Yeah human errors that threw the entire process off. However the journey was really fun, I learned a lot, and I highly recommend other to try the same as once you get it running, it really is amazing. My crappy netbooks boot time went from 2 minutes with win7 to 14 seconds with arch.
  - nawitus 13y ago
    >If it wasn't for the Arch guide for my specific laptop I found online holding my hand through every single step of the way there would be no chance in hell I would get it working. I feel like you need to be a linux guru just to get it working. Really? I find it pretty easy to find instructions to configure a particular device or install a certain software. If you want to install a DE, just Google how to install a DE to Arch Linux, or if you have a Broadcom wireless, you can Google how to install the wireless card. There's little laptop-specific instructions you'll need, and you don't need to be a guru since there's very good instructions available, especially in the Wiki.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      It's more like the happy path from start install to finish install is one of a million paths. Throughout each installation I'd hit a new detour, which in turn led me even further astray, and so on, and so on, until I never got back on the happy path and had to restart. That was my situation.
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
groovy2shoes 13y ago
They used to have a decent menu-driven installer. Why they threw it out and said, "here's zsh and a wiki page, go install," is beyond me (not to mention the default environment of your installed system is pretty different from the environment on the live disc). Even OpenBSD is easier to get up and running. That said, I still contend that pacman is hands-down the best package manager in existence. I just prefer to use it on Frugalware nowadays.
- bluetech 13y ago
  Feels like the developers said, "hi, we're starting to get too many of those pesky users, let's make each of them run a bunch of obscure commands just to get started". Well, I'm not being fair here, the commands are not really obscure (except the ones they made up), and I'm sure they had a reason. But I just recently had to reinstall Arch after many years, and found the new "installer" strange and kind of daunting compared to the old one.
- yogo 13y ago
  Yea I'm not sure why they got rid of the menu-driven installer and zsh sucks imo. I can still live with the installation process though, it boils down to: partitioning your disk, setup filesystems, /mnt and /mnt/boot (for my desktop), use pacstrap for base system, install bootloader. After one installation with the manual process you can still install Arch in 30 minutes, plus you can thank it for somewhat forcing you to understand how you are setting up your system. Pacman is really the best. I had to be reminded of that recently when I had the luxury of dealing with a Ubuntu system. Granted I don't have to deal with that system everyday but having to use apt, aptitude, dpkg to accomplish different things? What a fucking mess.
  - ce4 13y ago
    apt vs. pacman: Could you elaborate a little? What's your main reasoning for this? I have tried Arch on three machines (old netbook, laptop, desktop) and all went fine during installing (all LUKS cryptorooted). What made me mad was when some stuff broke on two of them due to infrequent updates this spring (didnt use both netbook+desktop for a longer time). Alas, I can't remember details any more. Made me switch back (to debian) I almost never use aptitude and dpkg only for low level stuff (e.g, when there are errors). Apt alone is in almost all cases sufficient.
Tanner 13y ago
I've recently installed Arch on two different laptops. The first one was an old netbook. I hadn't done an Arch install in a long time (I've been spoiled by the simplicity and convenience of the Wubi installer) and wanted the learning experience. I also wanted the HDD to be encrypted using dmcrypt and LUKS. The main problem I had was wrapping my head about the various partition schemes. This was made more difficult by my insistence to have the HDD be encrypted which meant I needed a separate /boot partition along with the special 1MB linux boot partition required to use GPT with BIOS (I missed that in the instructions and it tripped me up for quite a while). Altogether, it took three fresh installs before everything was exactly the way I wanted it but the last one was quite quick and was really on a fresh install because I wanted to make absolutely sure I had everything nailed down. The second laptop was a midrange, 2 year old HP "media"-style laptop. With my new knowledge, partitioning and installing was easy even while maintaining an existing Windows install. But this laptop has both Intel and Nvidia graphics shared via PowerXpress whereas the netbook has simple Intel graphics. I still haven't taken a stab at the proprietary drivers but using the open source intel and nvidia graphics in tandem (after some fumbling around but it seemed counterintuitive to simply install both drivers side-by-side) it works well enough for what I'm using it for. I don't really relish the prospect of installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, though. I've probably spent 20 hours installing Arch on both of these machines but I've learned a lot in the process. It's been good.
blueblob 13y ago
Depends on your hardware I suppose. I got it working the first try but had the unfair "advantage" that I had already had experience with installing Ubuntu on a laptop with sli before the Nvidia drivers included support for it and also ran the archlinux menu-driven installer before doing it the manual/script based way. The nice thing is that, as long as you keep updating, you don't really have to reinstall.
axaxs 13y ago
If you want to try arch with an easy install, have a look at Antergos(www.antergos.com). Sorry to self-promote, I do some work on the team when I can, especially on the installer. I'm very proud of it, and of the team. Once installed, although it does install some extras(drivers, codecs, etc), you are left with a vanilla arch system. It does, however, take away from the fun of your first successful arch install :).
Tyr42 13y ago
I got it on my second try, once I found out I was supposed to use arch_chroot instead of chroot or something like that.
RexRollman 13y ago
Since the last time I had used Arch, not only had they added systemd, but they had also killed AIF (Arch Installation Framework). Most of it is easy, like partitioning, but I had to figure some stuff out that I really didn't want to figure out, like the command for getting Grub working. But between the official and unofficial install guides, I got it working.
SCdF 13y ago
Wait really!? I hadn't installed a linux distro that wasn't a *buntu since Gentoo ~8 years ago when I started a new job a couple of months ago. They gave me a Lenovo laptop, and when it came to picking a distro I thought I'd try Arch. I just followed the beginner's guide[1]. Apart from the first bootmanager I tried (uefi is a new experience for me) not working right everything just worked as easily as you'd expect. Wifi worked ootb, graphics acceleration was as easy as installing the right driver package. For anything else I wanted to install (eg xfce) I just read the wiki page for that particular package on the arch site, and did what they said. I was actually blown away at how easy it was to install a command line "do it yourself" distro. I'm guessing from your comment that's not the standard experience then :-/ [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide
hrkristian 13y ago
In my opinion: Far from it, I find it hilariously easy. I've done it some 20 times at least but I got into a Gnome environment flawlessly the first time around (following the Beginner's Guide.) The majority of those installs have been on my main computer (a laptop) because I couldn't find the source of my issues with X not initializing. You could argue full re-installs are overkill, but I say no. Fun-fact, Turned out to be a fault with GDM (I use Gnome Shell), and I finally fixed my pains with a total of three commands.

qznc 13y ago

Enforcing the XDG data path via systemd seems weird. http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s02.html http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s02...

andrewaylett 13y ago

I don't have access to an Arch system to test, so: are you sure it's systemd that's doing that? It seems more likely to me that it would be from /etc/skel/, but I could be wrong...

RexRollman 13y ago
It certainly is, although I will check skel at my next chance. I also found a bug report about it (it was causing some kind of conflict with MySQL) here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1012842 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1012842 In any case, I know it is for systemd because if I dig down into the directly, it eventually ends into a dead systemd symlink for a directory in ~/.config, which doesn't yet exist. I think it is suppose to provide the ability to add and run end user units, but I am not sure.

leeoniya 13y ago

got it running in 1 try on my BeagleBone Black following this: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/ti/beaglebone-black http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/ti/beaglebone-black though i did have to screw around with uEnv.txt for a while to get it booting as seamlessly from eMMC rather than external SD card. this has since been fixed (as of 9/21) [1] btw, it's much much smaller and faster than the distro BBB comes with, Angstrom. Arch boots in a quarter the time and also has many more up-to-date packages. Embedded nginx stack ftw! [1] https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/issues/554 https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/issues/554 [EDIT] sorry, responded to wrong post. should have been this sibling post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521531