Home | Community | Message Board


This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   PhytoExtractum Kratom Powder for Sale   Myyco.com Golden Teacher Liquid Culture For Sale

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
OfflinePed
Interested In Your Brain
 User Gallery

Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 08/30/99
Posts: 5,494
Loc: Canada
Last seen: 7 years, 5 months
Switching to Arch
    #21522859 - 04/09/15 06:10 AM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Hey all,

I've been using Debian and its variants for my entire adult life.  Arch Linux is looking more and more attractive though, but my current skill level makes it a bit intimating.  As an intermediate computer user, and as an essentially-beginner Linux user, does anyone have any pointers or recommendations with respect to switching to Arch?

Particularly, I'd like to keep my home directory intact and all its contents without wiping this out (currently this a second partition.  Is this feasible, or should I just swap out the drive and star fresh?  Will I be in a situation where I have to build in the install the OS from the ground up?  I've had significant problems with make/make install in the past: there always seem to be some kind of cryptic and thereby unresolvable problem.

Aside from Arch, does anybody have any other distros they recommend?  Security is a high priority. 

I very much prefer Gnome3, and hope to keep this as the shell.

Thanks,

:peace:

Ped


--------------------


:poison: Dark Triangles - New Psychedelic Techno Single - Listen on Soundcloud :poison:
Gyroscope full album available SoundCloud or MySpace

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleByrain

Registered: 01/07/10
Posts: 9,664
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Ped] * 1
    #21523311 - 04/09/15 09:29 AM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Quote:

Ped said:
Particularly, I'd like to keep my home directory intact and all its contents without wiping this out (currently this a second partition.  Is this feasible, or should I just swap out the drive and star fresh?  Will I be in a situation where I have to build in the install the OS from the ground up?




Set up a data partition for a shared home directory with gparted or something and then make the appropriate symlinks in your distro's home directory.  Now whenever you install a new distro you just need to mount the partition and make the right symlinks in your new home folder.  I mount mine at /media/data/.  Edit:  You can make it automatic at startup by sticking a line in /etc/fstab.

Code:
ln -s /target/path /symlink/path



Quote:

Ped said:
I've had significant problems with make/make install in the past: there always seem to be some kind of cryptic and thereby unresolvable problem.




Can you elaborate?  What were you trying to compile? What went wrong?

Quote:

Ped said:
Aside from Arch, does anybody have any other distros they recommend?  Security is a high priority.




Gentoo would probably be a good choice for security, I like Slackware personally for its simplicity, ease of use, and widely transferable learning potential.  I haven't done arch, but I imagine you will spend a lot of time fixing things broken upstream.

Quote:

Ped said:
I very much prefer Gnome3, and hope to keep this as the shell.




Have you only done desktop environments or have you tried doing just a window manager yet?  Openbox?  Fluxbox?  How about a tiling wm like spectrwm or i3?  With all due honestly gnome3 would only be good if you have only 2 fingers and were restricted to using a mouse.  That said, you should be able to build gnome 3 in most if not all distros.

Edited by Byrain (04/09/15 10:26 AM)

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflinePed
Interested In Your Brain
 User Gallery

Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 08/30/99
Posts: 5,494
Loc: Canada
Last seen: 7 years, 5 months
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Byrain]
    #21524402 - 04/09/15 02:29 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Well, I'm Mac-convert.  After the Snowden fiasco, both Windows and Mac became unpalatable.  That's why I've made a point of working with Debian:  aside from the questionable Ubuntu, Debian seems to offer the ease of setup with minimal headaches.  I don't mind headaches, but I do mind headaches which I'm utterly in the dark about.

In your opinion are Debian/Ubuntu poor choices from a security standpoint?

Thanks of the tips about symlinks.  If I understand you correctly, this should allow any distro to use my existing Home folder as its default?  I hope that's the case, otherwise I'm looking at one helluva backup effort.  I'll look into Gentoo and Slackware too.


>> What were you trying to compile? What went wrong?

Most recently, I tried to compile d2x-xl.  I followed the instructions, but MAKE threw a myriad of errors, some of which mentioned upgrading to the newest version of some complilers or libraries.  Trouble was, I was already using the latest version (at least according to the repos).  I'd say that when I'm manually compiling something, it fails 60% of the time.  That's turned of me off the process, and for now I prefer to rely on Synaptic, apt-get, or .deb files.


>> Have you only done desktop environments

Yeah, and I'd like to keep it that way.  Call me spoiled, but the Mac environment was so fluid that I gravitated toward its best replica.  That was Gnome3.  I'm really quite attached to Gnome3; I have it tweaked to perform exactly as I like it, and it's both quick and stable as hell


As a side not, Gnome3 has a beautifully built in system-wide spell checker, which I've had to painstaking add dozens if not hundreds of entries to, such as "GABAergic", "adrenoceptor", and so forth.  Is there any way to preserve this?

Thanks again for all your help.

:peace: Ped


--------------------


:poison: Dark Triangles - New Psychedelic Techno Single - Listen on Soundcloud :poison:
Gyroscope full album available SoundCloud or MySpace

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleByrain

Registered: 01/07/10
Posts: 9,664
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Ped]
    #21525214 - 04/09/15 05:31 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Quote:

Ped said:
Well, I'm Mac-convert.  After the Snowden fiasco, both Windows and Mac became unpalatable.  That's why I've made a point of working with Debian:  aside from the questionable Ubuntu, Debian seems to offer the ease of setup with minimal headaches.  I don't mind headaches, but I do mind headaches which I'm utterly in the dark about.

In your opinion are Debian/Ubuntu poor choices from a security standpoint?




Ubuntu certainly is because of the spyware they include, debian is probably fine for most people.  If you really want to have the best security, there are probably better distros, but that is still a bit beyond me too.  My main complaint against debian is that they made it very hard recently to do debian without systemd, it is possible to use another init, but a lot of their packages won't like that...

Quote:

Ped said:
Thanks of the tips about symlinks.  If I understand you correctly, this should allow any distro to use my existing Home folder as its default?  I hope that's the case, otherwise I'm looking at one helluva backup effort.  I'll look into Gentoo and Slackware too.




Yea, just make sure to not format your data partition(s) when installing a distro and there is no need to symlink every directory, just the things you need like music, documents, videos...

Quote:

Ped said:
>> What were you trying to compile? What went wrong?

Most recently, I tried to compile d2x-xl.  I followed the instructions, but MAKE threw a myriad of errors, some of which mentioned upgrading to the newest version of some complilers or libraries.  Trouble was, I was already using the latest version (at least according to the repos).  I'd say that when I'm manually compiling something, it fails 60% of the time.  That's turned of me off the process, and for now I prefer to rely on Synaptic, apt-get, or .deb files.




What version of debian are you using?  Sometimes the packages even in the unstable repo are old, I'll play with d2x-xl and see if I can get it to compile in slackware.  If I have much luck I'll see what I can do about making a lutris installer.  Debian and the .rpm distros do a good job of keep users away from the source, they put a lot of effort into making it "Easier" while actually making it more complicated.  A .deb is a lot harder to tinker with than a slackbuild for instance and you're far more likely to run into missing libs.  Though apt-get will get you packages a lot faster while you would need to read the slackbuild page to make sure you have all the needed dependencies.

Quote:

Ped said:
As a side not, Gnome3 has a beautifully built in system-wide spell checker, which I've had to painstaking add dozens if not hundreds of entries to, such as "GABAergic", "adrenoceptor", and so forth.  Is there any way to preserve this?




I can't imagine why not, but as I don't use gnome 3 you're probably better off asking a place like linuxquestions or one of these irc channels.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleByrain

Registered: 01/07/10
Posts: 9,664
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Ped]
    #21525671 - 04/09/15 07:10 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

If you want secure, this would be a good place to start looking.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Hardened

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offliner00tuuu123
Now I'm just really piseed
 User Gallery


Registered: 04/20/12
Posts: 8,507
Loc: I'll be there in a minute
Last seen: 8 years, 2 months
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Byrain]
    #21527180 - 04/10/15 02:15 AM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Op with Arch your gonna be pretty much working from scratch I'd dual boot with what ever you choose for now and make a fat32 partition for storage of things you don't wanna lose.


--------------------
:kingcrankey: Please report me to a Mod for hurting your punk ass hippie feelings :flipthebird: And all time Champion thread killer.:thatsayes:

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineMagenta
I care!!
Male User Gallery


Registered: 06/14/09
Posts: 20,323
Loc: The land of plenty Flag
Last seen: 2 months, 14 days
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Ped]
    #21527732 - 04/10/15 08:14 AM (9 years, 1 month ago)

I also use a data partition.By that, i mean i have a partition i mount (and symlink) that i store all my media on, eg pictures, movies, music, documents.
Some people prefer to make a /home partition that incorporates all that i mentioned. The difference is that a home partition also includes config files normally hidden away. this makes it easy to transfer setups, for example making Gnome Shell act the same way no matter the distribution.

Because different distributions ship different versions of software, sometimes config files are not compatible cross distributions. Gnome shell in my experience seems to be very unpredictable across versions upon what extensions it'll accept.
These sort of incompatibilities are the reason i also run a data partition instead of a home partition which is normally advocated. The benefits of a data partition is there's no incompatibilities, but the disadvantages are that you will have to set things up from scratch again in regards to your work space.


Arch uses a basic package management system opposed to Debian. Debian often cuts it's packages up into devel packages, language packages ect. Arch does not do this, Arch supply packages that are commonly described as 'vanilla', in other words, not tampered with. This has the benefit of making compiling if you're so inclined, not such an convoluted process and thus less trouble. The down side is that packages will be larger (not extremely) and that will take up bandwidth if that's important to you.

I like the approach that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Perhaps you might shed some light on why you think Arch may be right for you instead of Debian? Without knowing the reason why you're having doubt's about debian then no one can give any serious suggestions.


--------------------

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineR0B0G3N3S1S
Quantum Mechanic

Registered: 04/08/15
Posts: 330
Loc: Noosphere
Last seen: 8 years, 8 months
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Magenta]
    #21528930 - 04/10/15 02:40 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

arch rocks I used it for a 32 gb flash drive, I will always be in love with this distro, even though the glitches on it were horid...


--------------------
One should of, but shouldn't of had to.
Because One Shouldn't of, but had to.
Pm me If you are trying to discuss that one thing that everybody knows but is so hard to put into words.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleByrain

Registered: 01/07/10
Posts: 9,664
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: r00tuuu123]
    #21529952 - 04/10/15 07:22 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Quote:

r00tuuu123 said:
Op with Arch your gonna be pretty much working from scratch I'd dual boot with what ever you choose for now and make a fat32 partition for storage of things you don't wanna lose.




Fat32? :lol:

No.....the op will be fine with just ext3 or 4, if he wants to be savvy he can try xfs, but he should make sure he will never lose power while the computer is on and know that the partition might be hard to resize down the line. 

Here is a chart with different possible file systems to use with linux.

http://gparted.org/features.php

Edit:  Fat32 has a 4 gb file size limit.
http://www.genie9.com/Support/KB/KnowledgeArticle.aspx?KBID=113

Edited by Byrain (04/10/15 07:44 PM)

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offliner00tuuu123
Now I'm just really piseed
 User Gallery


Registered: 04/20/12
Posts: 8,507
Loc: I'll be there in a minute
Last seen: 8 years, 2 months
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Byrain]
    #21535345 - 04/11/15 11:03 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Strange I have a bunch of 4 + GB files stored on my fat 32 storage partition. I'd better take this thing and have it looked at. :rofl:


--------------------
:kingcrankey: Please report me to a Mod for hurting your punk ass hippie feelings :flipthebird: And all time Champion thread killer.:thatsayes:

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineCepheus
Balance
Male User Gallery


Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 04/19/06
Posts: 8,266
Loc: the space between reality...
Last seen: 1 month, 19 days
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Ped]
    #21538692 - 04/12/15 06:19 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

I've been using gentoo for years but I'm running some pretty old hardware at the moment so I made the switch to arch. It's not massively different and fairly simple to install.

I'd copy your home directory to an external disk, then when you reformat your drive make a separate partition for your /home just in case you want to switch distro again.

Arch is package based so you don't need to compile much. There is a 'bleeding edge' repository available called AUR which you compile the packages from source, but pretty much everything you'll need is in the the standard pacman repositories. Pacman isn't really that different from apt, and once you get to grips with how arch handles init scripts (it's sort of like a cross between gentoo and debian) it's all clean sailing.

I'd definitely recommend it if you haven't got a cutting edge box and can't be fucked to compile everything from source :wink:.


--------------------
"I only ever hope to reach equilibrium, in Nature's matrix, in line with the meridian" ~ Jehst

:sun: "...and I know that I have to keep breathing, as tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring?" :sun:

Free Spore Ring Europe
Send any spare spore prints you might have and help the distribution :grin:

Open Source. Freedom.  GNU/Linux

Addicting is not a word.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblefoodsgoodtoo
FPSnosurrender
Male User Gallery

Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 02/13/09
Posts: 3,720
Re: Switching to Arch [Re: Ped]
    #21556130 - 04/16/15 04:23 PM (9 years, 1 month ago)

Recommend it.- its time consuming sometimes but its really fun.
Don't do much gaming other than maybe curseofwar here and there. Still the in the box type user. "script kiddie"

but recommend it it fascinates. there are really cool things on this side of linux.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   PhytoExtractum Kratom Powder for Sale   Myyco.com Golden Teacher Liquid Culture For Sale


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* comparing gentoo to debian ~ commands and configs automanM 999 0 08/30/05 06:01 PM
by automan
* Partitioned HD / Two operating systems / How to repartition with XP fazdazzle 641 9 11/14/09 04:26 AM
by Enphenitie
* Thinking about switching to Linux, need your help
( 1 2 all )
moog 5,118 31 05/25/05 12:26 PM
by MAIA
* adding new harddrive, how should i partition supra 909 9 01/15/06 02:53 PM
by wilshire
* scsi emulation in Debian sherm 2,112 9 02/04/05 04:52 PM
by delta9
* possible to strip debian back to base system? sherm 1,290 7 07/10/05 10:48 AM
by Huehuecoyotl
* I want my partition back! Gijith 1,900 10 10/26/05 04:26 PM
by supercollider
* Switching to linux LoveOverAll 455 4 06/08/10 11:22 AM
by frith

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: trendal, automan, Northerner
745 topic views. 0 members, 0 guests and 4 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.017 seconds spending 0.003 seconds on 12 queries.