Big Fat Ostrich

I’m officially finished messing around with operating systems for awhile, and I’m officially done with Arch Linux. I re-installed my office machine with Arch Linux a while back, and it was a great experience. Except for one thing. It sucked.

Seriously, if it wasn’t for the one tiny detail of Arch Linux sucking, it would have been awesome.

To be fair, I didn’t try hard enough. But, I just want an OS that works. Arch Linux is a great OS for performance nerds, like Gentoo fans who enjoy compiling every module for days. In my own experience, this is a fun way to really get to know Linux. However, those days are behind me and I just want an OS that works.

Arch Linux is so light and fast, but it’s also a desolate place where nothing lives but the core OS. You have to install every package manually and when I found that even the fucking calculator had to be installed (as part of gnome-extra) well, that was the last straw.

So I made an executive decision and did something I haven’t done in years.

I installed Fedora. Fedora 16.

Why? Two reasons. For one, most of our software runs on Redhat and Fedora is in the same family. Second, I use dual monitors and Ubuntu has become a complete idiot when it comes to managing that.

Well so far so good because Fedora 16 (Verne) works right out of the box. Yep. Everything works: external monitors (both of them) work which includes flipping them vertically or horizontally without having to mess around with your xorg.conf. No wireless issues, and the clean install is fast and snappy. Overall, Fedora 16 is a huge improvement over whatever Fedora I used in the past (like 2008). Even YUM feels better and package management seems tighter.

So for now I’m just going to use it as a regular desktop and see if any issues come up. I really have nothing else to say about it right now because I’m still blown away by the fact that the whole installation was complete and working in under 20 minutes. Also, xfce is light and clean. Had to install the ms-fonts after the fact, but no big deal.

Here’s the default desktop. Looking kinda Steampunk:

It’s done.

I wrote about how I was going to remove Ubuntu 11.10 and install Arch Linux instead and I did it.

The experience was nowhere near as painful as installing Gentoo, and as I suspected, it would be a little bit closer to an older Debian installation. You really do have complete control over what to install. Yes, you have to specify that you want xorg, or else you’ll end up with a headless install.

The first time logging in was clumsy as hell.

I get the desire to have a minimal installation. Really, I get it. Logging in for the first time and seeing 3.9 Gigs of RAM free out of 4Gigs was a thing of beauty. But do I really have to install ‘ifconfig’ separately? It’s really not included in the base install?

Choosing which packages to install is fine, but having to install sshd and ifconfig separately? Now you’re just wasting my time. Seriously, I’m getting angry again just thinking about it!

And what about the stuff I DID choose? Like Libre Office, Rhythmbox and VirtualBox? Even though I specified those, they were never installed. No biggie, since I just installed them myself afterwards.

But what about important stuff, like fonts? Don’t get me started on the fonts or the complete absence of them. Yep. Have to install those too.

So, to figure out which fonts you need, you can do the following:

pacman -Ss font

Install those net-tools as well. You’ll need them:

pacman -S net-tools

Do you need ssh? Of course you do!

pacman -S sshd

And so on.

Getting my xorg nice and slick and spanning across two monitors using the proprietary Nvidia drivers took some work. I installed the drivers like this:

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

Anyway, I’m not going to go into a huge how-to for Arch Linux here. It’s way too involved for that. Plus, they have a wealth of documentation which you can find on the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s long and involved, but all of the answers are there.

With all that said, if you don’t like documentation or reading/learning something new, Arch Linux is probably not for you. It’s definitely not for the impatient. I will say that now that I’ve got everything working, my system is faster than it’s ever been. I don’t have the fonts just right yet so it kind of looks like it’s been up all night drinking vermouth, but it sure runs fast. Everything is super snappy like and good.

I’ll be back with one more post about this, after a week of regular use. If things don’t work out with Arch-Linux, I’ll either be going back to an apt-get based system or Red Hat Fedora.

I was going to list a whole bunch of reasons why I’ll be switching from Ubuntu 11.10 to Arch Linux, but my decision really just comes down to 1 thing:

Ubuntu has gotten fat and lazy.

Actually, Ubuntu always was fat. It’s just that each subsequent install/upgrade seems to add more and more weight to the overall operating system. I may have said it before, but Ubuntu is starting to feel like the Windows of Linux distributions: bloated.

So, we’ll be test driving Arch Linux and its minimalist approach. Since I’ve never installed it before, I’m kind of expecting the process to be somewhere between Gentoo and Debian, but hopefully more Debian. Gentoo was a great learning experience, but god was it painful to install back in the day. Anyway, I’ll write about the experience next week or something.

One other reason why I think moving to Arch Linux will be a good thing: more focus on scripting and command line functions. See, as fat and lazy as Ubuntu is, it’s made me fat and lazy too. I need some more sweet command line action to sharpen my skills.

Later

Someone I know (Dan) has not shut up for the past 3 weeks about this “Demon’s Souls”. Yeah yeah, I thought. Just like WoW, and “Hero Guys”, or whatever it was called. I figured it’s just another MMORPG, but it’s not.

In fact, me and co-blogger Dan had a real live gaming session over at his pad this week, and you know what? It’s not a MMOPRG at all! It’s actually a pretty sweet ass game.

Now I may be like 70 years old, but that doesn’t mean I’ve gone through life wearing big oversized sunglasses. I’ve SEEN the evolution of computer games, and I’ll be first to admit that I was wrong about Pacman being the end all of videogames.

But Demon’s Souls is special. Even an old dude like me can see that. It’s like they took the best elements from the last 20 years of “single dude killing bad guys games” and rolled it all into Demon’s Souls. And made it look amazing to boot.

Figuring out how to move the guy around the map was pretty easy, even for me. In fact, once I got used to the gorgeous landscapes and smooth move-ability, I could concentrate on killing bad guys and stuff. Oh yeah, it’s a medieval setting if you didn’t know, and you start off navigating through a huge ass freaky castle. Classic dark ages stuff. You can almost smell the plague and become friends with it.

Demon’s Souls is also REALLY hard, and if you die, you go back to the beginning of the map. But it’s totally worth it. It’s rare for me to say this but it’s a fun game to be in. Like a cozy slime-filled sock or something. If I had the console that this game is played on (PS3 I think?) I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t shut up about it either.

Oh yeah, I got to see level 2 where there are these disgusting cthuluesque motherfuckers that electrocute you and then suck your soul out through a horrendous kiss of death. The makers of Demon’s Souls managed to make it just realistic enough that I really felt tense as I VERY cautiously explored the stinking dungeon.

So yeah, it’s a really well made game. I might suck at it, but this non-gamer is impressed.

m.