I’m blogging from Arch Linux :D

I’ve been meaning to setup Arch on my netbook for a while, after hearing a lot of people rave about how awesome pacman is and how fast their system is. I didn’t want to spend time on moving to a new distro during my GSoC, so I kept putting it off. Yesterday Ubuntu borked on my netbook for some weird reason (I suspect it was my friend Rathna sitting on it, but might have been because I was thinking of moving to Vim too) – and I took the opportunity to install Arch. After some messing around, and some help from #archlinux, I was able to get myself a commandline that also connected to the Internet via wifi. Yay!

I tried out LXDE first, instead of my usual GNOME – and found that it was incredibly unpolished (compared to GNOME). So after a bit of a struggle (AND READING DOCS! (and yes, my problem was dbus)), I got a minimal (very application-less) GNOME up and running. And yes, it is way faster. And yes, the packages are newer (and shinier!). And #archlinux was helpful :)

I’ve had to (understand and) edit a fair amount of config files to get myself a working system. It’s been a fun and informative journey – and I expect it will continue to be. My entire Linux experience so far has been with Ubuntu (hell, even the server I administer runs Ubuntu!), so coming to this world of required-and-encouraged config file editing is doing me good :)

I’m enjoying it :) If you’re a geek who loves fast text scrolling on an LCD (and you also have the time), you too would.