Weekly Edition
Return to the Distributions page
| |||||||||||||
Arch Linux for Power Users
Since its humble beginnings in early 2002 Arch Linux has been growing in
popularity, occasionally even winning over users of more popular power
distributions, such as Slackware or Gentoo. What are the reasons behind its
success? We installed the recently released Arch Linux 0.7 on a Pentium 4
test machine to find out.
The first point where Arch Linux is ahead of both Slackware and Gentoo is the system installer. Although similar to Slackware's own installer in that it is a curses-based, menu-driven installation program with several sub-screens for fine tuning of various installation options, we were pleasantly surprised by the number of choices the installer provided. As an example, it let us choose a preferred kernel (2.4 or 2.6), X window system (XFree86 or X.Org), boot loader (GRUB or LILO), text editor (nano or vim), and it even went as far as to provide an option to compile a custom kernel prior to completing the installation. For configuring the basic system, we were dropped right into well commented configuration files in /etc/ to make any changes (e.g. to enable networking with DHCP). The availability of choice was what made an excellent first impression; contrast that to the Slackware installer where the only available bootloader is LILO, or to Gentoo, which forces you to edit text files in nano (at least until you get to the point where you can install alternative text editors). The recommended way of installing Arch Linux is to select a base system only for initial installation, configure it, then reboot. Additional packages can be installed later - either from the installation CD (note, however, that in terms of desktop environments, the Arch Linux installation CD only provides IceWM, WindowMaker and XFce, but no GNOME or KDE), or over the network. The tool to install packages on Arch Linux is called "pacman", written in C++. After spending some time perusing the fairly comprehensive Arch Linux Installation Guide, we concluded that pacman, in its basic form, resembles Debian's apt-get in more than one way. With a simple 'pacman -Sy' (equivalent to 'apt-get update') we retrieved the current list of available packages from the master repository, then proceeded with installation of X.Org, followed by KDE and GNOME. If the '-S' switch (short for '--sync') is specified, pacman is capable of resolving any dependencies required by the given package(s). Therefore a simple command like 'pacman -S xorg kde gnome' was all that was needed to turn a very basic Arch Linux system into a powerful workstation with both KDE and GNOME. Next, we went on to create an xorg.conf file with 'X -configure', then updated the ~/.xinitrc file to start KDE instead of the default WindowMaker, before we found ourselves in a pristine KDE desktop. Unlike Slackware or Gentoo, Arch Linux does include some branding on the KDE splash screen and on the default wallpaper, but the KDE theme, menu items and desktop icons are left in their default states. We noticed the absence of Firefox, so we fired up a terminal and went back to pacman (there is no graphical edition of the package installation tool). Here we used pacman's search capabilities to locate available files with commands like 'pacman -Ss firefox', then installed the packages that we wanted. Besides the usual open source software applications, we also noticed the availability of some non-free packages, such as MS TrueType fonts, NVIDIA driver, Opera and Acrobat Reader. Altogether, there are over 1,800 binary packages available in the current and extra directories on Arch Linux mirrors. Those of you who read the Ubuntu Hoary story last week will recall our disappointment on not being able to install the beta version of OpenOffice.org 2.0. Luckily, we found this package (version 1.9.74) in the Arch's unstable directory, so we invoked pacman one more time to take a look at this preview of the much anticipated release. It installed and downloaded as expected and we were soon greeted with the OpenOffice.org 2.0 splash screen. At first glance, there are no visible changes in the user interface, but this list of new features leaves little doubt about the extent of the improvements in the open source office suite. We found the package very stable, although not much speedier than the 1.1 series. The developers of Arch Linux tend to provide other experimental packages for interested users - besides OpenOffice.org 2.0, Arch binary packages of the first beta of KDE 3.4 are now also available in a third-party repository. Comparing this distribution to Gentoo, there is another aspect of Arch Linux that will appeal to power users - the Arch Build System (ABS). ABS was designed to fulfill a role of building Arch binary packages from source code with relative ease - either for packages that do not exist in the official Arch repositories, or to rebuild packages with custom options. This is done by modifying a pre-built template in /var/abs/PKGBUILD.proto, then executing the 'makepkg' command to build an Arch Linux binary package. The resulting file can be installed with pacman. Unlike Gentoo, however, there is no easy way to rebuild the entire system or to optimize it for the processor at hand, and currently there are no plans to support architectures other than the i686. Arch Linux is a clean, powerful distribution. Apart from the two package management utilities of pacman and pkgbuild, the developers have resisted any temptation to implement package customizations or add new utilities. As such, the system requires a fair amount of post-install tweaking to bring it to a usable level. Security updates are handled in a style of FreeBSD's ports of constantly updating packages to their latest versions. This may occasionally break the system, but problems are usually fixed in a reasonably short time. One area where Arch Linux trails behind Gentoo is documentation; except for the two man pages for pacman and pkgbuild, the installation manual and a sparse wiki, there is little else to guide novice users to configure their Arch Linux system. On the other hand, the distribution has active user forums and mailing lists, as well as several international community sites in German, Italian and Polish. Next time you find yourself at home during a rainy weekend, give Arch Linux a try - it is one of the more interesting and powerful dark horses among Linux distributions. (Log in to post comments)
Arch Linux for Power Users Posted Feb 3, 2005 12:59 UTC (Thu) by zezaz (guest, #5465) [Link]
Very fine review. Being an Arch Linux user since one year, i find that is summarizes quite well Arch features.
One important point is that there are not many tools specific to the distribution that you need to know to use it. When you need to configure a package, you have to use the configuration tools provided by the package if they exist.
That said, you realize that once the system is up, only a few package really need some configuration. For example, installing gnome or kde is straightforward. In practice, i have a fully working workstation in half a day with Arch.
I think that the Arch developpers can be quite proud: while Arch is only maintained by (few) volunteers, they managed to bring us a very high quality distribution.
Arch Linux for Power Users Posted Feb 3, 2005 13:03 UTC (Thu) by zezaz (guest, #5465) [Link] "When you need to configure a package, you have to use the configuration tools provided by the package if they exist."
That was not clear: i meant provided by the *upstream* package. Once installed, Arch only provides a default configuration for packages, no Arch-specific wizards.
Openoffice.org 2 Ubuntu Posted Feb 3, 2005 16:29 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link] Huh, I just installed this on my Ubuntu Hoary box over the weekend. Did it just become available?
Arch Linux for Power Users Posted Feb 3, 2005 16:47 UTC (Thu) by dan_b (subscriber, #22105) [Link] A general point about these distro reviews: although they're potentially useful I would much rather hear more about how the system works in actual day to day use of the system, and less on installation. I install an operating system about as often as I get a new computer, but I use it every day, so I would rather optimize for the common case.
I appreciate that support staff and admins of large sites might have different priorities, but even then I think they're going to be more interested in how the installation can be automated than in the vanilla single-box install.
Arch Linux for Power Users Posted Feb 24, 2005 20:52 UTC (Thu) by JazzMan (guest, #28088) [Link] "there is no easy way... to optimize it for the processor at hand"
In fact it is possible to change the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS for ABS editing the /etc/makepkg.conf file, but Arch only supports i686, so it's on your own risk. It may break packages, so don't submit bug reports to packages you've build with other flags than the original.
Sorry for any english errors!
|
|||||||||||||