Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
Hello, I've been using various Linux distros for a while now. I just decided to give Arch Linux a try. But I'm a little bit lost. I'm used to distros like Xubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenSuSE, etc... Where I don't need to personally understand what order I need to install which packages to get at least one GUI desktop up & running...
You don't need to understand the *Order* in Arch either?
The install itself went ok. But I needed to add a few things.
First I used the list of typical tasks for pacman from the installation guide, to figure out how to look for a package and install it with pacman.
I installed mc and vim without a problem. Then I thought it would be nice if I could get a desktop up.
Well it would those are non GUI apps as you know with your opensuse ect experience. I did a:
pacman -Si xfce|less
and looked for a package that might get me to a minimal desktop I could work with. I thought maybe xfdesktop...
pacman -S xfdesktop
Why have you done this? If you look at the 'man' page you will see http://linux.die.net/man/1/xfdesktop xfdesktop manages the desktop itself in the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment. You should have done pacman -S xfce4 By the sound of it you've only installed part of the desktop environment. <cut>
More to the point: Will I need to figure out how to uninstall xfdesktop to resolve the error?
No.
Could some nice Arch user point me at enough step by step instructions so that I can get enough of a gui up to use a browser like firefox so I can try to find solutions via the web while Arch is actually running???
You need to do as others have suggested and read the beginners guide http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide especially the "Setting up X" section.