On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 08:57:54PM -0600, steve@vwebr.net wrote:
No reading at all isn't necessarily what I'm after.
Like I said, I can follow and appreciate clear instructions.
I need to end up with a distro that has good driver support, and very low resource utilization and gets me to a GUI in 20 steps or less, which are clear steps.
Ubuntu being virtually zero steps, so that gives you a better idea.
Steve <... snip ...>
Hi Steve, I would appreciate if you could put replies to emails at the bottom of the quoted section of the email you're replying to (just like I am doing now). It just makes it easier to read the flow of the emails. I have snipped the email chain you replied to as it was very difficult to follow especially after the transformation your email client was applying to it. I am happy to hear that my recommendation helped you get the Archlinux ISO running and put you into a position to install the distribution. Now, to respond to your concern that the instructions are unclear: The instructions are written with the intention that the reader is familiar with what a normal distro's graphical installation tool might be doing in the background when the user navigates through its prompts. The instructions also link to multiple other pages which give a lot of the necessary background to anyone with the time to read. That being said, the installation instructions STILL provide a considerable excess of information which should be enough for someone who is willing and patient enough to do the necessary research to follow them without much prior experience (even prior linux experience). Regarding an earlier message of yours about root passwords, I'm not entirely sure how you got lost so early in the process. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and give you some elaboration on the beginning of the process of installing archlinux in the hope that it will give you a better idea of how to read the rest of the installation guide. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide Since you have already written the ISO to a USB flash drive and booted from it successfully, we can skip the "Verify signature" step as at this point you have already consciously or unconsciously made the decision to trust what you have downloaded enough to boot from it. The step you're on, as far as I am aware is the very end of the section named "Boot the live environment." That is to say that you have successfully booted the Archlinux live ISO and have been "logged in on the first virtual console as the root user, and presented with a Zsh shell prompt." This means that you're now running Archlinux from the ISO and the next step to aim towards would be to prepare the machine you're installing the distribution onto for the installation process. As Archlinux isn't yet installed on the machine, it would be pointless to try to set the root password as the root password would only change on the ISO and only until you were to re-boot the ISO. Now hopefully you understand where you are, following along from this step the next step is "Set the keyboard layout." This is obviously an optional step but if you have dealt with graphical distro installers, one of the first steps upon booting is usually a question about your keyboard layout. Continuing, the next steps deal with other pre-installation tasks which put the running system into a good position to begin configuring the target machine. Then as the final stage of pre-installation the guide explains partitioning, formatting and mounting the target disks for the installation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I will not go any further in paraphrasing the installation process because unfortunately if the above is not enough to get you started then the chances that you will be successful in configuring and using the distribution AFTER the installation are low and the Archlinux community does not exist to teach potential users how their machine works under the hood. So to finish off, it's not that the instructions are unclear, it's that the instructions are not intended to teach the end user what they're doing, and they're also intentionally not designed such that someone could just copy paste commands without thinking about what they're doing. Part of the reason why the simplified installation guide was removed (as far as I am aware) was because it was misleading users who were not adequately familiar with Linux or did not have the right attitude towards learning about Linux into thinking that the entirety of the Archlinux experience was going to be a matter of following simple steps with minimal thought to achieve any desired end result. This just ended up putting a significant burden on the community to answer questions for which answers were already publicly available. Or to use a (probably not very good knowing my past record) mathematics analogy: someone who enjoys teaching and working with linear algebra might not enjoy or want to answer endless questions about the fundamentals of algebra or geometry when there is plenty of good material and good teachers who specialise in teaching precisely that kind of thing. Kind regards, -- Tomasz Kramkowski