Lastly, are there any Arch Linux specific gui tools I should be aware of? Like for package config, etc..
Get to know the AUR, abs, and the makepkg tool. You'll be using makepkg a lot, as there's a pretty sizable number of packages in Arch that the devs don't maintain in the "core" or "extra" repos. In these cases, although sometimes it might still be available as a binary package in the "community" repo (which is maintained by Arch Trusted Users), more often than not it'll be available as a PKGBUILD script in the AUR, in which case you'll need to build the package yourself from source using "makepkg". Many packages are available from source only like this, and it's really not a big deal to deal with, once you get used to it. (Plus once you get comfortable with Arch, you'll probably want to start creating your own PKGBUILDs for packages that don't exist yet anywhere in Arch.)
As far as other Arch-specific tools, there's really not many. But I do use these from time to time:
netcfg - a command-line utility that takes care of much of the hard work of connecting to a network. You set up a profile for, for example, a wifi network, and you can then connect to it with a simple command "sudo netcfg <your_wifi_network_profile>"
hwdetect - very useful in auto-detecting the correct kernel modules for your hardware. e.g. "sudo hwdetect --show-modules"
You probably need to install them; I don't think they come preinstalled:
sudo pacman -S netcfg hwdetect abs fakeroot
There are a couple GUI pacman frontends[1], but honestly, I can't really see the value. The CLI for pacman is excellent. I also like pkg tools, which has useful stuff like pkgfile. pkgfile is an add-on that lets you find "which package provides this file". For example, if I didn't know what package provides "kate", I could do "pkgfile bin/kate" and it would tell me that it's from extra/kdesdk. [1] http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_GUI_Frontends Cheers, -AT