David Rosenstrauch wrote:

David C. Rankin wrote:

...

and you have your screenshot:

http://nirvana.3111skyline.com/download/screenshots/archlinux/archlinux1-800...

Thank you to all who have help me stumble through getting to this point. All in all, setup has been a breeze on Arch (the fumbling around getting kde going aside). Looks like a great distro, and so far everything I use has been available. I haven't gotten to the compilers yet, but I bet they are all there. I still have a bit of cleanup and loading of packages to do, but I bet in a few days when you look at www.3111skyline.com, it will be running on archlinux;-)

Nice! Cool screenshot too.

Just curious, btw, on a side note: how'd you hear about Arch and/or what attracted you to it?

DR

Well, As far a selecting Arch, I went to distro watch, and having already done the RH-Mandrake, mandrivel (sarcasm implied), the and SuSE/openSuSE thing for years, I wanted to use a real linux distro again that wasn't now a beta platform for some mega-corp's commercial offering. (way,way to many problems are caused by that setup). I lived through the Mandrake meltdown in the 8.0-8.3 days, quality went to shit, so I moved to SuSE 8.0 pro and loved it and all following releases and continued to use it -- Enter Novell (Oh no -- not again..) I still use openSuSE and I am active there, but there is a whole lot of friction within openSuSE on Novell/openSuSE not fixing bugs in any release except the absolute latest release despite the earlier releases being no where near EOL and still supposedly "supported." The corporate takeover quality plunge never became a problem with openSuSE until (and/or starting) about June '08 with the 11.0 release. Perfect example, a fellow who was building packages accidentally built a whole slew of kde3 packages against the kde4-runtime base instead of the kde3 base. I bugged it and the devs admitted the mistake but closed the bug as 'WONTFIX'. Huh? WTF?? 10.3 isn't EOL until 10/09 and 11.0 isn't EOL until 6/10, why in the hell leave packages you know are broken -- broken for the next 14 months of the releases supported lifetime?? Basically, it wouldn't be fixed because it wouldn't affect the 11.2 release or flow into SLES or SLED, so the decision was made to simply leave the packages broken and move on. That irked me a bit. The reality being that openSuSE is now just a beta for SLES and SLED, not that pure linux distro I first used where it was all about quality and... "if it was broke, then let's see how we can fix it." Don't get me wrong, I still think openSuSE is a damn good distro and I have a whole lot of boxes running it. (All except this new Arch box ~ 14 in all) So... continuing the story, I had heard about Arch some time ago as being a Slackware derivative, and I had always planned on trying it. So from distrowatch, I went to their top-ten, found slackware, then looked for Arch, found it, downloaded the .iso, and wound up here;-) So "Hello Arch!" I have been using Linux since the Mandrake 7.0 release sometime in? what late 2000. Grown through KDE2 through KDE3, and now am preparing to be pulled kicking and screaming to KDE4 in the near future, but not quite yet. Once they take the crayons away from the current gee-whiz developers of kde4 and let the core kde guys get in there and straighten everything out and get all the core functionality squared away, I won't hesitate to move up at all. P.S. Yes, if you ask me what time it is, I'll tell you how to build a watch! -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com

On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 13:17 -0400, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

David C. Rankin wrote:

...

So... continuing the story, I had heard about Arch some time ago as being a Slackware derivative, and I had always planned on trying it. So from distrowatch, I went to their top-ten, found slackware, then looked for Arch, found it, downloaded the .iso, and wound up here;-) So "Hello Arch!"

Cool.

Just FYI, though: Arch isn't a slackware derivative. IIRC, it's actually derived from (or perhaps inspired by Crux Linux).

The only thing inherited from Crux is the PKGBUILD package format. Arch has changed so much in the past that our distribution doesn't look like any other distribution anymore.

For fun statistics from the distrowatch list: ... 12 Arch 624 13 Slackware 524 ... 22 Gentoo 358 ... 77 CRUX 97 Bitches please. Arch own ya'll ;) -Andrei Thorp

DrCR wrote:

Awesome, to see you're up an running.

Didn't you have an Error11 when attempting to start X? Maybe that's my imagination. If not, how did you fix it? I'm currently having this problem myself.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 11:06 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:

...

David C. Rankin wrote:

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Listmates,

<snip>

...

and you have your screenshot:

http://nirvana.3111skyline.com/download/screenshots/archlinux/archlinux1-800...

Oops, sorry,

I see from the logs I forgot to move the screenshots over to the Archlinux server when I switched the router from the suse box to the archlinux box. They are on the webserver now.

DrCR, I pretty sure I had the Error11 message when I was struggling through getting things going (I think I has every error possible while I was making things hard on myself;-) As usual, I did just about everything I could to make it more difficult than needed. The other DR, AT and everyone else were really helpful in solving the problems and helping me pull my.. (get straightened out;-). What I should have done initially to get X/kde up and running was to: *Getting KDE Started the 1st Time* (1) Install the nvidia driver if you have an nvidia card, if you have an ATI card, just use the openSource 'radeon' driver. (2) If you are using nvidia, then run nvidia-xconfig to create a default /etc/X11/xorg.conf, if not, do not create an xorg.conf, just let X use its defaults. (3) So that you will have font support in X/KDE, as root, change directories to /usr/share/fonts and for each font subdirectory there run: mkfontscale <dirname> mkfontdir -e /usr/share/fonts/encodings/ <dirname> (Normal font directories include: 100dpi 75dpi TTF Type1 URW artwiz-fonts cyrillic encodings local misc truetype util) Note: you may not have all of these. You can do it in one shot with this (pasted in the command line): for in $(ls); do \ mkfontscale $i; \ mkfontdir -e /usr/share/fonts/encodings/ $i; \ done (4) Do not worry about creating an initial ~/.xinitrc and if a default /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc exits move that file to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.sav to let X use its defaults to get you going. (You can come back later and tweak your ~/.xinitrc and /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. (5) Make sure there are no lingering X or kdm processes running from any previous attempt to start X or kde: ps ax | grep -E X\|kdm If you have any processes like: /opt/kde/bin/kdm /usr/bin/X -br -nolisten tcp :0 vt7 -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-Z7cAuH Kill them before trying to start KDE. (You can ignore the "kdmflush" processes) (6) Now it is time to try and start KDE. In my case I was working with KDE3, so the init script I called was: /etc/rc.d/kdm3 start I don't know exactly what the KDE4 init script is called, but I suspect it will be something like: /etc/rc.d/kdm or /etc/rc.d/kdm4. Now just see what happens and pay attention to any warnings (WW) or errors (EE) in Xorg.0.log after each attempt to start kde. (You may want to save the Xorg.0.log if you are changing things in your configuration as there is only 1 copy of the information kept (Xorg.0.log.old) and that is overwritten with each subsequent attempt to start kde. (7) Once you get kde started and the configuration straightened out, then just add "kdm3" or whatever the init script is for kde4 to the DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf. That's as far as I've gotten. I haven't yet gone back to build out /etc/xinit/xinitrc and ~/.xinitrc yet to add any customization, its working fine now. When I get around to 'rat-killing' I'll go back and see if anything is needed, but right now I'm still just trying to get up to speed on the rest of Arch. Good luck! -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com

David Rosenstrauch wrote:

David C. Rankin wrote:

...

(3) So that you will have font support in X/KDE, as root, change directories to /usr/share/fonts and for each font subdirectory there run:

mkfontscale <dirname> mkfontdir -e /usr/share/fonts/encodings/ <dirname>

(Normal font directories include: 100dpi 75dpi TTF Type1 URW artwiz-fonts cyrillic encodings local misc truetype util) Note: you may not have all of these.

You can do it in one shot with this (pasted in the command line):

for in $(ls); do \ mkfontscale $i; \ mkfontdir -e /usr/share/fonts/encodings/ $i; \ done

Just for the record, I don't think I've ever had to do step 3 on any of my Arch boxes.

DR

DR, as usual, "You are correct, sir." But after having gone through the steps at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg_Font_Configuration, it was just as easy to "kill two birds with one stone" and include that at step 3 so the font directories would be properly configured for X-startup. But your right, I should probably included an (**Optional) notice for step 3 since X will start anyway without it ;-) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com