On 09/12/2010 09:44 AM, Steve Holmes wrote:

Hey David,

Thanks for the suggestion; when it comes to learning more about how to do more with and get more out of the Arch environment, I'm all ears. I'm keeping this message here for future reference when I might need to maintain several machines under an Arch repo. This is cool indeed.

Thanks, Between home and office, I have 10-12 Arch boxes now. (I think I only have 3 suse boxes left). Finding a way to eliminate 300M downloads was a priority. With Arch, it was easier than I expected. (of course I needed help from the list to figure that out ;-) So I'm glad to help. After 1.5 years with Arch and even going through the pacman tar.gz to tar.xz changes, there are probably only 10-20 packages that I have had to manually move manually. (verses over 10,000+ that have passed through /var/cache/pacman/pkg) I do really full installs of Arch with many desktops (kde3, kde4, iceWM, fluxbox, openbox WindowMaker, Gnome, enlightenment e16 and e17) and full openOffice and compilation tools, etc.. and total packages per box run from ~2200 to ~2800 (for full-server installs). A simple way to manage updates between boxes over the LAN w/o having to re-download over the Internet is worth it's weight in gold. Especially at the office where 'business internet bandwidth' cost is ~ 5x the residential cost. (no wonder the US is losing its competitive edge). Anyway, glad I could help with the idea. Put it in your hip pocket for when you have multiple boxes. This simple little setup works like a champ. Also, as a final tip, if you don't currently use 'basket notepads' to keep your Arch/Linux notes squirreled away in. Give it a look. Even if you don't use kde3 or kde4, it's worth loading the runtime and installing basket notepads. (I'm running fluxbox right now and basket works just fine) It's like a flexible second brain for any type of notes/sounds/colors/images/etc.. (I try to limit it to text notes just to minimize the size) Here is a quick screenshot of some of what I use basket for to give you an idea of what it is and what you can do with it: http://www.3111skyline.com/dl/img/misc/basket-example.jpg -- 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