[arch-general] Iinstallation program

[mike cloaked]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Martín Cigorraga <msx at archlinux.us> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Bigby James <anoknusa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Please, please /please/ don't recommend spin-offs as "Arch Lite" or "Arch
>> Made Easy" or anything like that.  Neither Manjaro nor Chakra are closely
>> related to Arch, and giving folks the impression that they are just leads
>> them to ask for help on our forums--where they get the brush-off--and
>> everyone ends up unhappy.  It's enough to mention that Arch doesn't offer
>> what the OP wants.
>>
>
> +1
>
> [OT]
> @Ralf: from all the canned distros installers I've seen so far Ubuntu's is
> the best, far superior to the rest (including Win and MacOS) and certainly
> fairly ease to use; however I agree with you that Anaconda sucks (hard) and
> that all these graphical installers (including Ubuntu's Ubiquity) are
> targeted almost exclusively to non-technical people (openSUSE's installer
> may be an exception here) leaving us out.
> Looking on the bright side, the vast majority of this installers let you
> have a fully functional system in no time, varying from 15 minutes or less
> (like Ubuntu) ~35' (like Windoze).
> Cheers!

There seems to be quite a lot of fuss about the installer - however I
have installed arch on a laptop two days ago that was running a
non-arch distro until then - I have to say that once I had done the
necessary reading so that I was happy I could go through the steps
needed the entire initial install only took me a short time. I did all
the partitioning ahead of time using a usbkey with PartedMagic on it
so that I would not need to do any partitioning during the arch
install.  Even with going slowly and typing all the commands manually
once the usbkey with the 9-7 arch iso booted, it took me less than an
hour to install the basic system (base and base devel).

I suppose I cheated with the main set of packages because I took
another machine already running arch and using some scripting plus a
bit of manual editing created a script to install the remaining
packages after rsyncing all the files in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ to the
newly installed system (to save downloading from the outside wan) -
then ran the script I had created to install everything else. Another
hour and a half later I had the system with the package set I wanted
and then switched over from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5 and had a kde
login working.

This evening I spent about a quarter of an hour to change over to
systemd from initscripts (again I have already researched this and
done it on two other machines) - some additional time is necessary to
configure services (such as postfix, dovecot, chrony, named, iptables,
etc). But this would be the case for any system and is outside the
basic install.

So all in all this seems to me very much in the spirit of "The Arch
Way" and was not too much of a learning curve. Yes for someone
inexperienced in using linux this would take a whole lot longer.

However I believe that it was useful going through the process of
doing an install manually - and there is enough information on the
arch wiki to provide everything I needed to get the system up and
running - which is I believe what many others are likely to be doing
as well?

I guess it is actually not too difficult to set up scripts to do an
install configured to personal taste - but having a more general
script written to cover everyone's individual myriad of possible
install configurations may be quite a big task to both write and
maintain?

-- 
mike c