so i figured i'd give arch one last chance.. because it does have some nice redeeming qualities, and now i'm running xfce 4.4. it's very nice, though firefox seems a touch slower to start than i was used to when i had openbox running. i'm not sure why, but oh well.. no matter, i guess.


what program do you use to burn cds??? i've always had the best experiences with k3b, but i'm not installing qt and all that shit.. gnomebaker was pretty okay too, so i might go with it, but i'd also like to avoid those extra gnome libraries. i need ideas (i've toyed with bashburn, and xcdroast.. don't particularly like either. heard about graveman.. not sure about it yet though)

update: xfce 4.4 is pretty sweet; it's nice having thunar by default (outside of xubuntu of course, which already had it by default) instead of that pesky xffm.

hey looks pretty nice! getting things like xfce 4.4 right away is a very nice aspect of arch, but in the end, i think it is just not for me right now.

i'm still totally undecided between arch and *buntu. but i guess as i learn more and more about arch, i will lean more towards arch. there are still some kinks to work out, though..

uuuh i'm getting that arch itch again! i always get that arch itch when i really just have to use my laptop for other things :D

maybe i'll use arch for a server?

i've got my arch system setup pretty good.

there are still a couple small things for me to investigate.. but i'm lazy.

i think tonight i will boot into arch, at least for a bit. i also think i am going to, at some point, do another arch install but use it for svn/cvs stuff. i realized that using Ubuntu for something like that would probably be more problematic than something like Arch.

i've gotten over most of the issues i had initially with arch, and learned a few new things in the process.. and i imagine i'll stick with arch from here on out. i'm not sure what i'll do when feisty is released.

i wish my laptop wasn't fucked up, otherwise i'd play with other distros on it.. :/

what issues were they, and what have you learned? i am quite interested. i keep thinking more and more about using Arch as my main setup and just keeping Ubuntu as a backup when i screw things up. but i already have Ubuntu set up pretty firmly as my main OS, and it owns the /boot partition. not sure how / if i can swap which distro uses that partition.

i didn't boot into arch tonight because i realized that the latest kernel update overwrote my menu.list and i needed to boot into Ubuntu to fix it anyways. besides, all i really need to do in Arch is "pacman -Syu" and maybe check out some different things to add, and i can't check my email in it either.

ok johnny, how did you get fonts looking nice in Arch?

i think what you're supposed to do is set the dpi correctly in your xorg.conf file. but i did it the quick and easy way;

edit the /usr/bin/startx script and change this line:
to this:
but this only worked to an extent, because once i set up a display manager (i use slim), startx is no longer a factor, so i had to edit which arguments were sent to the x server from slim, in the /etc/slim.conf file. if you're using gdm/xdm/kdm, simply editing the startx script probably won't work.. so you can either check out some settings/config files for you display manager, or fix it the other way (editing xorg.conf). here's the portion of the xorg page on the arch wiki that discusses display size and dpi

while we're talking fonts... did you do a sysupgrade on your arch setup yet..? 'cause i've read some complaints on the arch forums of how the latest freetype update messed with the way some people's fonts look. i haven't done an update in a while, so i still have the older version of freetype. so even if you get x's dpi set correctly and things are still weird, it could be freetype. that problem might have been rectified though. i'm not sure.

hmm yeah my font dpi is fine, the fonts just generally look like ass, and none of the settings in GNOME's font config makes it look good.

i tried to do a pacman -Syu last night, and it hide ~150MB of updates to download. On my connection, that is a lot. So I watched some TV while it was updating and came back to find myself at the GDM login screen. I know it didn't reboot, because it would have been in Ubuntu if it had. So I logged in, and did pacman -Syu again, but there was still a lock on it. So I'm not sure if it did update or what, I just shutdown and went to bed.

i think i am going to install Foresight Linux in the very near future. it has been looking more and more appealing, and after reading up on it, it sounds like it could be a possible replacement for Ubuntu.

what is attracting me is the conary package manager, which seems like a very robust package manager, and the fact that it aims at a nice GNOME desktop. also, it is a rolling release structure, so basically it has what i like about Arch and what i like about Ubuntu all rolled into one.

can't say i've heard of it, but now it's on my radar--research to be done later!

i think i might be (more or less) done with gnome, though.. so i don't know how keen i'll get.

yeah their gnome desktop is aimed to be pretty much a stock gnome except for the theme. they recently switched the default browser to Epiphany for that reason. Firefox is still installed by default, i think, but not the default. they also have jre and all the "bad" gstreamer plugins installed by default too. so it's not really a completely free distro, but i install all of that stuff anyways it's not a big deal for me.

unfortunately my install didn't go well. i had to run the installer with the "noprobe" option or else it locked up, and the second disc is borked.

it's a two cd installer?? forget that.

so did you ever get foresight up and running??

no, the second CD is being weird. the md5sum checks out, i just can't seem to burn a good copy of it... the first one i did struggles when browsing the package directory in nautilus, but the second one doesn't, but neither of them work. just keeps saying it can't find the mono package. i had trouble with this on the zenwalk installer as well.

i burn as slow as nautilus will let me, not sure what else to try!

i've always had poor experiences with gnome's cd recording functions.. i usually just do it from the command line with cdrecord. but i'm sure that nautilus just forks a cdrecord process to do the burning anyways, so i'm not sure how much of a difference would be made..

btw, here's a quick shot of my ion3 desktop (i've not configured it much yet..)

Well, I finally got Foresight installed last night... It is a little disappointing to say the least.

It looks nice, but there's some weeeeeird oversights. Conary is weird to use on the command line, there is no "install", just "update". And the terminology is weird. What the hell is a "trove"? Searching for packages in the Foresight manager thing is problematic, because it doesn't just search the Foresight repositories. You are given the option of installing packages from the rPath and the 64-bit repositories. I have no idea if they would actually install, but if they did it would no doubt fuck some things up.

I was under the impression that multimedia codecs were installed by default, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The mplayer plugins are installed for firefox, but they don't work for me, they just buffer but don't play. I moved them out of the plugins directory, and then discovered that the gstreamer plugins either aren't installed or don't work, and mplayer isn't actually installed.

The biggest gripe though is that the installer lied to me. I swear it said it was installing grub to hd(0,7) (the / and only partition I gave to Foresight), and it just installed it to the MBR instead. It was quite surprising to reboot and see a boot menu with just Foresight. Luckily I didn't install Ubuntu's or Arch's grub to the MBR, so I just had to copy some text to get my old installs working again.


Overall, it has promise, but right now it's just got so many flaws.