Arch Linux

I’m posting this from Firefox 2 in Arch Linux!

Yay!

And I appear to have come through the transition with all my data in tact! Really, the only thing I wanted to keep hold of was my music, my episodes of Top Gear, and my e-mail, so I’ve managed to cover those three bases (and more), apparently.

The Arch install wasn’t very difficult at all, though Tate helped me a lot, and without his assistance I’d probably still be sitting at an Arch install dialogue wondering what the hell I’m doing. :-D

So far, I’ve install xorg, gdm, gnome, gnome-extra, and all the other stuff I need to make life a little easier. Though, as I’m going along I’m finding new things that I’ve forgotten to install that an install of Ubuntu would’ve remembered for me, like audio and video codecs and such. However, pacman, Arch’s package manager, is absolutely GREAT. When I installed Quod Libet (sorry Tate, mpd doesn’t appear to have a last.fm plugin), it automatically installed the gstreamer plugins (to decode mp3 and Ogg-Vorbis) for me as well. Something strange I’ve found is that Arch does not come with an ssh client in the base package; I thought that would’ve been pertinent to include, after all, it’s only an extra few hundred kilobytes.

I still have a few niggles, such as:

• My fonts are a bit wierd. I don’t seem to have the range of fonts that I did with Ubuntu, and some websites look dodgy.
• My fonts in Firefox aren’t anti-aliased
• I need to install some themes to get rid of the uglyness that is default GNOME
• The gdm login screen is crap. I want it to look like Ubuntu/XP and be a nice pretty thing with a single text input box, not something that looks like it came from the 90′s and Windows NT
• My volume is always muted on startup
• I have to sort through my three hard drives and remove all my duplicate files and clean everything up (this is hardly Arch’s fault, but, it’s still a niggle)

So hopefully when Tate wakes up, he might be able to help me out a bit more. Otherwise I’m going to have to search the Arch forums and Wiki (which are pretty good, IMO) for solutions.

Also, I hate installing XP, it took longer to install XP than it did for me to setup Arch, and I’ve never installed Arch before. Go figure. Also, Creative drivers for their SoundBlaster Live cards SUCK DICK, mainly because no matter what driver I download, it ALWAYS gives me an error saying “cannot detect an SB Live card installed, are you sure you have the right driver?” … no matter what driver.