The Arch Way

After using Debian for more than an year I thought of going for something more "geeky" ;) and I downloaded the Arch core CD. But I never had time to install it until yesterday. The installation went "smoothly" (if you can call it smooth) until the network setup. I had some trouble messing around with /etc/resolv.conf but at around 9 pm. I had a working arch installation with a shell (No X yet). Installing Xorg was far more smoother than Debian ( I had to mess with the crappy ATi drivers when I installed Debian) but the open source ati driver was pretty good and I was able to activate AIGLX in no time. This time I decided to install GNOME and grabbing the packages from the repos and installing them took some more time, but at the end (after a day!) I have a fully functional ( 100% compatible with my needs ;)) Arch system which is faster than my old Debian installation, and more responsive.

As an ex-KDE user I loved Amarok and kopete, so I installed them, but I didn't install konversation because I thought xchat is an IRC client that's good enough for me. The only problem with Amarok was that the short-cut keys were not working (but I found a solution for that, I'll post about it later).

And I was tempted to try the new compiz-fusion, this was a bit of a problem because the Arch wiki's article wasn't very helpful in this (That wiki is great, and it helped me a lot while trying to configure my network, so I'm going to edit it shortly :D ).

And I find using the Firefox "Bon Echo" more easier than using Iceweasel in Debian :P dunno why, it just feels more like firefox I guess.

GNOME was a bit better than I thought, and after lots of messing around it's now as good as my previous KDE installation. And the tomboy notes is a very neat program.

TODO: I'm thinking about setting up a *shiny* boot-splash screen, and I'm going to remove the gnome splash and I think the default GDM looks kinda ugly, so I'm going to change it too.

Here's a screenshot (I don't like GNOME's screen capture program, KSnapShot was a much better). Click on the thumbnail for a larger preview.