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Arch Linux 0.7 Reviewed 31

Posted by CowboyNeal
from the closer-looks dept.
Eugenia writes "Andrew Roberts posted a long and informative review of the newly released Arch Linux 0.7. It describes the installation method, post-install configuration, features included, package management and the available support for the distro. Trying to describe Arch Linux in a single sentence, many would say that it's a distro that's almost as speedy as Gentoo is, as simple as Slackware is and with a package management similar to Debian's. [Semi-]advanced Linux users would probably like it a lot."
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Arch Linux 0.7 Reviewed More

Arch Linux 0.7 Reviewed

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  • Oh God, noooo (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Cowherd X (850136) on Friday January 28, 2005 @08:24AM (#11502124) Journal
    Oh please no, not another Linux distro, there really is no reason to have as many distros as there are penguins in the world! We're running out of penguins!
    • And where is that screenshot? :p ./T
    • That's pretty funny, but I think that one of the coolest things about GNU/Linux is in how many different ways you can put together an os. The applications are all the same anyways so not much effort is wasted. If anything it fills the needs of niche markets that other distros may not address. I for one have tried Gentoo, Slackware and Redhat, but am sticking with Arch because of it's power and simplicity (not to mention the awesome package manager).

      I'm writing this post from a laptop running Arch, sittin

  • Cool (Score:4, Insightful)

    by digitalchinky (650880) <dtchky@gmail.com> on Friday January 28, 2005 @09:03AM (#11502288)
    (for the poster above, everyone is reading about battery stickers)

    I thought the review was written pretty well actually! I'm always on the lookout for a better distro - not that this one really fits, but there are many links to other sites that lead me to other ideas.

  • To keep this series of posts at least a bit less off-topic: the codename for ArchLinux 0.7 beta is Wombat.
  • I don't know much about Wombats but thats the 16th post! :P

  • Arch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FictionPimp (712802) on Friday January 28, 2005 @10:43AM (#11503145) Homepage
    I've used arch in the past and found it a great distro. It has its quirks, but for me it was rock solid and ran like a charm as a development/test server for a side project I was working on. It does require you to know a little bit more about linux and your hardware then most distros, but its not anymore complex then gentoo or slackware. Plus it is targeted at i686 which is nice for speed. I found the package choices a bit small, but it is way easy to make a new package from souce and install it with pacman.

    Anyways, its a great distro.

  • I used to use Arch Linux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cthefuture (665326) on Friday January 28, 2005 @12:06PM (#11504050)
    I used Arch Linux for about 6 months not too long ago.

    It has some annoying quirks but nothing too bad I guess. The biggest problem is lack of packages and the very slow package manager. Although packages are easy to create, I got tired of having to create packages for every little thing I needed. After looking at the code for the package manager I could tell it was written by someone who did not know what they were doing. Maybe that has improved since 0.6, I don't know.

    It is not any faster than any other distro. With the exception of boot time, all distros are really about the same performance-wise. In fact, I found the Arch package manager was incredibly slow (try running Arch on an old machine).

    Overall, between the goofy quirks, lack of packages, and lack of coding skill, I went back to my old friend Debian (actually, Ubuntu Linux).
    • Wow, In case you haven't noticed this distro is made for newer machines. Not old ones. I don't know why people are so oblivious to everything. this a great distro with a great package manager :) I mean what can beat pacman?

  • The subject pretty much says it all. Gentoo is not speedy. Gentoo can be speedy, but generally, it isn't any faster than any of the other guys out there.

    This is compounded by the fact that most of the people who claim the speed of Gentoo overoptimize their machines and end up with slower binaries thanthose that don't, but I'll leave that one alone. ;]

Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. -- Booth Tarkington

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