Arch Linux team has just released their Voodoo (version 0.8) ISOs. Many changes and brand new software application versions included, while at the same time the Arch team released Pacman, v3.0, currently available in the -Testing tree.
Arch Linux Voodoo 0.8 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I have old P3 box surviving on Arch + XFCE. Pretty useful box for email and lightweight word processing. I really like Arch for its clean and lightweight design.
And yes, rolling system means my system is always up-to-date.
Keep up the good work !
Tejas Kokje
Did you guys notice that the website says “Ark Linux” rather than “Arch Linux” ?
Those are two totally different distros with different goals.
This is defiently an April fools joke.
Xaero_Vincent: Ghee, you think? Did you figure that all by yourself? How smart! Congrats!
And gnome-2.18 has just hit extra repositories today
Great distro, great community and great experience, just try it.
Fantastic distro
686 optimized
Bleedigng edge
Great package management in pacman
Easy to build your own packages with the Arch Build System
Requires some linux experience though (which is great since I have some!
)
Keep up the good work!
Now if only it was as easy to install as *Buntu/OpenSUSE, it’d be perfect. Call me old but I’m just tired of setting up everything by hand, especially if I have multiple PC’s.
Indeed, setting rc.conf and locales is a pain in the ass.
Maybe it is if you’re comparing it to doing everything in a GUI, but the rc.conf system is *simple* compared to most SysV init systems, it’s one of the reasons for Arch Linux’s popularity. (Amongst people who don’t want the limitations of GUI configuration systems, at least.) Compare it instead to configuring Debian or Red Hat without X, and you’ll see that its actually quite simple. (Though Debian through debconf and Debian-specific utilities hides some of this.)
I assume that with Arch Linux, you get a very basic setup, and its up to the installee to configure it to suite his or her tastes – correct?
Alot of the speed issues that come with Red Hat/Fedora and OpenSuSE are due to the fact that it tries to be everything to everyone, the net result, for example, you have hardware detection things that load at start up which slow things down etc.
I might give it ago, however, I think I might wait till the new driver for ipw3945 is released, which no longer relies on the userland demon, that can be a real bitch to setup, making sure that it is loaded before the wpa_supplicant, but ensuring there is a sufficient ‘gap’ in the load proceedure or otherwise, wpa won’t work – and ontop of all that, making sure thare all that occurs before the ethernet connection is initialised.
That’s what most people do, it does have a CD with more stuff on it, I forget what that includes, you can check their website to find out. 😉 One doesn’t rely on releases either, it is a “rolling release”, the installer only gets updated due to infrastructure needs.
It sort of reminds me of a cross between Slackware (simple init and configuration), Debian (package management), and a drop of Gentoo (abs) if you want that. A unique feature is AUR, it offers a repository, along with the decent-sized official repositories, that is user-contributed with little approval process; which means it has lots of packages without the package-approval-bureaucracy. Of course, that means its wise to examine the package builds of AUR stuff before you install if it hasn’t received approval yet.
I was being ironic in to the response to a previous post, but thank’s for the upstream confirmation of my point
Nice name, i was hoping for something else though when i read it. Not that im disappointed. What i would like to see is a distro optimized for glide and voodoo cards. That would be awsome, composite desktop through glide =) and maybe a 64bit version of that same idea for us that have one of the most recent 3dfx cards still compatible with some 64bit systems. Now that would be cool.
Well, i guess i might be the last person that still uses those cards for my everyday work, i might even call myself a collector.
If there allready is such an distro/os that can do this, please let me know.
“Well, i guess i might be the last person that still uses those cards for my everyday work, i might even call myself a collector.”
I may tell you that I’ve got a machine running with a 3Dfx Voodoo 3 GPU. No fan, no noise. It was the first machine developing OpenGL / GLUT stuff on was quite fun. Allthough it might be considered as a collector’s item, it still serves nearly every purpose the average home user might think of (except playing the most recent games, of course). Ah, did I mention it? No fan, no noise. 🙂
Not sure if its a 1st April thing or real but their home page lists that as the codename for 1.0 release.
I hope it will be released! 😉
Not sure if its a 1st April thing
And look at this
http://www.archlinux.org/news/307/
http://www.arklinux.org/
I’ll considered as April Mop if they change name to Aargh Linux
You mean: Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh Linux, right? The legendary black beast of FLOSS
These guys have done a great work. Even the logo for Ark and Arch have been interchanged.
Really funny.
Quotes from Ark
http://www.arklinux.org/index.php?page_id=0
“After 5 years of being called Ark Linux and 5 years of people confusing us with Arch Linux, we’ve finally come up with a solution. We’ve spent the last few months talking to the Arch Linux people to come up with a solution that’s beneficial for both distributions. Today, we are happy to announce a name change for Ark Linux. Today, we are happy to announce we will be known as Arch Linux”
Identical Quotes from Arch
http://www.archlinux.org/news/307/
“After 5 years of being called Arch Linux and 5 years of people confusing us with Ark Linux, we’ve finally come up with a solution. We’ve spent the last few months talking to the Ark Linux people to come up with a solution that’s beneficial for both distributions. Today, we are happy to announce a name change for Arch Linux. Today, I am happy to announce, we will be known as Ark Linux! ”
Ark is primarily for Linux newbie and a desktop oriented one, Arch on the other hand is for a little experienced people who are at ease with command line.
Though I would say that a fusion would be very interesting, if they retain pacman as package manager.
and runs, and runs, very well.
What can i say more?
This is 7:40 AM in India and I am already downloading the torrent. I am sure that it will be downloaded by 10 AM and from then on it is fun time.
Whenever a new torrent is released I like to do a clean install, to get to know the changes in the install and just for the kicks. Luckily, in Arch, ISO release is not very frequent.
I know its a Sunday, but I just cannot overcome the temptation of Voodoo and pacman 3.0.
Here is my plan for the day::
I’ll do a clean install, install pacman 3.0, re-compile the kernel, install kde and the SUSE kde menu, configure my wifi, install all the non-free stuff ( flash, java, media codecs etc.) and finally write all my experiences in my blog. By this time I have to either use some cotton or just do up with my wife’s displeasure.
At night, I’ll take her out for dinner, make peace and celebrate my new shiny desktop
I was planning to do a reinstall today of a badly out of date production server, so I can set it up to replace our router next weekend. I thought I’d be using the last beta, but to my surprised the final was available.
A few nice things about the install process have made it more automated. You’re optionally prompted to run hwdetect for your initrd, having the very nice benefit of hard drive and network interface naming consistent. I’ve had a very hard time in the past with inconsistencies in hard drive naming between the install disk and the base system on this server (3ware RAID, booting from the Tyan onboard SATA). It kept the device names consistent, but I did still have to alter the root in grub. Net interface devices have been equally consistent. Very nice.
OK, this is off-topic, but since I often hear that people have trouble with switching device identifiers when NOT using a ramdisk, I want to point out the usual way to deal with this particular pain.
1) For drives check out persistent drive identifiers, esp. UUID.
2) For NICs take a look at udev’s ability to assign identifiers based on MAC.
Any search engine should give you a nice collection on how-tos, etc.
/off-topic
EDIT: trying these new-fangled quote tags.
Edited 2007-04-01 08:34
Yeah, that’s what I had been doing. Of course, in the area of disks you actually have to get the thing to boot first.
Using Arch Linux for years, it’s nice how it evolves and incorporates upstream evolution as well, to get better and better.
For me, Arch is the “best tool for the job”. I don’t have to care about version numbers, but I guess, next days I will do another “pacman -Syu” run
Thanks to all Arch developers and contributors!
The best Linux distro you can get almost as good as BSD. This is the Linux-way to go.
/* off topic:
I saw in a mailing list a footer like this:
“It is said to install kernel 2.4 or better. So I install FreeBSD”
*/
Which part of Arch linux is similar to BSD? The port system?
-abs (makepkg) <> FreeBSD ports
-BSD init style of course
-KISS
-bleeding edge, but tested, libraries and applications
If I would go with Linux, it would be definitely ArchLinux.
Beyond the release, there is an official public developer mailing list and a Pacman project page. The only thing I think Arch mostly lack of is a QA team or QA process, though the stability is improving much (comparing to its bleeding edge policy, stability is indeed great) and quick fix from devs is very impressive.
Salute to Arch’s great dev team and community.
I think the important thing to remember when running arch is that you are always running -current so things are prone to occasional breakage. That said, I can count the number of times something broke badly over the past two years on one hand. The main cause of “breakage” is not keeping abreast of changes which require the user to update configs or similar. These issues are nearly always posted on the main page and have at least one thread going in the forums before they are moved out of testing, and the output of pacman always includes warnings/news about changes. Afterwards, of course, the forums are packed with posts. Arch is not a distro you should run if you are not willing to keep your ear to the ground (or read package manager output).
Things do really break from time to time, but they are almost always fixed very quickly.
Reminds me of the good old slackware days.
does the i686 outperform i86_64 ?
does the i686 outperform i86_64 ?
No it’s more or less equall but you have access to more propietary drivers and or plugins such as flash and codecs..
I’ve used Arch for 3 years straight. I moved to Ubuntu about 2 months ago as I wanted something with better QA.
That said, I still believe in it whole-heartedly: Arch has the best design a Linux system can have. It just shows you the great power of simplicity.
The only thing missing is massive QA, but I guess this is due to its rather underground nature.
If you are an advanced Linux user and you don’t mind having seldom package issues, this is, by all means, the best thing you’d ever come across.
Congratulations to the Arch team.
Yes, I know, bad pun.
I recently (like, last night) switched to Arch from Gentoo as I finally got sick of package breakage :-(.
Apart from the fact that installation was slow – probably my fault since I think I chose a far-away server – I love it. It’s quicker than Gentoo to install, doesn’t do bloat, and it’s also a damn site quicker than my Gentoo installation when running – even Firefox, with over 20 addons, loads up almost instantaneously. Even better, my Gentoo root partition was on an LVM, and Arch installed and booted on that sucker with no complaints! I was amazed to see all my settings (and mail) come up intact too, (since I had a separate /home partition which I chose not to format).
I’m sad to leave Gentoo – it’s served me well for three years – but it’s time for a change. Arch is da bomb!
EDIT: And – the best bit – merchandise includes a thong!
Edited 2007-04-02 09:50