My Adventures in Arch Linux

Ok, so it's Frank's turn to post (yes, as a 3rd person narrative.) I'm not so sure that anyone following our blog will be too terribly interested in this, but I'm sure at least Aaron will like it.

The year twenty-ten of the second age; here follows the account of Franklin, high king of the Rosebush, and the finding of Arch, the Linux of power. "It has come to me; the Arch Linux of Power! It shall be the heirloom of my Rosebush--all those who follow in my bloodline shall be bound to its

fate, for I will risk no hurt to the Arch Linux."

About three years ago I was finally fed-up with MS Windows. I once heard someone say that the day Microsoft made something that didn't suck would be the day they made a vacuum. For a long time I wouldn't believe it, believing instead that people just didn't know how to use their computer. This may be partly true, but it doesn't explain why my boot time was beginning to be measured with a calendar, and why humongous blocks of irreplaceable files just evaporated. And the viruses, my God, the viruses.

I began to look into the possibility of Linux as an OS. It has a steeper learning curve, especially for someone who's been under-the-hood of Windows since 1991. Learning what Linux really was took a while itself, being completely otherworldly when compared to Windows' centralized philosophy.

Here is my current desktop...

But after using what I call a "baby-bottle Linux" called Ubuntu (it's super friendly, like Windows) for going on

three years, I have felt the time was right to move on to something a bit more, well...geeky. So, along comes Arch Linux. As long as I've been googling answers to my Ubuntu questions, there's been Arch Linux gurus with the solutions. I decided to browse through a few distributions of Linux, only to wind-up on Arch.

So, what is it exactly? It's a Linux distro which guides a person through the geekier aspects of installing their system from the ground-up. Where their basic tutorial leaves-off, a host of "what now?" tutorials follow, all detailed. It is, essentially, a way to wean one off of the Ubuntu.

Why am I posting this? Because I just ache for all of those I love who are still stuck under Windoze on their computer. You'd know what I meant if you got used to turning on the computer power, and having your desktop completely ready to run in just over 8 seconds. If you want it to look one way, you can make it look that way. If you want it to behave some way, just tell it to. Linux is truly amazing, and I have so much fun using it, I have forgotten about the one reason I switched to it in the first place--no viruses.

Specifically, I'm currently running Arch Openbox, with conky (I dropped my Lua scripts; that's just too flashy,) feh with cron, xfce4-panel, & tint2. I'm currently looking for just the right replacement for xfce4-panel, to lighten it up a bit. Future plans include dropping xorg for something light, and automating theme colors to match background.