Arch
Installation
Have a look at the Beginner's guide, and you'll see this is no click and play install,
but it is IMHO a good way to get to know more about how things are set up.
I used the FTP ISOs x86_64 netinstall cd and installed Arch with gnome-session on my HP Pavilion Slimline yesterday.
[peter@hp-s3030 ~]$ uname -a
Linux hp-s3030 2.6.32-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Feb 9 15:12:10 CET 2010 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
Configure login and shutdown
Today was configuration day with the wiki pages start X at boot (I modified my .bash_profile to start X automatically) and autologin using mingetty .
Now when I push on the powerbutton, after about 50 seconds, I am logged in and get my graphical GNOME environment.
Then, to get an easy shortway to put the PC off with the sudo poweroff command from the terminal, I added a line to sudoers using visudo.
To have the option "Shut Down" in the System > Shut Down menu, I edited my ~/.xinitrc to use PolicyKit and added ck-launch-session before gnome-session, so the line now says exec ck-launch-session gnome-session.
If I want to edit the preferences regarding power management, I can use the System > Preferences > Power Management
link to open GNOME Power Manager.
Configure real-time
To get rid of the error "cannot lock down memory for RT thread (Cannot allocate memory)" in qjackctl's messages window,
I added these lines to /etc/security/limits.conf :
@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - memlock 512000
@audio - nice -19
and this line to /etc/pam.d/su :
session required pam_limits.so
Installing additional software
Pacman
To download and install scons, svn and boost, this is the command to enter in the terminal:
sudo pacman -S scons svn boost
Pacman replaces apt-get that I know from my experience with Debian based distro's.
Like Synaptic is a GUI frontend for apt-get in Debian, there are also GUI frontends for pacman.
AUR
Another difference is the AUR (Arch User Repository) where I can search and download a file named BUILDPKG for a program I want to have.
(a lot of these are made by hollunder, thanks hollunder!)
I've set up a map 'AUR' for this, where I add a new map with the name of the program when I save the BUILDPKG file for that program.
Then in the terminal I go to that directory and type makepkg to build the program as described in the BUILDPKG file.
To install: sudo pacman -U name-of-program_cpu-architecture.pkg.tar.gz
ABS
The Arch Build System is a system for building and packaging software from source code. Instead of doing the regular ./configure && make && sudo make install , these commands are written in a PKGBUILD file, and to build the source, you just do makepkg. Makepkg looks for the PKGBUILD file and makes a .pkg.tar.gz file that can be installed with pacman.
More info: