news about the talking ArchLinux ISO

[Chris Brannon]

Christopher Moore wrote:
> Hello,
> I've been following the discussions about arch linux. Could someone 
> chime in on some advantages of arch linux over other debian based 
> distros?

Hi Chris,
First, Arch isn't Debian-based at all.
It resembles Slackware far more than it resembles Debian.  Arch uses a
package manager called pacman.  A pacman package is little more than
a compressed tar file, and you can look at one with tar -xzvf.  Unlike
Slackware's package management facilities, pacman tracks dependencies!
There are tons of available packages from the official repositories,
and most of the software that I want is available as a binary package.
That brings me to my next point: PKGBUILDs and the Arch Build System.

Arch makes it very easy to build binary packages from source.  One simply
writes a file called a PKGBUILD.  
Once one has a PKGBUILD, he types makepkg.  makepkg is a shell script.
It reads the PKGBUILD, downloads the source from the net (if necessary),
and builds a source package by following the packager's instructions.
If you want to see what a PKGBUILD file looks like, here's a sample:
http://members.cox.net/cmbrannon/PKGBUILD

The Arch Build System, ABS, is like FreeBSD's Ports tree or Gentoo's
Portage.

Configuring an Arch machine is pretty straightforward.  There is one
file, /etc/rc.conf, which one needs to customize.  Here, you specify
the local timezone, the locale, and so forth.  Also, you indicate which
modules should be loaded and which daemons should be started at boot.
All the configuration happens in one file.

The init scripts for daemons and services are in /etc/rc.d, rather than
/etc/init.d.

One thing I really like about Arch is that a freshly installed system
doesn't come with any activated servers at all.  If you execute netstat -tan,
you won't see any random daemons listening.  If you want some server
to start at boot, you have to explicitly add it to the DAEMONS array
in /etc/rc.conf.  Even if you decide to install something like Apache,
Arch won't automatically start it unless you indicate that you want it to do 
so.  If you've ever had to disable network services that you didn't need,
you'll understand why I like this aspect of Arch.

I could say more, but I think that's a pretty good introduction from a
user's point of view.

-- Chris