A must read very important news

[mhumm2]

You've helped me out of a lot of bad situations (that I got myself into). I appreciate all you've done -- you will be missed.

[GreyGeek]

I'm not going anywhere. It doesn't matter what distro I end up using (which for now is Kubuntu 14.04.2) I will always make this my Linux home. it is too good of a forum to leave.(PS - glad I could be of help!)

[julek]

On my side the same, even though I did not participate to that very forum I continue helping people on ubuntu-fr forums and so on.

[SteveRiley]

The thing with Debian is that so many of the packages are just old. I was chatting with my son yesterday. He's getting into IRC. I told him about Quassel, and how having a Quassel core running on the home server here would allow him to see chat histories. The Quassel in Debian 8 is 0.10 -- which is more than a year old. The current version is 0.12.2, released in May. The Quassel folks aren't even supporting 0.10 anymore, but Debian testing and Debian unstable still contain Quassel 0.10.

Ubuntu Server 15.04 has Quassel 0.12.2. It's been backported to earlier releases. Seems that if you want a Debian-based server with up-to-date packages, Ubuntu is the only choice. Are there any other Debian-based distros that stay up to date?

Maybe I'll just put Arch on the server.

[ronw]

Are there any other Debian-based distros that stay up to date?

My conclusion, based on my non-scientific distro experiments, is no there are not any others.

I certainly don't disagree about your Arch statement.

[GreyGeek]

Interesting that you should mention Arch. I've been thinking about making Arch a guest OS under VB so I could play with it. Heard lots of good stuff about it, and, that it's NOT a distro for noobs. I'm wondering if I'm too old to run it!

[ronw]

Based on your posts here, I suspect you will enjoy working your way through the install, and then using it. Be prepared though, you won't install it in 15 minutes like a typical click click through a Ubiquity install.

[otisklt]

Manjaro is based on arch... plasma 5 is working quite well on it, compared to plasma 5 on openSuse maybe. The laptop I am testing with is not the oldest or most current.
I am liking it so far for the little bit I have played. One downside with the installer currently is if you want and advanced setup (brtfs) the GUI installer is not an option.

[sithlord48]

i have been runing arch on my laptop for maybe 2 months now . once you set it up its great. the arch wiki is also very helpful

[GreyGeek]

Interesting installation process. I printed out the installation "guide" and booted the ISO file as a guest OS. I was presented with a root prompt. My first discovery is that the "guide" is worthless. The instructions might as well be written in Chinese. The "install.txt" I found in /root was only slightly more elaborate which made it equally obtuse. It appears to me that the "guide" is really Google search hints, telling you the order of questions you should ask on Google in order to find out what commands you should type, along with switches to do the installation steps. Deb and apt-get I am familiar with but "pacman"? And, according to Sithlord, if I want to use advanced features like Btrfs I can only do so through a terminal command line install because it is not available in their simplistic GUI installer. My only question is "what GUI installer?" That option wasn't presented on the installation boot menu.


What would you think if the Kubuntu installer, after going through the graphical installer which allowed you to set country and keyboard, do the partition and formatting and install all the software, dumped you at a terminal login prompt with the instruction "create your account, log into it and install the KDE4 desktop, configure it and then log onto it? How many of you would still be running Kubuntu?

[vinnywright]

LOL ,,,,this talk reminds me of my first few installs ever ,,,,Slackware ,,,,totally text based no GUI whatsoever ,,,,,,,,,,hours of fun to get to a desktop ,,,with a working computer by my side for tut reading wile doing it ,,,,,,,Muahaha

VINNY

[SteveRiley]

Interesting installation process. I printed out the installation "guide" and booted the ISO file as a guest OS. I was presented with a root prompt. My first discovery is that the "guide" is worthless.

Which guide? There are two. The Installation Guide is quite short and is best thought of as a conceptual overview. The Beginner's Guide is far more detailed. I've done probably half a dozen Arch installs on VMs over the years. The Beginner's Guide works perfectly.

Deb and apt-get I am familiar with but "pacman"?

Pacman: package manager. If there is one thing I could wave my hand and change all across the Linux land, it would be the unnecessary proliferation of package management tools. If only there were, you know, something like a standard.

And, according to Sithlord, if I want to use advanced features like Btrfs I can only do so through a terminal command line install because it is not available in their simplistic GUI installer. My only question is "what GUI installer?" That option wasn't presented on the installation boot menu.

You're confusing Arch with Manjaro. Manjaro is an Arch-based distribution that eliminates much of the tedium of setting up an Arch system, mostly by way of Manjaro's graphical installer.

[GreyGeek]

The guide on the wiki contains the necessary terminal commands at each stage of the install. My photographic memory having failed mr years ago I must either print out the good guide or have a second box running in order to read the guide. You can't install arch without an Internet connection.

However, I will solider on because I am interested in seeing what advantages it might have.

[mparillo]

If only there were, you know, something like a standard.

https://xkcd.com/927/

[Wheel Inventor]

About testing Linux distributions (Arch) and package managers

I think that the easiest way is to use a virtual installation.



When you have a working installation you could copy the virtual installation to the hardware.
With the Arch, in the testing phase, you could simply copy&paste the commands.


The pacman ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman ) is a powerful tool from the cli. Those who can't use the cli there are plenty of front ends: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...cman_frontends


KDE/Qt