oh yeah, i forgot i blogged about my new arch

XD

well, yeah, i'll try to make the update as full, swift, and appropriate as possible.

the problems i experienced were entirely pebcak.

it all spawned from a simple typo when trying to install xmonad-contrib in pacman, and resultingly thinking xmonad-contrib was not there, so went on a long n pointless strugglesome adventure trying to get it to work with cabal and other crazy ideas.

once that issue was resolved, evrything became rather smooth again.

the arch linux wiki, is, by a great big gaping margin, the best wiki/documentation for any linux distribution i have had the pleasure to paruse.

i was told 5 days for a normal user, and was complimented (undeservingly i thought) that 3 days for me, to get an arch system from start to perfection.

well, perhaps only marginally like GW declaring "victory" in 2003 at preventing future generations of americans speaking iraqi, i declared success in under 21 hours.

... and i wasnt even trying! i was spending much of the time in chat, writing silly blogs and forum posts. and i went to sleep for 8 hours. and did a whole pile of other stuff.

but yeah, twas only slightly a premature declaration. i knew at that stage that i wantd to set up a couple shortcuts in gimp (ooh, big wow... what's that, not even 2 minutes) and use FEBE on my firefox (even taking my sweet time, thats still barely half an hour). but besides the two i knew about, there's still the occassional little niggle that i forgot about... installed a calculator today, for the an example of the sort of thing i'm talking about. small stuff, that's easily sorted with a quick "pacman -S".

ok, i admit... networkmanager configuration is a pain in the hoop. networky stuff has never been my strong suit.

but it's not like that's really a necessity. i just wanted the little luxury of having nm-applet on the go again. soooo not important. ... in a way, that's even antithical to a a system worthy of the accolade of "perfection". you know how many mbs that is just for that one little feature? with all the things it requires... it's waaay into double figures!, and thats a decimal place too far for my liking, on the scale of features per kilobyte.

anyways, suffice to say, it's been days now that i'm happily tootling along in my new arch install, doing the occassional pacman -Syu, and generally getting up to all the stuff i use a computer for... some graphics here, some research there, some discussing things here there and everywhere, some audio sample creation and editing, some website fiddling... and so on.

the experience has completely dispelled some myths i had let grow in my thoughts about arch, and the archway. it's all rather nice. only networkmanager managed to coax out some grunts of frustration from me.