Hi Ralph,
Thanks for all your information and explanations on Arch Linux!
On Tue, 01 Aug 2017 11:40:05 +0100 Ralph Corderoy
<ralph(_at_)inputplus(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> sez:
I have a sufficiently non-standard install. Specifically, I prefer to
use ctwm instead of any of the modern "desktops"
Arch Linux's install media leaves one at a VT with a shell.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide runs
through the next steps, Internet access, partitioning,
installing the core packages, and finishes with references to
other wiki pages about common packages. So you get to choose
if X might be useful, what window manager, etc. There are
packages that just depend on lots of others so Gnomers can get
their fix easily.
Oh, that's very nice! Most importantly for me, example shell
commands are given in the guide.
The 3 major and 1.5 minor reasons I use the Gnome tools (and
panel) are:
1. Update management -- I *really* don't want to be a
full-time sys-admin again, and the major reason I liked
Ubuntu was that it took care of all that for me. I just
logged into the "update" user I created for myself,
clicked on the "Update Manager" icon in the Gnome
session, and let it do its thing. If Arch Linux makes
it that easy (or there's a way to configure it to do so,
so that I control *whether* an update happens, but
otherwise it's automatic), then that works for me!
2. Network management -- specifically, for WiFi access.
3. Printer management -- specifically, to change printer
configuration (e.g. double-sided vs. single-sided) prior
to a print job.
4. Hardware temperature monitoring -- for which I use the
psensor(1) application that is launched by Ghome panel,
although anything that provides me a running visual
would suffice.
4.5 gkrellm(1), the Gnome GUI for the Krell hardware
monitors. There's probably some other GUI I can use.
One complication of this is that the certain Gnome applications
can be randomly restarted when some monitoring daemon is poked,
which in my situation sometimes leads to gnome-screensaver(1)
being restarted. If I then suspend my laptop, when I awaken it,
the appropriate hooks are not in place, and thus *none* of my
input devices (keyboard, mouse, trackpad) does anything -- and I
need to hard-reboot. (I've created scripts to prevent this and
similar Gnome-annoyances.) Not having to deal with this would be
a *very* nice bonus!
I need to see what has changed since my last OS update, which usually
means figuring out the new way to do XYZ -- and that's what typically
causes this to balloon to days
With a rolling release, this tends to be a steady trickle of
incremental package upgrades, most don't bother me, and when
one does other users are in the same boat *now* so the solution
is normally easy to find, e.g. top thread on the forum, rather
than digging about for something from months ago when "testing"
users first encountered it.
Woot! B-)
is it trivially easy to undo a package's upgrade?
As a rolling release, a package can assume your other packages
are up to date so there's not the "pinning" of one package at
an old version whilst the rest move on. I think you can do it,
but it's explicitly not supported.
The repo has the current packages. There's an
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Archive that has the
previous ones, and I used that once for the Nvidia problem that
stopped graphics working.
Hmm ... this gives me *slight* pause, but probably as long as my
shell and NMH don't unexpectedly change then I can probably deal
with it. B-) Since there's a repo of packages, I can (probably)
just install an older version and cross my fingers that the newer
versions of libraries it depends on won't break the older build.
Bob
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