Over the past several months I've been getting complacent with my Ubuntu install, for many reasons. The biggest one being that I felt like I had learned everything I could whilst using that as my primary distro. Over the past 5 years I've used a variety of Linux distributions; SuSE, Blag, Ubuntu, Slax, CentOS, Puppy, ClearOS, BackTrack, among others. However, I always went back to Ubuntu for some reason or another, mostly, though, because it was "easy". That all changed here a few months back.
See, System/Network Administration is the career field that I want to go into (eventually). I have several friends who are already in this field, so I decided to ask them what some things I could be doing on my own, outside of school, to start preparing for it. The common denominator between them all was, "Learn Linux". Since then, Ubuntu just wasn't going to cut it anymore. I needed something a bit more...raw.
Thus my journey began. Searching high and low for something that would help me "get my hands dirty", if you will. This is where I ran into ArchLinux. I had come across it whilst browsing a "Linux Users, Show Us Your Desktop" thread in another forum. The thread was filled with all sorts of different setups, configurations, and looks. Very different from the "cookie cutter" distributions I was used to working with. My curiosity was spiked. So I downloaded it and loaded it into a Virtual Machine.
It didn't take long to notice how different it was. The best way I can describe it was it seemed to throw you into the belly of the best. No messing around, no added extras, you gotta make it work, or it's not going to type of feel.
Fast forward a few months to today. I finally made the leap. Earlier this week I got some new parts for my machine. So I figured, what better time to ditch Ubuntu altogether when I have to reinstall Windows (for games) anyway?
After several failed attempts at getting the image to boot from a USB Flash Drive, I finally got the installer running. Then, even after mucking around with it for months, I hit a snag. The partitioner was much different than what I was used to. Never had to worry about messing up other installations before in a VM. Luckily enough, I got by without messing anything up.
Next snag, GrUB failed to detect the BOOT partitions for Arch properly (ironic, yeah?). So after about 15 minutes of manually editing the entries, I finally got lucky enough to boot into my new CLI system. From there, it was one more obstacle after another, as Arch only installs the base, and you add everything else to it. First step was to get sound working, as Fedora 13, Ubuntu 9.10, and the latest OpenSuSE all failed to detect my card properly. Worked the first time. Next, video drivers. I have a nVidia GeForce 9600 GT which I could not install the proprietary drivers for. Kept getting errors about other packages already being installed and the like. After some manual file deletion and package installation, that all got worked out too.
The hardest part, contrary to what it may look like, was deciding on a Desktop Environment/Window Manager to use with my new install. I finally settled on KDE, seeing as how I've never really used it before. Figured I'll play around with that for a while then shift over to a tiling WM or something.
After about 3 hours I had a working Linux Desktop again. And I'm happy to say I'm enjoying it so far. During the few hours that I had been working with Arch in a "real world" (read, not virtual) scenario I learned a lot. Things such as modules, daemons, dependencies, troubleshooting, management, and such. Things that I never had to worry about in Ubuntu. It's been a very positive experience so far, and I hope for it to continue.
The next step is to setup a few virtual servers and start getting my hands dirty on those. I've been doing SSH and FTP for years, but never mucked around with HTTP or anything. As of now, I haven't hit above 1.2GB RAM used out of 8GB, so plenty of resources to allocate for this project. Will keep everyone posted on how the progress goes.
