GoneWacko’s Blog

Arch

July 26, 2006 on 8:50 pm | In Computing, Linux |

With the holiday reaching it’s point where I was getting bored, I decided to try something new.

After getting increasingly annoyed at Ubuntu and Gnome for making way too many assumptions about how I wanted things to work, I decided to go with a new distro (to me, at least). One that was not so focussed on usability that it became the opposite of usable.

After hearing about Arch Linux a few times on chat and on the Dutch news for nerds site I frequently visit (Tweakers) I decided to give it a try. I went ahead and downloaded the base package (which is really just a CD with the bare basics of the Linux OS and some stuff to make installing it easier), because I was up for a challenge. Then I backed up my ubuntu partition (just in case I’d completely fuck up with Arch, which I was expecting) and gave it a whirl.

I now write to you from Arch linux, running KDE (and XFCE, although I’m actually liking KDE so far). Of course having an OS that does a lot less of it’s configuring for you (like Ubuntu does) also means that more things will not work straight away. But I’ve not had any major issues thus far. It took some time to get used to it all, but I’m starting to get the hang of it now :).

Another way to kill time is working for RBTS™. The website still needs a lot of work and we recently had some new ideas. We’re going for a ’semi-web-2.0′ approach, with AJAX in some places, but not overdoing it (because we want to stay accessible!). But think FAQ search boxes with auto-complete, news messages with comments that are loaded into the page using AJAX, etc.

Furthermore, I’m still rooting for a LANd-party at Rob’s house. Basically, it’s thought of as a LAN party in some tents on the field by his house. But that’ll depend on how much free time Rob’s got :).
LAN parties at Rob’s are great fun (even though we don’t game a lot, we still have fun just doing geeky things with computers) and this time around I might even go home with a free P2 400 MHz server to play around with :).