Arch Unearthed!

Guys, I won't ask for your forgiveness anymore. I'm too lazy to continue regularly. It's not that I don't enjoy blogging, I really do. But I am always a bit too lazy :(

Anyways, good news is, I've started using arch linux! I wish I could say a lot of good things about it, but I can't :( I've only started, remember? To make long story short, it's YET another linux distro. But the difference of arch linux from the rest of the distributions is, you get the chance to assemble it from scratch. Well, it's not like linuxfromscratch actually, but a lot easier than that. Probably the main advantage is, since you're installing all the packages all by yourself, there's actually nothing installed in your pc that you don't need!

Wait, let me explain. This might seem a bit annoying too! Let me give you guys an example. Imagine, you've installed the latest release of Ubuntu, and the desktop looks so pretty! The first thing you want to do, is to take a screenshot of your new "untouched" love and send it to your boy/girlfriend ( which of course, will inevitably cause a break-up :( ). So what you will do is, hit the "prt sc sys rq" button and a window with the screenshot will appear and ask you to save the image. It's that easy! But sometimes, you might fail to understand ( at least I did it ) that an specific program does this job for you once you've hit the pssr button. So, "that" program had to be installed with your operating system. And of course Ubuntu does it for you.

So what wrong with that? Well, seemingly nothing. Because you already got what you need right? But listen, you don't need all of that, do you? I mean once you go to the supershop to buy a box of chocolates, all you need is a box of chocolates! You don't need toothpastes, ice-creams, lipsticks or t-shirts! Well, you might need it some other time, but not now! But if I tell you to take this things to your home all at once, wouldn't it be a little difficult? Well, if it was asked to me, I must have tried to take as much as possible. But the question is how much? Specially when most of things I don't need at all? Well, the answer is not much! And here comes the beauty of arch linux.

Arch has one of the most regularly updated repositories of software packages. So all you've gotta do is just ask. Anytime and anyway you want. You don't have to take the burden of keeping all those unnecessary things that come from other distros. But yes, you need to give it a bit time to make your selections and bringing them to your system ( specially when you have a slow internet connection like mine :( ) And if that sounds crazy to you, well, you can easily pick one of those popular distros, that's all!

Actually I wanted to discuss a few interesting tips about using arch. I've only started, but I've already faced some issues and managed to come up against it. But since there's not much time, I'll end with just one!

The problem that actually occured is: when I tried to use empathy after few hours of installing, a message kept on bothering me. It said, "The login keyring did not get unlocked when you logged into your computer". So I tried with every password that come to my mind, but to no avail. So with the help of google, I've found this easy 3 step solution:

1. Go to your home folder and press CTRL + h, this will show all your hidden files
2. Go to .gnome2 folder. Dont miss the dawt before gnome2.
3. Go to the keyring folder and delete the login.keyring file

After that I logged out and logged back in. And thank God, no more "keyring" mumbo jumbo anymore :D

That's it for today guys. Hope to keep you guys updated! Happy hunting!

this blog post is dedicated to our inspiratinal fellow CS student, Mahmud Ridwan, who installed arch linux on my laptop :P