Comments on: The beauty of AUR

By: Xew

Xew — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:32:26 +0000

it’s reasons like this that I keep trying to switch to arch, but it’s been so intimidating. I have to set up my own xorg.conf and daemons? But i’ll keep trying…

By: Marzhall

Marzhall — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:04:12 +0000

I’m currently posting from Arch myself; it’s an excellent distro, after having tried Ubuntu and Red Hat, and I enjoy AUR; my packages are very rarely out of date, even with relative unkowns, such as the Awesome WM, which I love. Like every other distro, it has its problems, but the community aspect they focus on is what I enjoy about linux and Open Source; I think any linux user should give it a go.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:44:59 +0000

In this case Arch is a must see for me. I will cleanup a partition and give it a go.

By: Mikko777

Mikko777 — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:30:17 +0000

The thing is arch has the BSD ports system too. It’s called ABS and it’s used to recompile / modify the arch maintained binary packages.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:54:18 +0000

Hi,

you may want to have a looks at the ports framework used by the BSDs. The underlying architecture makes it possible, to even automatically compile Openoffice with all the required tools and dependencies. While not all the BSDs maintain 3rd party software updates for the stable release (at least OpenBSD does not), it is a very powerful construction.
Especially OpenBSDs ports tree makes it very simple to distribute software, that comes with the right permissions as binary packages, and at the same time enables the user to fetch and compile software, that needs special license agreements, such as binary firmware and windows codecs.
Compiling a port will lead to a package, which you may install as many times, as you want, allowing you to distribute software in your own organization, if needed.

As to having software updates on a click: I personally prefer a stable tree of applications over having to deal with endless dependency updates, which sometimes can leave you with a half broken system, because the latest version of software XY forces you to update many other applications and in the end you discover, that there is no QT/GTK/wxwidget 2028.4 version of your most needed application.

I really enjoy reading your page and you already inspired me to try a few things, I found exciting in the end. Please never stop being curious about how things work.

By: cdwillis

cdwillis — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:37:46 +0000

I love Arch. I think the degree of difficulty people expect to have instaling and setting it up is much overstated, just RTFM. I’ve experimented with other distros but just keep coming back to Arch. I love the AUR but I have to admit I just use yaourt to install packages from there most of the time. For some reason aurvote won’t work with my password and username so I have to fire up firefox to vote on the packages I install.

By: anarkokatten

anarkokatten — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:03:34 +0000

It sounds beautiful ^__^ After reading your blog for quite some time, I have decided to migrate from Ubuntu to Arch in the near future – I really like having control of my computer (going from WinXP to Ubuntu was lovely, I hope Ubuntu to Arch will be as fulfilling) and tweak with things, even tho I am not that of an advanced user (I have never managed to compile anything from source, for example).

I cannot migrate right now tho, as I need my computer fully functional alot nowadays, it is needed for schoolwork. I have aquired an old computer that I will test building an Arch-setup on, experience will probably make me more secure with wiping my main computer

AUR and some other things sound rather abstract tho, but I am confident that I will learn by doing. The ArchWiki and especially the Beginners Guide is awesome, it will be all I need.

Keep up the good work with your blog!