Why I use Arch.

I could do an Animaniacs-esque "states of the world" for however many Linux distributions there are out there but mostly when people know I use Linux, they wonder why I use Arch. Well... I'll tell you.

Lets start with Ubuntu, as grand as it is, is quite a bit bloated in terms of the things I need. I also don't agree with the Ubuntu Base install because really... it's honestly no different than the current Debian testing and in reality... I don't like release-based distros. New release breaks things and twists things around too much whereas rolling release distributions like Arch and Debian let you install what the packages you need one-by-one as it slowly updates into the next release cycle.

But there's two solid reasons why I use Arch.
-New package is released by the developers of Flash, or Nexuiz or Java.
-It's in Arch's repositories the next day.

Or.
-There's some obscure package that no distribution would ever toss into their main repositories because it has absolutely nothing to do with the system itself.

For instance, lets say I wanted World of Goo.
>Terminal
>yaourt world goo
-Arch gives me a list of the various installation files for all packages labeled with "world" and "goo"
-I pick one, and the developer files on my system grab it from the Arch User Repository, build it from source and install it for me.

Wow, guys.
Just, wow.

To think that if a package doesn't exist, all I have to do is either request it or throw it in the repositories myself to get my hands on it. The AUR houses beta releases and SVN releases of all sorts of programs like VLC, Mplayer, games, all sorts of things that normally run quite a bit better as they are developed. That's a good thing, quite a good thing.

I've been extremely surprised at how rarely I ever have to go download an actual package from source manually from a browser. I'm almost to the point to where I could say that if you want it and it's a linux program, someone, somewhere has put it in there for some reason.

That's why I use Archlinux.

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Music for the day:



P.S. Hit me up for friend requests if you want.
You throw me some clicks, I'll throw you some.
To each their own!

New Look

Finally got something customized going here, looks nice.
I'll give it a rest for the night, you kids be good!

I leave you with this awesome guy building a huge robot in the woods. He's like a 30-year old kid.

Ubuntu Unity and Virtualbox

News:

As some of you more than likely have noticed, Virtualbox does not like Unity. With Ubuntu's 11.04 alpha releasing just last week, many of us were sure to see about trying it out in Sun's little workstation. Though a minor setback considering the ability to live boot the system, many of us might not even have that luxury.


Grub2 is becoming a standard these days and because of that, .iso to usb converter software such as Unetbootin and dd fail to properly copy the .iso files from newer editions of certian distributions, Ubuntu included. It's a bit odd when you can't even install Ubuntu Netbook Edition on a netbook because the developers failed to realize that 80% of usb installation programs don't support Grub2 yet, much less their loop-around legacy grub settings.

Personal Introduction:

I personally own an Asus EeePC 1005HA, nine months old, the current setup is something similar to crunchbang but done manually. Debian testing + openbox and tint2, I'm not much for conky, it just really gets in the way and looks tacky when put in place with complicated wallpapers. That's not to say I'm not proud of what Crunchbang is doing... I just like my standard Debian and I like to be a bit proud of running it.

My main box is my Desktop, some parts are 3 years old, some less than 1:
Intel Q6600 @ 3ghz
2GB of Gskill 800 RAM
500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue
640GB Seagate Drive(which were prone to failure upon release... guess I got lucky)
AMD ATI HD5770 GPU
Turtle Beach Montego DDL PCI sound card
and a 550Watt Goodpower PSU

Pretty standard last generation stuff, still good for decent gaming and it never gives me much trouble. I run Arch linux here 99% of the time with a Debian stable install on another partition should anything go wrong. Arch is a good distro but I'm not saying it isn't prone to breaking every so often. It's the fastest ship in the fleet but it's not the best built but that's for another blog some other day.

That's really it for the hardware side... and I'll end the blog on that note. Can't tell everything first-off, can I? Leaves the fun out of it.

Welcome to it.

This is my new blog for Linux and Music. A strange combination but I assure you it shouldn't be any sort of uninteresting. Now, the thing is; I like both and that's likely to be the reason this blog exists in the first place... because both are massive interests to me.

I primarily use Archlinux for my main OS and I davel in Debian or Ubuntu for my netbook.  It gets me from A to B. I've enjoyed what Arch has done in the past few years with their User Repository and the ability to install certain packages from source if I so wish to do so. So, that's really all there is to that.

Musically speaking, I'm more into the indie sort of music. The alternative, experimental sort. My favorite bands are:
-Deerhunter
-Melvins
-Modest Mouse
-Dinosaur Jr
-Pixies
-DJ Shadow
-Mogwai

And there's certainly a lot more but I would hate to spill the details without first giving you some sort of introduction. So there's that, my good people! Enjoy the blog, it's going to be one hell of a ride.