Updates to the Migration (from Arch) page

19 October 2022, 16:27:34

I migrated from base Arch, which I migrated from Manjaro a few years ago; it may be that the switch from Manjaro left some cruft on my system that affected my experience. Excising Gnome was far more difficult than it should have been.

All things considered, the migration went smoothly. There are some thing I think might be improved on the Migration wiki -- I'm recording them here before I forget, but if someone wants to give me editor access to the wiki I'll give updating it myself a shot.

I chose s6 as an init system. The instructions say that autofs is in the Universe repository. The current s6 install depends on autofs; I don't know whether it affects the end runnability state, but s6-db-reload throws errors about a missing autofs service. I had to figure out a couple of things to get past this -- adding universe to the pacman conf, adding the repositories to mirrorlist, etc. It wasn't hard to figure out, but I think that if autofs is needed to use s6, then the instructions for adding universe should be on the Migration page.

The second thing is NetworkManager. Anyone migrating from Arch is almost certainly going to be using NetworkManager, since it's the default. The instructions end up with connman installed, but there's some (mostly unhelpful) hand-waving about network configuration -- understandable, considering the topic. However, I think that -- knowing how prevalent NetworkManager is -- instructions to install the NetworkManager service files (in my case, networkmanager-s6) and enable the service will greatly improve users' experience after first reboot.

Third was that there were some services left behind after the systemd removal -- systemd-resolved and systemd-suspend-modules, in particular. Maybe these work without systemd, but I removed them which resulted in discovering that there were no instructions about a replacement resolve system. Several packages had dependency on openresolv, which was reported by one of the pacman commands. Now, I'm aware that a resolve *service* is not strictly necessary, and that NetworkManager mucks around with resolve.conf in any case, but I think some verbiage about what the DNS resolution is going to look like after the migration bears mentioning.

Fourth was xdm. I honestly don't recall what Arch's default manager was, but I had lightdm. The instructions install and enable xorg-xdm, and while X came up after reboot, I was unable to log in. There were errors about the user's previous session being null... TBH I dropped into the console and figured out how to stop xdm and start lightdm, after which everything worked. I suspect a brief mention about checking what the user's previous login manager was and making sure that it's selected in the new init would help here.

After the reboot, I flailed around crash-test learning s6, but that's beyond the Migration doc. There are things I still haven't figured out, but in terms of removing systemd and booting into a system based on Artix mirrors, it went remarkably well. I very much appreciated the grub instructions; it's that kind of thing that many of us have done many times, but with possibly years between each instance, and it's a particularly nerve-wracking aspect of a system change. Considering the number of init choices available, I think the Migration wiki page is remarkably well-written and effective. Thanks to whoever wrote it!

Re: Updates to the Migration (from Arch) page

Reply #1 – 19 October 2022, 17:27:02

autofs is absolutely not required. None of those services are required. It's just an example. autofs is a bad example though because it got moved to universe (it used to be in the main repos), so I will nuke that one.