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Moving to Artix?

Hi,

I am currently looking for a replacement of my good old gentoo/funtoo setup. I am sick 'n tired of compiling given that chromium alone takes 2-3 hours on a 8 core AMD 4.7 GHz box and I need to have it installed on two laptops as well. Being able to use precompiled package is the only change I wish to make but I realize I will have to change a little bit more ;)

I would prefer not to abandon the overall well working always overviewable openRC and I DO have a mental resistance moving to systemd - it is just a mess that can't be overviewable. Several hunders of services started where the used to be 20-30... Impossible to find problem in and no way in hell I can remember the ones I need to have started. My sympathy to Atrix and others that provides alternatives.

I want my linux to have an extensive wiki. Arch do have an extensive wiki, sabayon does not. With 10 years of gentoo I strongly rely in doing what ever I need based on the availability of a wiki-atricle.

Also I rely on KDE.

I used to run Arch linux a few years back and one of the few things I had problems with was the AUR. Quite soon I needed to use a few packages from AUR and the mix became troublesome. So, before I get my engine running on Atrix - how are you managing the combination of AUR and pacman repositories? I am fine going outside the official supported frames.

How I use to work is to add an overlay in portage with my own stuff or even stuff that is in portage and where I want to have own control of versioning. Then I deal with everything using portage (emerge) and beside overlay management I never need to consider if this is an overlay or not. This is how I would like it.

If there is a way to manage packman and AUR in a decent way and there is a posibility to run KDE I will most likely give atrix a go.
I take full responsibility of my Linux systems - I just need some help from time to time.

Re: Moving to Atrix?

Reply #1 –
The position of Arch (and I presume, of Artix) on the AUR is that what you install from there is completely your responsibility. Meaning that there may creep in dependency issues, and you'll have to get things sorted with the maintainer of the package.

I use pacaur instead of pacman , since then, I can manage all my packages (repo & AUR) from one tool. It is very convenient.

Quote from: Erik R – on
How I use to work is to add an overlay in portage with my own stuff or even stuff that is in portage and where I want to have own control of versioning. Then I deal with everything using portage (emerge) and beside overlay management I never need to consider if this is an overlay or not. This is how I would like it.

You'll have to elucidate if you want non-Gentoo users to understand what it is that you want; I don't know what an overlay is. There is no easy 'version-control' in Arch. You could set pacman to ignore updates to specific packages, but that again will be on you, and isn't a supported system state.

Re: Moving to Atrix?

Reply #2 –
Hi Erik, welcome to Artix.

You can do the same as you do with your overlays, you just create a directory in your machine where you have a tree of packages (directories with PKGBUILD files and whatever other thing that you need) and you just maintain it. Then you can compile those packages using makepkg tool and add them to a custom repo using repo-add, then you just add that repo to your pacman.conf file.

For example I have this in my pacman.conf
Code: [Select]
[galaxy-damnlinux]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = file:///home/damnwidget/artools-workspace/repos/galaxy-damnlinux/os/x86_64

That repo is filed with things that I need to have packaged because I use them in my work (related with big data mainly) and I can't rely on AUR because AUR relies in systemd but we use OpenRC so I need to add init.d and conf.d scripts to it.

Re: Moving to Artix?

Reply #3 –
spelling no tinstalled yet, sorry!

@physkets you learned a new word. Thanks for that ;)


Simplified about Gentoo; in Gentoo everything is like AUR - you have scripts that fetches source code, builds it and installs it. There are no pre-compiled packages in gentoo (well, there are a few like libreoffice that takes 60 minutes on 8x4.7 GHz AMD cores to build). All build-scripts are stored in a tree normally refered to as portage.

An overlay is just an extra tree that may or may not be official. I have published one for one of the two professinal Digital Audio Workstations available for Linux; Bitwig Studio. It is now maintained by another dude. There are a load of others and some of them are bleeding edge up stream versions before they are incorporated in the official portage.

The nice thing with the gentoo setup is that while you can have several sources of package-recepie-trees with or without support, you are always using the very same tool (emerge) to execute the scripts (i.e. fetch, build and install).  Once you decided to use an overlay you don't have to bother about it being an overlay.

The thing is that in Gentoo I am most always responsible, at least to some extent. I create my own setting of dependencies both on a generic an per package scale using USE-flags. I can decide to have or not to have support for MP3, AAC, JPEG, PNG etc etc. Some of them is expected to be there running KDE but I can decide not to support them om my server - no need for PNG in a terminal. I can decide to have PNG support everywhere but in GIMP if I like (just as example).

One side of being a Gentoo user is that you are acustomed to make a lot of choises and are able to FOBAR your system to oblivion. I have tried that too ;) And managed to fix it and learned a lot along the way. Nowadays I always work with btrfs snapshots when updating my system - I know that there might be a complicated compilation or dependency problem and I might not be able to complete  the update this particular day but ends up in a partly upgraded system that fails to boot or where the DM won't work. In some cases portage/emerge didn't work (upgrade of XML library used a few years ago was very tricky).

And there is no installer, only a proceedure to make it in a chrooted envrionment.

One of the nice things with Gentoo is that even though I need to do a lot myself, there is always a wiki-pake helping out. Gentoo is in parity with Arch with respect to wiki-pages. Wiki is gold. Wiki is king! Also, Gentoo is using OpenRC as default and I am a happy OpenRC user since a very long time. And are planing to stay that way.

I have now installed Artix 3 times. First I tried on my desktop computer and messed things up with Nvidia-problems. Then I installed it on my laptop with Intel graphics and it worked like a charm.

Lastly I reinstalled on the desktop computer. This time I unpacked the squashfs-es from the base ISO and performed the entire installation in a chrooted environemnt. If you ever need an up to date nvidia driver (due to the hardware), you must select the non-nvidia option when selecting lib-whatever-it-was when doing basestrap. That was where I wnet wrong. The rest of the installation was just much faster than I am used to but worked in a similar manner.

I think I am hooked on Artix already. Just need to examine the overlayish trick from @damnwidget :) Thanks for the hint.

Next step is to rsync the installatoin from the laptop to my other laptop and I am all Artix. To the fellows that bosted Artix, I must say that it now works much better than how I experienced both Manjaro and Arch openRC using Architect-something earlier this spring (I think). This time it played my song ;) Thanks for a nice OpenRC option!

I take full responsibility of my Linux systems - I just need some help from time to time.

Re: Moving to Artix?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: damnwidget – on
Hi Erik, welcome to Artix.

You can do the same as you do with your overlays, you just create a directory in your machine where you have a tree of packages (directories with PKGBUILD files and whatever other thing that you need) and you just maintain it. Then you can compile those packages using makepkg tool and add them to a custom repo using repo-add, then you just add that repo to your pacman.conf file.

For example I have this in my pacman.conf
Code: [Select]
[galaxy-damnlinux]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = file:///home/damnwidget/artools-workspace/repos/galaxy-damnlinux/os/x86_64

That repo is filed with things that I need to have packaged because I use them in my work (related with big data mainly) and I can't rely on AUR because AUR relies in systemd but we use OpenRC so I need to add init.d and conf.d scripts to it.

You go to the trouble of making those packages?  How do you do that?  I would love to  get my whole mod_perl/Apache/Perl stack into such a package.