Distros again

Well, I had a bad experience with two distros today: Arch Linux, and Ubuntu.

Arch: tried the FTP-based install for 2007.05 "Duke" x86_64 - my home ADSL connection must have been a bit choppy or something; I'd have to kill the downloader, restart it, several times, to get that 100mb of base system down. Then it choked when I tried to go through post-install config; they have you edit /etc/rc.conf, which is their startup configuration script (only one, not like the whole family you get with Slackware). The most important thing in there is the network config, which I even had to edit during install. (Comments explain everything, by the way). What's more, vim started crashing when the target file did not yet exist; the installer was supposed to throw the common settings version of each into your new tree, but that didn't happen quite right, and vim says "/mnt/etc/rc.conf [new DIRECTORY]" or something wrong like that. Then I decided to skip the rest of the config files and set a root password to reboot the thing. Bad idea. I got a screenful of the same error, from chroot, that there was no passwd command. Had to CTRL+C that one, and when I ran the installer again, it kindly formatted my target partition. End of story.

Ubuntu's installer has always been on my nerves. This time on my desktop, I had to change a kernel boot parameter, adding "noapic" because the thing fell apart after 3 lines of kernel messages. So I got the graphic bar running back and forth for a long time... and then it just stopped moving. With no hard drive activity and no way to tell if anything was going on, I hit the little reset button and ejected the CD. End of story.

Sorry, folks, Slackware is my OS.

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)