Hello Mike,

On Sat Dec 02 2017 00:52:26, Mike Miller wrote to Nicholas Boel:

 MM>  I'm running into one of those stupid emerge issues right now on my
 MM> devbox. too many things unmasked and it doesn't want to update
 MM> properly.  Meanwhile I can just "yum -y update" on my BBS machine
 MM> without worrying that it's going to break.

Yeah, those were a pain tracking down the problem too! I honestly can't say
that I miss it one bit, really. While the idea is nice, I'd now rather wait for
the time to try an LFS build if I'm going to go back to compiling everything.

 MM>  "You built a new computer, throw Gentoo on the old one" I said. "It's
 MM> got a fast CPU, Gentoo will work great!" I insisted. "You'll keep it
 MM> up to date, just emerge once every few days or so!" I thought.

 MM> Yeah...

HAHA. But sometimes that "once every few days" overlap each other when you have
to compile for 8 hours (so you walk away), come back 12 hours later and the
compile broke somewhere, so you have to track it down and recompile everything
that didn't compile all over again. Yikes, as I said I don't miss it. lol

 NB>> Now I run the BBS on Arch and update whenever I feel like it.
 NB>> Takes no time at all and everything has been surprisingly stable
 NB>> for a few years now.

 MM> I tried to toss Arch on my laptop at one point, and I just couldn't
 MM> get it to run right. It booted, but X wouldn't come up, and I didn't
 MM> want to do Gentoo-levels of tinkering with it to make it work, so I
 MM> gave up.  I think I'm too old to learn a new distro...

So you tried installing X after you rebooted into it the first time? Arch
doesn't come with X preinstalled. The best instructions are on the wiki. I
think it's as simple as:

pacman -S xorg 

Then if you want to use 'startx' you'd have to install xorg-xinit as it doesn't
come with the base xorg packages. Same goes for something like xdg, gdm, kdm,
etc if you want a graphical login.

That aside, if you're looking for an Arch-based distro that comes with all the
extras, you could try Manjaro or Antergos. I gave Manjaro a looksee in a VM and
it was great. Definitely a nice usable desktop OS. I just have no need for X so
I stick with Arch itself these days. My main desktop is Windows 10, mainly
because of gaming. I just use Putty or VMWare's detachable console program to
access my Linux servers.

Regards,
Nick

... "Не знаю. Я здесь только работаю."
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20170303