There’s so much fun in computing lately, a nice refresher from an utterly boring scene. Ever since I got in touch with Arch, I’ve been spending some time with it, tweaking its every aspect and all, and some days ago I decided that this is the perfect OS for me. It’s lightweight and because I “built” it, I love it much like a pet, I even give it a name! Archangel. That’s quite overkill a name but hey, it’s cool. Following my total dedication to switch to Arch, here’s what happened (this is by no means a comprehensive list):
- For the 2nd time, I totally erased Windows from my PC. The first one was when I felt comfortable with openSUSE but then its gotten so big, slow, and bloated I reverted back to XP. Erasing XP is so much fun! Parted does its job well.
- Next, after rearranging partitions, it’s time to move Arch from sda2 to sda1. It’s super easy, given the portable and flexibility of linux. Since both uses ext3 (it will work with practically every fs that supports permission and journaling. No, it won’t work on NTFS! It sucks!), I just copy *everything* with permissions intact. Next, I edit fstab and grub’s menu.lst, then reinstall grub after chroot-ing to destination partition. Tada!
- Replace some apps with similar, simpler and faster ones. Firefox -> Swiftfox, Geany -> mEdit, mlocate -> rlocate, GDM -> SLiM, xf86-ati -> Catalyst, Quod Libet -> Sonata, and some other things.
- Compile a new kernel! Actually it’s still compiling now, since I just started it 3 minutes ago! That goes without saying. I’m currently using kernel26arch, stock from install cd, and now compiling kernel26zen-git. I haven’t been compiling any kernels since those good old Slackware days. It brings back memories of when I was young and Linux seems so interesting I dreamed about it.
Next things I’d like to do:
- Migrate to 64bit Arch
- Build a super-slim super-fast kernel optimized for my PC only, with support for selected apps only.
- Build a wireless home network
- Get a real job! Really, being a freelancer just doesn’t cut it (yet).
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