One Two Archlinux

Ok folks, so here’s the update. Today’s Tuesday and from Sunday afternoon evening to Monday day and evening, I got me some Linux installed on my Macbook.

The easy part: replacing the HDD with the new SSD. Putting in a new hard drive.

The time consuming parts: reinstalling software. Mac software. The live OSX Mavericks USB stick didn’t work. Put in the new drive, had to install 10.8 from the net, then I upgraded it to 10.9 Mavericks. Takes while. And of course need to put in settings too.

The hard(er) parts: installing Archlinux on this Mac. I must say, from what I recall. Its a lot easier to install Linux on a normal pc x86 piece of hardware. Then again thats mid 2000’s hardware. Who knows whats up with the secure boot stuff on Windows 8 PC’s nowadays. Currently I’ve gone through three tutorials and the archlinux wiki for installing arch on a macbook, and am in the midst of configuring things: a nice window manager or desktop environment and the wifi drivers–little did I know that after the install, it would take a command to get the dhcpd services running. Figures, its working on the install usb stick but not once you boot into the box.

Anyhow, why Archlinux. Why not Ubuntu? Cuz. Because when I ran Kubuntu for 1.5 years, I felt like I learned a bit when I installed the system, then I just dwelt in the land of the gui. But when I ran and installed Arch sometime back in 2008, editing rc.conf files (don’t think they use that particular file anymore), but yeah, configuration files, editing files with this thing called nano (I like to use me some Vi and Vim now :) ), I felt like I was learning and growing all three months.

Thats the goal folks. There’s a ton of stuff to learn, from the command line, bash, but also a bunch of other tools that are more standardized on Linux, and also a lot more up to date – e.g. bash and git on Linux are newer version. And if I’m going to be in a Linux environment, might as well learn it all the way, go hard core and learn it the archlinux way, with its spectacular wiki.

The skills here will translate to other things. Lol, forcing me to use Vim more for editing. No but seriously, learning the tools and environment that will translate to more Devops skills and usage.

Anyhow, I’m liking it. Just one small kick and turn at a time. Learning file systems, guids, sharing stuff, man…so many commands to learn and research. Fun stuffs :) .

JL