Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor. When I describe my own trading activities, it is not intended as advice or solicitation of any kind.

The Move To Arch - Index

Since I have posts about moving my primary desktop machine to Arch Linux scattered throughout the blog, and they really only make sense in sequence, I thought it might be a good idea to create this page to sort of tie it all together. Many of the pages below are chronological in nature, since dependencies for application X might have already been satisfied by installing application Y.

Font and text color key
Throughout this series, I did my best to follow a consistent pattern when showing what I was doing:

All commands are in dark plum Courier
$ Normal-user commands are preceded by a "$"
# Root-level commands are preceded by a "#"
Responses are in dark red Courier

All other prose is in the default font.

Preparation and Planning
  • Time For A Change - I explain my move from Ubuntu, and why I don't move lightly.
  • Why Arch Linux? - I describe how Arch Linux satisfies the needs described in the previous post.
  • VirtualBox - VirtualBox is like a safety net for me on this project. Here I explain how it works and how I use it.
  • An Application Survey - In order to make sure my key applications work on Arch/KDE, I first need to know what they are... and why.

System Installation
  • The Arch Installer - I finally start the installation of Arch, and play hard drive partitioning games.
  • X Windows and KDE - The command prompt at the end of the last post was not a huge triumph. This time I start mousing around.
  • The Arch User Repository - For those packages that aren't in the main repository, there is the AUR. I prep the Arch Build System and use it to get two of them.

Easy Applications
Except for Choqok and Okteta, these can all be found in a single post: The Easy Applications.
  • LibreOffice for word processing, etc.
  • Chromium for web surfing
  • Gimp for image editing
  • Audacity for sound editing
  • OpenShot for video editing
  • Wine for running Windows applications
  • Skype for VOIP
  • Netbeans for software development
  • Kopete for Instant Messaging
  • Choqok for Twitter
  • Okteta for Hex Editing (same link)

Not-As-Easy Applications
Stay tuned for more!