Interesting new distro

[viking777]

Here is a fascinating new project that is really brand new, I don't think anyone has mentioned it on this forum before, but you know how bad the forum search is, so they might have!

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=manjaro

Think of an LMDE like rolling distro with all codecs pre installed, but based on Arch Linux instead of Debian - whet your appetite? It did mine, I already have it installed. Forget what they say about being an 'intuitive' installer - if you find cfdisk and nano intuitive then maybe, otherwise, no It is Xfce based but also has Cinnamon, gnome-shell and KDE options. It is fully compatible with Arch, so anything they have on their repos you can install on this. Of course you will probably have to learn a new skill - like pacman syntax, but you won't have to learn it straight away as it comes with a gui package manager and updater.

One very interesting feature of the live cd is that it offers the option to run in live mode with proprietary video drivers - and it works to. This is really handy for those of us with dual monitor setups that are not handled well by nouveau, you can really test how the installed version will perform for once (without extra installations onto a live system).

I don't consider it all that stable yet, for example it wouldn't install grub for me, I had to do it manually, but the way I boot is a little strange . It also has conky preinstalled but I can't for the life of me get it onto the primary monitor yet, but it's still early days.

If you fancy a real change of scene and don't mind working a few things out for yourself then this is well worth a look.

Arch Linux without the "Arch Way" YAY!! Not before time.

[animaguy]

Very interesting post.

The three main distros I like to use are:

Arch - customization
CentOS - server
Mint - ease of use/user friendly

I may try Gentoo and Debian

Manjaro may be worth it too.

Can Arch or Manjaro operate a web server?

[viking777]

Probably.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LAMP

[GeneC]

Hey Viking..

Thanks for that. A user friendly ARCH...
I am going to give it a spin..

[DrHu]

I quite like the Arch forums, lots of good advice there

I'll have a look at that distribution, because it offers (I think) an install of the binary driver Intel or NVIDIA during installation?
--even though that is only a minor inconvenience and I can easily install the correct Nvidia driver from the source file.

Any Linux could operate as a web server (desktop or Server OS versions)
--the main difference for a pure web server application being the reduction of desktop services: not needed when running a server as a server

[GeneC]

Posting this from Manjaro XFCE 64 bit live CD...
Very nice.
Big surprise loading the live CD. I was given the option to use non-free video driver. I choose yes, and it loaded to find Nvidia 304.37 running from the live CD.. That is a first.
Nice conky by default.
It uses package manger for software.
Synaptic can't be found.
Apt doesn't seem installed either...

Code: Select all

[manjaro@manjaro ~]$ sudo apt-get install synaptic
sudo: apt-get: command not found


Things appear to be handeled a bit different than I am used to..
Will take a look at the KDE version when I get a chance.

[animaguy]

Any Linux could operate as a web server (desktop or Server OS versions)
--the main difference for a pure web server application being the reduction of desktop services: not needed when running a server as a server

Really?

I didn't know that. So any linux pro can use any Linux distro to run a pure webserver or combination webserver/desktop?

[zerozero]

and now you unveiled the secret, viking
been following this distro for long (since the pre-Philip Muller era) and is now an interesting project (like it was back then) but with a few less rough edges)
philm was one of the lead devs of chakra, left a few months ago and joined this project that until then was xfce-centric but was almost stopped: the existing iso was broken (too many updates and changes in one go- sounds familiar? )and there was some difficulties to bring a new one up.

in a way philm changed that and broadened the options inside the team.

since april/may i tried the xfce and the kde respins a couple times and they are definitely in the right way; i don't "know" the other team leaders but with philm involved you can expect cutting-edge.

Gene Manjaro uses pacman https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman
sudo pacman -Syy updates the system
sudo pacman -Syu upgrades the system
sudo pacman -S <packagename> installs

[GeneC]

Thanks for the link....'zz'.
Will have to investigate further. Time to learn something new. I think its time I give KDE a fair go. The XFCE version looked good, but I already have several XFCE installs.
Definitely looks interesting.
Leaning to live without 'synaptic' or 'apt-get' looks to open a whole new learning curve.....

[zerozero]

Thanks for the link....'zz'.
[...] I think its time I give KDE a fair go. [...]

ohh you are welcome and please yes do try kde for real, i believe your hardware can handle it

Leaning to live without 'synaptic' or 'apt-get' looks to open a whole new learning curve.....

using pacman for almost 2 years now and there's one feature i wish apt had: downgrades;
in all the rest they are similar package managers: you install and remove packages and dependencies and update/upgrade the system, just the syntax is different;
but downgrades (and handled in a such elegant way) yeahh i miss in apt

[GeneC]

This post is from Manjaro KDE 64bit live iso....
Had to burn a DVD. Could not get 'Unetbootin' to work on this iso.
Going install this tomorrow. Time to learn more about KDE and 'pacman'...

[viking777]

Sorry zz, I didn't know it was your secret

I am having a few problems with it at the moment (it keeps resetting the primary monitor to my laptop instead of my large monitor every time I restart, I change it back with nvidia-settings (as root) and write out to xorg.conf, but the settings don't stick). Also I used the Xfce desktop for a couple of hours and it nearly drove me insane. I have got Cinnamon on it now which is way, way better.

Also I tried a couple of program installs from the Arch Aur system and neither of them worked although both packages I tried were a bit out of date so that may be why.

All in all though a very interesting distro which I will keep revisiting when time permits to see if I can knock it into shape.

Edit. In case anyone is interested I solved the monitor mix up. You can't save xorg.conf to /etc/X11 like everyone else does, that isn't the Arch way, you have to save the output of nvidia-settings to /etc/X11/mhwd.d/nvidia.conf (which means you have to rename it as well)!!

[Adelante]

I would like to try this, but with every Arch-based distro I try, I am stymied at install. I get quite panicky, all of a sudden confronted with a question or direction I can't seem to respond to correctly, no matter what I do.

Bridge Linux is supposed to be an easier one to install, user-friendly and looks nice. I don't remember where I went wrong with that one, but I never did get an installed system.

But I am determined to somehow, someday experience an Arch-based system, so I'll give Manjaro a shot. Thank you, viking777.

Animaguy, a very nice Gentoo-based distro is Sabayon 9 KDE. I like it a lot. It wasn't a difficult shift at all.

[nomko]

looks interesting.... ill try it using virtualbox.

[claudecat]

I've tried both Manjaro and Bridge, and they are both pretty nice. Manjaro comes with more firmware (broadcom wireless for example) and uses its own repos that are NOT as up to date as regular Arch. Bridge brings less of its own polish to the table but hews closer to its parent. I settled on keeping Manjaro around for a bit, and I'll maybe experiment with changing to an Arch mirror.

I like that we're starting to see more Arch based distros. It really is a fine system that could be much more prevalent if somone could tame the install hurdles and come up with a decent and reliable gui for pacman. Perhaps in time one of these two distros (my money's on Manjaro) can be to Arch what Ubuntu is/was to Debian.

update: Ok, setting the mirrors to Arch and editing pacman.conf to Arch defaults breaks the system (boots to cli after replacing all packages with Arch versions). Probably fixable, but the point is, Manjaro is its own distro - not an easy way to install Arch proper. Bridge is more appropriate for that purpose.

[abnvolk]

Another "user-friendly" Arch distro is Cinnarch. It only has Cinnamon
But the installer is CLI, and because it is netinstall, it took way to long to download packages (Internet connection in developing countries are very slow), and somehow it failed to install GRUB.
So now I'm back to Mint

[viking777]

I've tried both Manjaro and Bridge, and they are both pretty nice. Manjaro comes with more firmware (broadcom wireless for example) and uses its own repos that are NOT as up to date as regular Arch. Bridge brings less of its own polish to the table but hews closer to its parent. I settled on keeping Manjaro around for a bit, and I'll maybe experiment with changing to an Arch mirror.

I like that we're starting to see more Arch based distros. It really is a fine system that could be much more prevalent if somone could tame the install hurdles and come up with a decent and reliable gui for pacman. Perhaps in time one of these two distros (my money's on Manjaro) can be to Arch what Ubuntu is/was to Debian.

update: Ok, setting the mirrors to Arch and editing pacman.conf to Arch defaults breaks the system (boots to cli after replacing all packages with Arch versions). Probably fixable, but the point is, Manjaro is its own distro - not an easy way to install Arch proper. Bridge is more appropriate for that purpose.

That is interesting claudecat, I was a bit frustrated with the lack of packages available so I did the same as you and my system is still OK. I first used the Reflector command to update the mirror list ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Reflector ) then added back the nearest manjaro mirror from the mirrorlist backup, updated the system and got 250 Mb of updates. I did have a few packages that won't update due to conflicts (mostly language packs that I don't want anyway) and the other strange thing that happened is that it added another user to the login screen - git aur user - or something like that. I think I might delete that later. On reflection though it wasn't really worth doing. The lack of packages is better addressed by using the AUR repo. Although some of it is out of date and won't work it does have a lot in it, it is a bit like ppa's in Ubuntu. The only problem with it is that it is a tiresome process, so I found 'Packer' which makes the process a lot easier -
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Aur_helpers

Edit. I think I can definitely say that this wasn't worth it now, the upgrades I did have broken iptables. I am behind my router firewall now, but this is a laptop and it doesn't always stay at home so a broken iptables is not a good idea. There is a bug about it here http://bugzilla.netfilter.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774#c13 that says it was fixed about a week ago, but obviously not for me. It definitely worked before I messed with the sources and upgraded.

Edit2. That was easily solved, I just downgraded to an earlier version ( http://arm.konnichi.com/search/ ) and iptables is back again. I appreciate what zerozero said about this function in his earlier post - excellent. I have got just about everything I need on Manjaro now, and the only thing I have had to install from source is qt4-fsarchiver (it has a package in Aur, but it is broken). I could get to like this.

[claudecat]

@ viking -

Interesting - I guess my mistake was getting rid of the manjaro mirrors entirely and upgrading all the manjaro packages with the arch versions (purely as an experiment). That it didn't work cleanly tells me that manjaro really isn't meant to be trifled with in this admittedly drastic way, and as such, is not "fully" arch-compatible. It is a nice distro though. I've since gone back to playing with bridge-kde, which I really like a lot, if only because it acts just like vanilla arch - with which I am quite familiar.

[viking777]

After a few experiments of my own I more or less came to the same conclusion about Manjaro, adding the Arch repos did introduce instabilities, had to hold packages back etc, so I decided to go back to the Manjaro only repos. Also installing Cinnamon was a failure in many respects too, so I have had to revert back to Xfce, but with those two adjustments I have been able to install most programs that I would normally use on a Debian based distro (all bar one actually), so for me at the moment this is a 'keeper', I like it.

[ringo32]

i do step over on manjaro, i had used lmde , i love xfce and manjaro to, only in some AUR package is some rubbish some works some not.., i did need beid , belgium ID and i could get it, i know the package kit (gnome packekit) in the next version it removes so i gona learn the pacman way but i confident that they place a new one, the repository is maintained.. so, why should you take te testing repository or take the arch repository when the stable repository are maintained? last week i had manjaro the first time put kde on it, trying the xfapplet, but was not a suc6 but wasnt the important thing main xfce menu is ok.. i could use cardapio..., from aur not a mate-desktop option..., mate-desktop would be dificult some depences.., but stil, repository is goed why should you take alien repo? on LMDE during to long to a fresh repository , my chromium is 22, when even google-chrome on 22 is on lmde older,

works fine so better stay not and build it in my hard by by Mint, it´s a mint from de Arch way

Nice..... mayby when lmde goes in the right way mayby going back....,

ADVICE for LMDE ! maintain LMDE not as a second hands distro!, just build lmde on unstable repository.. and and through own Alpha/testing repository can build a own Stable repository... and you can ubuntu say goodby
Mint is big enough to have a new challange... lmde could be a user friendly os with the Alpha import repsitory and testing would stable more stable, update package is good way but maintain the Distro! you could me a different repo for the software and a different for the OS ..