The Arch Way

Roughly four years ago, I learned about the concept of linux, and fell in love with the idea of an operating system designed and distributed by its community. After a weekend of research, I learned a little about how it worked. That being said, I was a senior in high school, and was definitely no computer genious. Actually, the whole idea of installing another operating system on my machine was a little more than daunting. Still, I had essentially found three stable distributions to choose from: Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Then and now, Ubuntu dominated the scene. It offered ease of use and installation, flexibility, and a wonderful community perfectly willing to help new users. Fedora, to me, was the least interesting of the trio, though it sported a cool name and design, I simply did not understand it's benefits over Ubuntu. Arch, though, was special. After browsing the wiki, I came across a page comparing it to other distributions, which lead me to another page detailing The Arch Way. At the time, I had no idea what I was getting into, but I knew one thing: Arch was the distribution for me. 

I decided to install Arch on my system the next weekend and fumbled around Windows for a week creating back-ups and burning installation disks. Admittedly, this was challenging for me back then, but I managed to get it done by following a few online guides. When the weekend came, I was ready for what I thought would be an easy installation, so I popped the disk in Friday afternoon, expecting to be ready to use my system by the next morning. I could not have been more wrong. 

When the installation media booted, I read the phrase "Archiso login: _" and thought what any other Windows user would have thought, "Oh. My disk must not have burned appropriately. This must be some sort of error." I took the time to burn another disk and found the same "error," as I thought it was. This time, though, I looked it up and found the wonderfully well-documented beginner's guide, and managed to move through the installation. Unfortunately, it took me a few hours to realize I was simply supposed to type in the word "root," which a foreign concept to me at the time. After that, I was greeted with the following prompt:

Then it hit me: I was in for a long, long weekend. Due to a difficult wireless card and some writing errors, the installation took me the entire weekend. After the first sleepless night, I began to wonder if my machine was the somewhat mystical "kerosene-powered cheese grater" the installation media was referring to. The only problem was that I was already consulting http://wiki.archlinux.org! Even though I had always had blue eyes, I swore that the blue installation screen had burned into my irises still. At the end of the weekend, my wireless card was still not working, and I reverted back to Windows Vista. After working so hard for so long, I felt hopelessly depressed about the entire endeavor for the next month, but eventually got back on the horse (or penguin, I should say) and tried it again. This time, I breezed through the installation and managed to fix my wireless card after only a few hours of suffering. 

In the next few hours, I had openbox installed and found myself desirable tint2 and conky configurations. My system has not changed much since then. Even after changing computers, I kept the UI constant. That being said, I have decided to name this blog after the kerosene-powered cheese grater referred to in the now outdated Arch installation media, but because the entire item can be a bit of a mouthful, I shortened it to KeroCG.

That being said, I am currently a junior undergraduate physics major at my university and intend to attend graduate school in two years (or so). In my spare time, I study neurophysics and neurotechnology, and would like to use this blog as a place to post any interesting linux or technology-related tidbits of my own along with a few other ideas that might or might not be nerdy enough to pique your interests. 

Thanks for reading,

-Leios