Friday, August 7, 2009

Archlinux: (IMHO) the best Linux distribution ever!

After a long time spent with all major Linux distributions,
I finally found one that suits me the best: Archlinux.

I really like its minimalist approach and nice pakage management system.
Thr later combines the Debian-like pacman (install binaries)
with an option to install from sources (see ABS&AUR) as if they are natives!

Furthermore it has a huge and friendly community and lots of helpfull wiki.


Recently i made a mistake:
i tried updating pacman without dependencies: "pacman -Sd pacman"
(since i had other staff depending on pacman... and thought it's ok to do like this: PLEASE, DO NOT DO IT!!!). Although i got a newer pacman - its dependency on libfetch become broken,
rendering pacman defunct: "pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libfetch.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" :(((

The solution (due to http://forum.arch-linux.pl/viewtopic.php?pid=41076) is simple:
manually build libfetch (from ABS with makepkg -s)
copy libfetch.so into /usr/lib (this will resurrect pacman!!!)
force installation of libfetch (with "pacman -Sf libfetch", to fix the pakage database)

I hope this will help somebody...