On 03/15/2010 01:19 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
Hello, I've been using various Linux distros for a while now. I just
decided to give Arch Linux a try. But I'm a little bit lost. I'm used to
distros like Xubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenSuSE, etc... Where I don't need to
personally understand what order I need to install which packages to get
at least one GUI desktop up& running...
The install itself went ok. But I needed to add a few things.
First I used the list of typical tasks for pacman from the installation
guide, to figure out how to look for a package and install it with pacman.
I installed mc and vim without a problem. Then I thought it would be nice
if I could get a desktop up. I did a:
pacman -Si xfce|less
and looked for a package that might get me to a minimal desktop I could work with.
I thought maybe xfdesktop...
pacman -S xfdesktop
It wanted (I think) 26 packages to satisfy the dependencies... Sounded low
to me but what do I know? I figured the next step would be to ask for help
(or a good step by step how-to) But sooner or later I was going to want
xfce so I said yes...
I didn't get any errors until the last package (xfdesktop itself) Then there was
an error with a line number (oops I didn't write it down) And I think something
about gtk& icons, (something not existing...)<sigh> {If I'd figured out
how to activate GPM I'd have pasted the error into a text file so that I
could accurately report what it said.}
When pacman reports an error, listing just one line number like that,
does it stop processing. Or does the fact that there was only one error
(about icons I think) mean that everything else in the package installed
successfully???
More to the point: Will I need to figure out how to uninstall xfdesktop to resolve
the error?
Could some nice Arch user point me at enough step by step instructions so
that I can get enough of a gui up to use a browser like firefox so I can
try to find solutions via the web while Arch is actually running???
Please!
Have you read the beginners guide? It's a great help for times like
these, I'll post it below. Well what you wanna do now is to install the
xorg group (pacman -S xorg) then the xfce group (pacman -S xfce4). Then
move the .xinitrc file to your home folder (cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc/
/home/user/.xinitrc); edit this file to so that the line with startxfce4
is uncommented (in other words has a '#' in front of it. Finally, run
'startx'
But do read the beginners guide, it is a very nice page that details all
of these steps and more.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide
