The Linux Society

I just thought it would be a good idea to have people explain what their favourite distro is and why they like it. It might be useful to new users so they can have a quick look for themselves. Kinda like distro watch but hopefully less formal.

Here goes mine

A lightweight and flexible linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

I switched from Fedora as it was just getting too big and bulky, I had no need of the thousands of packages and services it was running as default. I came across Arch Linux. I have to admit I had an issue with installation on my laptop as the normal install CD died when installing X, I can't remember exactly why and I don't think this is really an issue for most people. I just stuck in the Base Install CD and started with command line.

The documentation on the wiki is up to a standard that would almost compete with the gentoo wiki and help on #archlinux on Freenode has always solved problems.

The package manager is pacman which runs on .pkg.tar.gz files and the repositories, from what I can tell are updated frequently. The precompiled binaries aren't the only way to go, it's possible to build them in an almost gentoo style from /var/abs which contains a file structure that contains all the packages that archlinux has to offer and can be built and installed running

makepkg -i

there is a PKGBUILD in each directory that can be modified so the build suits anyones needs.
If for whatever reason the package you wish to install isn't in ABS, you can probably download the PKGBUILD file from the Archlinux User Repository and build it in another location (probably /var/abs/local)

It's also possible to get a pacman clone (yaourt) which not only connects to the normal pacman repositories but also downloads and builds AUR packages which makes the whole system portage-esque.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for the greenest of linux newbies, but I think anyone who is wanting to maybe get their hands a little more dirty than they would with ubuntu.
I have had Beryl working previously using fglrx currently have VirtualBox running with Windows XP, both fairly straight forward installs following guides.