Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mephisto]

I've got an old PC from around 2000 whose hard drive died. I bought a 180GB drive and stuck in it. As, obviously, the operating system (ME, *shudder*) was gone, I was wondering what to do with it. The obvious solution would be to install Linux. Most of the distributions that run on it are live cds where installing to the drive is not recommended by the developer. That's no good. I've got a new drive with plenty of space! I want to use it. So, I install Arch Linux. I'm already decent with the command line, so being dumped into one after the install was no problem. The install picked up my (also new) Linksys wireless NIC, so that was a plus. The problem? I can't contact the repos to get all of my updates. My school has this thing called PacketFence, where only devices with registered MAC addresses can get through. That wouldn't normally be a problem, except for one tiny little thing. I'm running a CLI, not a GUI, and there is no included text-based web browser.

I do the next logical choice and decide to manually search the repos for the required packages (mainly an X server, so I can install Firefox) and their dependencies (not fun). It turns out some of the dependencies weren't listed and I couldn't find some through my manual searching. The next logical step? Put my 320GB external drive to use and download the whole repo! It's in progress as we (or I) speak, so I'll edit this later if it works.

Just so this thing isn't totally useless, I guess I'll open my own repo as my computer is, effectively, a mirror of the archlinuxfr.org mirror.

Don't understand a word I just said?

[translation]
I installed an operating system. I couldn't access the internet. I wasted gigs of bandwidth getting the 20 megs of stuff required to give me that access.

[Dryn]

You poor soul

[Cthulhu]

Is it worth all that work to be able to smugly say, "I use linux"?

IS IT?!

[Gigalith]

Is it worth all that work to be able to smugly say, "I use linux"?

IS IT?!

Yes.

[Mephisto]

... Why did I put this in "Other Games?" *mumbles* That's the last time I post after midnight.

Is it worth all that work to be able to smugly say, "I use linux"?

IS IT?!

The answer to that is a resounding "YES!" I don't know why, but there's just something about installing 500 dependencies by hand that makes it all worthwhile.

Update: It's alive! After error messages left and right telling me to install dependencies I already installed, I got X and fluxbox running. After installing three browsers, I found one that would accept the bad certificate my school uses. It's now connected to the internet and doing a system update. I feel like I've actually accomplished something.

And the final count is in. 159 different packages installed by hand. I've now got three sheets of notebook paper with the list on them if I ever have to go through that crap again.

[Keiseth]

A man with your dedication to completing things can do anything.