Cinnarch 64 bit, Installation Review

Howdy folks, this is FiftyOneFifty, and today I wanted to talk about my experiences installing the 64 bit version of Cinnarch net edition on a dual core notebook. Cinnarch of course is a relatively new Arch based distro running the Cinnamon fork of Gnome. I had previously installed Arch proper on this notebook, but when I rebooted to the hard drive, I lost the Ethernet connection. This is not uncommon, but there the notebook sat while until I had time to work the problem. I wanted to start using the notebook, and I'd heard good things about Cinnarch, so it seemed like a simple solution. I went into knowing Cinnarch was in alpha, so i shouldn't have been surprised when an update broke the system less then a week after the install, but that comes later in my story.

1. Installation notes

   1. Three big buttons "Try It", i.e. Use the live CD, "CLI Installer", "Graphical Installer"

      1. Graphical Installer – Either not finished or unavailable for my hardware

      2. If network is connected, CLI installer runs an update and asks you to restart the installer.

         1. Go to the Menu, type "install" into the search field, pick "Cinnarch Installer CLI"

   2. The first installer item is "0 Set Language and Keyboard"

      1. First decision the installer will have to make is to choose a local -- Most U.S. Users will want to pick en_US.UTF-8

         1. This question may be unfamiliar to users will who have never installed Arch before, I recommend they have the Arch Wiki Beginners Guide Handy - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide

      2. When asked to pick a Kemap, again most U.S. users will want – us.map.gz

   3. 1 Set Time and Date

      1. Timezone pretty straight forward, region, then a city in your timezone

      2. Make sure you are connected to a network if you want to use NTP

   4. 2 Prepare Hard Drive

      1. Partitions were already set up, so I just set filesystem mountpoints

         1. Couldn't enter partition configuration without erasing my existing partitions, but it looks like it's menu driven (i.e., I don't think you have to use gdisk or cfdisk)

         2. Prompted to associate a mount point with an existing partition -- installer takes a while to detect existing partitions

            • I replaced the stock drive on the notebook with an SSD and boosted the memory, so I created no swap partition.

            • I assigned / to /dev/sda2 and had it formatted to Ext4 (gdisk reserves /dev/sda1 for housekeeping)

            • "Select any additional file partitions to mount under your new root"

              • Pick and unassigned partition (/dev/sda3) [is the installation media]

                • Enter the mount point (i.e. "/home")

Postinstall:

As I understand it, the login screen consists of a modified Unity Greeter over LightDM. I believe an update went awry and made the login revert back to standard Unity Greeter. I cannot imagine how the previous day's installs (Crossover, wget, and rsync) could have effected the login screen. I can get to a command prompt if I edit my failback Grub menu option. To do this, I select the failback when the Grub menu comes on scree and hit 'e', this will give me an editing screen. Then I look for the option "quiet" at the end of the line that begins "linux". I delete "quiet", replace it with "single" and hit <F10> (the change is not persistent, I have to do this every time you log in). When prompted, I type me root password and then I am in single user command line mode. To connect to the Internet:

# ip link set eth0 up

# ip addr add <ip address>/<subnetmask> dev <interface>

example: # ip addr add 192.168.1.2/24 dev eth0

# ip route add default via <your_routers_ip_address>

# nano /etc/resolv.conf

             nameserver <your_routers_ip_address>
[My router's IP was already in there, so I probably need to configure it to receive DNS from the DHCP server once I get it working]
   # pacman -R lightdm-ubuntu lightdm-unity-greeter  
          (recommendation from MrBios on #cinnarch) 
  # yaourt -Syua lightdm
              (trying the most minimal desktop manager I could load)
The installation told me I should install lightdm-gtk-greeter, so I did that too.  Now I get mouse pointer that flashes a few times and gives way to a blank screen with a cursor.  Tomorrow, I'll see if i can't get help on the Cinnarch forums.  If they can't help me figure it out, you may hear me review Manjaro or Parobola. 
[yauort is a wrapper for pacman that includes the AUR (you have to wait for my episode, "So I've Installed Arch, Now What {an Arch newbie perspective}" to find our what the AUR is. The arguments '-Syua' update all repositories and upgrade all packages before proceeding 
with installing a new package.
BTW, if you do something silly, like let the battery die in the middle of installing a package, you will need to do 'rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck' to unlock pacman and yaourt. 

Post-post-installation

OK, I think I know what I did. Before final editing on this piece, I caught part of a conversation on #oggcastplanet in IRC which I asked artv61 to clarify. He affirmed that it was common knowledge among Arch users that using yaourt for system updates invites breakage (remember how enthusiastic I was that I could update the system and install new software all in one command; don't worry, you can do something similar with pacman).

Rants and information:

• Why do people who post files for download (such as software packages and ISOs) feel the need to obfuscate the link behind some kind of script? SourceForge is particularly bad about this. Does it give the host site some added layer of security? I ask because with my rural connection, I always use wget or a torrent to download large binaries like ISO files, and wget works best with a simple direct link. DownThemAll is great, but a large binary is always broken if the connection is interrupted during the download, which is often the case on an ISO that takes several hours (even more than a day on a large DVD ISO) to download, but wget with the '-c' (continue) parameter never fails, even on files DTA says can't be paused and resumed.

• http://www.geekwire.com/2012/microsoft-diskinect-freeloading-tv-viewers/ To summarize, Microsoft has applied for a patent to allow them to use the camera on devices like the Kinect to determine how many people are in the room while a streaming (I presume) movie is playing, in order to charge us more per viewer, stop the video until people leave the room, or block the play of explicit movies if the software determines some of the viewers might be children. We know from the 3D images generated with third party software, the Kinect camera is capable of recording normal video. Even if Microsoft assures the public no images will be transmitted back over the Internet, with the closed nature of their products, we can never be certain their software hasn't been exploited by hackers or by their own employees (the precedent being a few years back when there was a concern the the anti theft software on school supplied laptops could be used to spy on students in their own homes). If law enforcement can compel ISPs to provide your personal information, do we really think the police will be able to resist asking for access to a surveillance camera in a house they are about to enter? If there is no consumer outcry against this practice, how long until every media consumption device has a camera looking back at you? This is the old paranoid anxiety that the government is watching us from inside our televisions brought to fruition.

• By the time you hear this, either we will have a comfortable buffer of new shows in the HPR queue, or we will be desperately close to canceling the show. It's up to you, dear listener. If you have ever considered contributing your own episode to Hacker Public Radio, there has never been a better time to take action and post a show.

• If you sometimes lose you open tabs when launching FireFox, try the Session Manager add-on. Thanks Ehtyar for the tip.

Removing live configuration (packages)