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Old 10-01-2007, 08:16 PM   #79
mrjwalsh
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Join Date: Aug 2007
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no it uses it's own packages and a program called pacman. Arch packages can be easliy built by anyone though as all they are are the source file and two additional files that modify the installation process.

Pacman allows single command update of the machine and Arch is a rolling release distro; that is you never need to reinstall a new version, once a new kernel and packages come out of the testing repo you can update your distro to a new version; it's a really simple and clever way to do it. The only downside is that you'll need a good internet connection as things are always being updated; but you can always just wait like 3 months before running an update; why update when things are good and stable?\

There are tons of packages and any obscure ones will probably be in the community package repo where users maintain and build their own and share to the public.

Also because the distro initially only installs the base components (about 50 packages to get the machine running) you can add any frontend you want. Gnome? KDE? E17? Openbox? etc etc.
It just means that you control distro bloat and because your adding things to it you'll know exactly whats running in the background. When I use to run SuSE a 'base' install would have about 200 processes running in the background that I didn't even need; this ain't Windows!

Anyways hope I've shed some light.
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