Installing Arch Linux. Part 2

This is the 2nd part of the how-to guide for Arch Linux installation. Please click here for the 1st part.

Now we are finally booted into our Arch Linux computer! At this point we can install some basic packages. I will install PulseAudio and alsa-utils by entering

sudo pacman -S alsa-utils pulseaudio

Installing Arch Linux. Part 1

Arch Linux is often rather challenging or scary when it comes to a newbie's first Linux experience. Some reasons you may want to go with Arch would be the Pacman package handler, or the fact that it comes with no bloat software that will allow you to truly make it your own. In the installation process, there is no GUI or "Press Next to Continue" to hold your hand. This usually drives people away. I also found the forums to have lots of impatient people who expect you to magically know what you're doing. Here I will try to provide an in depth guide on how to install and setup your own Arch Linux computer.

Ubuntu MATE 16.04: there is always room for improvement

Linux bloggers have plenty of topics to write about every 6 months. These are release cycles for Ubuntu and Fedora families. Canonical and RedHat give us an opportunity to write reviews of their operating systems often enough to keep the blogs going. Many derivatives of these distributions add to the pot.

I have written three articles about Xubuntu 16.04 recently, and I am sure that there are plenty reviews of Ubuntu 16.04. But there are some other parts of that family that should be covered, should they not? Which one would I write about? That was not a question for me for one simple reason.

You know that the commercial arm of this blog sells disks with Linux distributions via BuyLinuxCDs.co.uk site, helped by eBay sales. Users could purchase their own disks with different flavours of Ubuntu as I announced. Would you guess which Ubuntu flavour got most of the orders? Of course, the majority of the orders were for Ubuntu 16.04 itself. The second place was not taken by Kubuntu or Xubuntu as many would guess. It was taken by Ubuntu MATE.

What is Ubuntu MATE? Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu GNOME are the latest additions to the Ubuntu family, added when Canonical decided to release official flavours of their operating system with "new generation" desktop environments. This is not a very precise definition since MATE is a fork of "good ol'" GNOME 2 desktop environment, while GNOME 3 is used in Ubuntu GNOME. But let's put the definitions aside.

The ISO image of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 32-bit is about 1.6 Gb in size. I downloaded it using the torrent, though you can get it from one of many official mirrors too. The image is written to the DVD-R prepared for one of my customers. The disk is in the DVD-ROM of my Toshiba laptop.

Reboot. Choose to boot from DVD. Fasten your seatbelts. Let's go!

ROSA Desktop Fresh R7 KDE: nothing to complain... almost

Mandriva was one of the most famous names in the Linux world just a few years ago. Unfortunately, the company behind that Linux distribution had some difficulties that inevitably created issues for the project.

Mandriva Linux also became a base for several offsprings, derivatives, and forks.

Even though the Mandriva project is no longer in its famous state, derivatives still continue their existence. The most famous of them is, of course, Mageia. I used to use Mageia versions 1 through to 5 for some time until I migrated to Ubuntu-based distributions because of some 3rd-party dependencies.

ROSA is a Linux distribution that was also forked from Mandriva some time ago. I reviewed it back in 2012, when ROSA Marathon 2012 was released.

Since then, ROSA released few more versions and the most recent of them is ROSA Desktop Fresh R7. It has been available since January 2016. Unfortunately, only the KDE version is listed on the official Download page, although a GNOME version is also available. You can download this distribution either from the Download section of the ROSA web site or via torrent. I would recommend to use this link to see all the download options you have. If you don't want to bother with downloading and making the disk, you can order one from the BuyLinuxCDs site.

The ISO image of the KDE versions of ROSA Desktop Fresh R7 is 1.9 Gb in size. I burnt it to my USB stick.

The USB stick is in the port of my Toshiba laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!