The machine I want to try out ArchLinux on is an E-Machine:

466 MHz Celeron
256 MB Ram
Integrated Video & Audio
Linksys LNE100TX ver. 4 NIC
6 GB Maxtor HD

I'm unsure as to what exactly the video adapter is.. though I can probably find out... Will arch most likely detect what video module it needs??

I want to say that it's an ATI Mach64... I know it's only got like 4MB of ram... does that sound right??

P.S. - Also, how about running Arch on a notebook?? Idon't plan on it right now.. but if I really like it I may.. Is laptop detection decent? I have an HP pavillion ze5270: Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512MB DDR RAM, some ATI card that I can never get to work with anything other than VESA drivers.. Firewire, USB, DVD-CDRW Combo, 15.1" XGA, Synaptics Touchpad, etc..

Arch does not really have hardware detection. You install and get a base (cli) system going, then you configure the files via a text editor, then you can add gui and stuff with the pacman tool. You need to specify your nic and sound module int the rc.conf file yourself. The video is specified when you setup xorg.conf, you can chose fro a list, you just need to know the general type and memory. Later, if you get the kernel sources from kernel.org you can install the custom nvidia or ati drivers from them using their command line tools.

do what i did, load a newbie friendly distro like Debian or something, sniff around the files in /etc and copy the info, then load Arch, select nano as your editor ( lots easier than vi ) and edit your config files. Remember ctrl - O exits nano, and hit enter to save the file.
Lots of help here on the Arch forums, too. THese guys have helped me do everything.

arch has hwd and hotplug

arch linux has some fantastic features, one of them is its hardware detection. As zeppelin said, hwd is the thing to use. Moreover it has the best package manager you could hope for. This is a remedy for dependency hell you get with older distros. Unlike elite package managers, this one even allows you to delete a pacage if you want to. It runs on my Twinhead laptop and a box I built myself. Both of them use VIA chipsets & via 82cxx sound, and they both have S3 ProSavage video. The only difference between the two is the Smartlink modem on the laptop, and Arch has a module already built for that & the Lucent winmodems. I dont know what I am using for a video driver, probably a vesa framebuffer, I installed xorg and I cant remember what happened after that, so it must be fairly transparent to the hardware, or else I have been lucky.

Where there is work for you to do is in setting up udev configuration files, and that can be testy. I think it will be a long time before I dump this for anything else, I am using xfce4, maybe I will kick the wheels on icewm for a change, apart from that, it just works.

The box I built does have one more diff, and that is a second NIC, natsemi, and it has 1G of ram.

I jusr ran hwd again, no guessing, it tells what module to load for what. The real interesting part of the hardware setup is that I just plug in my wireless-optical mouse, and it works. This was the first distro that did that for me. I think, and I could be wrong, but Slackware could not come to grips with that or the scroll wheel. I also have a camera, with some messing round and a lot of gnashed teeth, it works as a webcam. Before it only worked as a storage device.

I checked my diary, March 3 was when I installed Arch and a week later it was on the Twinhead.

There is one thing to watch, the default partitioning is a bit off, it makes a boot part & then you might have trouble booting. If you do use a boot part, make it about 30M and stay with ext2. There is absolutely no point in using a journalled filesystem on a boot partition because it is never ever written to after you set it up, and the journal takes over 30M. pointless waste of space.

I totally agree about using ext2 for a separate boot partition........I have a 50 MB ext2 boot partition since I have several kernels to boot with and also just trying out Arch, mostly for the package management........Although I was still able to boot into Arch with the original fstab file, I did notice the "/boot" partition was placed before the "/" partition, but I switched them just for my piece of mind....


I read about the hardware detection thingie from the Arch forums and the homepage for hwd is here: HWD - hardware detect for Arch Linux, but since I'm very new to Arch, I'm struggling a bit with getting my network connection up and running and haven't installed hwd yet..........I only did a base install from the 0.6 base cd......

I plan on recompiling everything for an Athlon setup instead of using Arch's i686 packages.......but I guess I'm putting the cart before the horse and should try to use the regular packages first to get used to Arch......AND install hwd so I can get all the hardware working (I've gotten spoiled with hotplug in Slackware)...........


PS: If you do have an existing boot parititon, you will need to rename vmlinuz and System.map to something different, such as vmlinuz-<current distro> and System.map-<current distro>..........Otherwise Arch will refuse to install it's kernel.....And don't install the bootloader........You can go into your other distro and add the kernel to that bootloader's configuration file, making the necessary changes, and reinstall the bootloader.............That is, if you plan on multi-booting........