Arch Linux: Reading the fine manual
Year 2015: After watching that every effort I made to hack private wifi on kali linux going in vain, somehow I got stumbled upon this new distro of linux — arch linux. I tried installing it in 2015 but as impatient as I was and on top of that a script kiddie always looking for command someone can provide I got a lot of bashing on arch linux’s IRC. Haha I still remember they used to say rtfm as answer to my every question. But I am very thankful to them for not telling me answers. It forced me to look out for myself. Once I asked them why they do that with me and one of the user shared an image which I still have with me —
I thank all the users of #archlinux-newbie and #archlinux. After that I installed Ubuntu and college life was going normal again.
Year 2018: My last year of college and one fine day I tried my hands on arch again. And this time I installed arch successfully. Not only that I learnt how to partition using fdisk (f**k disk haha) and then after installing all the necessary utils and Linux kernel I installed i3 as my very first windows manager. I must say that r/unixporn community inspired me very much to setup a stylish GUI on top of just installed arch. I am thankful to God because the knowledge this time I had collected since my last attempt from various places came very handy.
rtfm from earlier stands for read the fine manual. And arch linux’s manual is the best manual ever written amongst all the linux distros.
I learnt a lot of things PID 1, systemd, daemons, pacman — package manager of arch, window manager, X window system, XOrg, GTK, desktop managers, tmux, gpg, asymmetric key crypto, digital signatures, TCP/IP stack, cmake, installing from source and many more things. After this, I used to always consider myself superior and look down on ubuntu, fedora and ofcourse windows users of my college. Today I know how big of a fool I was to look down on others and getting overconfident over drinking few drops from river when there are people who are ocean of knowledge in themselves. Gentoo and Linuxfromscratch were enough to destroy my this just built up overconfidence but when I came to know about Terry Davis and the os he created templeos even after suffering from schizophrenia I was almost crying and full of sorrow.
I think writing an operating system from the scratch is very inspiring in itself. I admire Terry Davis but I came to know about him after his death.
I must say, I have seen a lot of things that took place during my college time (2014:2018) — like migration of people from lamp to mern, flipkart’s big billion day crash (rise of nodejs), onionIRC, downfall of Micromax, hypocrisy of mozilla firefox and the community behind it and many more things.
Now, I suppose it’s time I should put down my pen.
