Category: Arch

looking at arch linux and its derivatives

whbeebe2 Comments

Although I’ve settled, as it were, on using Fedora Linux (Fedora 36) as my main development OS, I’m still willing to look at other distributions rather than become complacent again like I did with Ubuntu. In spite of having had a bad time with Arch back in the mid-2010s, I decided to give Arch and some of its derivatives another look. After all, seven-plus years is an eternity in open source OS development, and assumptions made back then really don’t apply anymore.

I have Parallels and a big beefy MacBook Pro on which to easily spin up Linux virtual machines. There’s no reason not to give them a look. While I looked at nearly all of them, the two I’ll talk about is Manjaro Linux and Arch Linux itself.

I’ll start with Arch. Before I get started let me mention where I watched Arch being installed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpkjtyvvO0 . After watching this YouTube video I was able to download and quickly install Arch as a VM. The key to a frustration free Arch initial installation is to run archinstall when the first stage installation is finished and you’re dropped to a text prompt in the VM. Watch the video to see what you need to do after that. I chose to install KDE as the desktop manager. I’d tried Gnome and wasn’t satisfied. KDE by comparison is very polished these days.

I’ll cut to the chase: Arch 5.18.3 (see neofetch output above) is very performant and has a remarkably small footprint (see htop Mem out above), especially when compared to the latest Ubuntu. I’m constantly pleased with how fast Arch’s pacman will perform necessary updates, necessary because it’s a rolling release. And I’m quite comfortable with KDE. The KDE developers have poured tremendous time and effort into polishing the KDE desktop environment, and I for one certainly appreciate how it looks and performs. If I were more comfortable trusting Arch, I can see how I would use it in place of Fedora. I’m still not quite past the problems I had running Arch on Raspberry Pi (which I documented in years past on this blog), but I’m getting to a good place with Arch. On x86 architecture systems it appears to be very well behaved and solid.

Manjaro was easy enough to install, especially using its graphical installer, but its operation is definitely unique.

I can handle unique. But there’s one quirk that Manjaro has which I’ve screen-shotted above. Manjaro has an “Automatic suspend” feature that locks up the VM and requires that I use macOS’ Activity Monitor to force kill the VM. I can go back in again. In the mean time note the attempt to do a pacman update, and its failure. Not sure what that means, as I couldn’t scroll up to read the full list of messages. But that won’t bother me anymore as I deleted the Manjaro VM instance. I suppose that if I could install the Parallels Toolkit it might behave better, but attempting to build the kernel modules fails. It’s the same kind of failure I get with Fedora 36, Alma 9, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Arch.  In other words, distributions that have Linux kernel 5.17 or later.

Vanilla Arch is sufficient for my experimental needs. It would probably be a good alternative to Fedora 36 on bare silicon. Of all the Arch distributions regular Arch is the only VM I have left.

manjaro linux 18.1 – not ready for virtualization prime time

whbeebe2 Comments

I read of a new group selling Linux computers, Tuxedo Computers (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com), which is bundling Manjaro Linux with the hardware. All the commentary about Manjaro is laudatory, especially when running on the Tuxedo hardware. So I navigated over to the Manjaro Linux site (https://manjaro.org) and downloaded the latest ISO release, 8.1.

I run a number of Linux systems virtually using Oracle’s VirtualBox on my Mac, all successfully. Before installing a Manjaro guest VM, I updated to the latest VirtualBox, 6.1.2. The update was no problem with my existing VMs, which are a mix of RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux 8.1 releases, and various Debian/Ubuntu VMs as well. I was able to update the guest extensions on all of them with no issues whatsoever. Keep that in mind.

Installation of Manjaro was absolutely smooth with no issues. It was attempting to install the guest extensions in the VM where I ran into issues. I tried the regular way of installing them by mounting the extensions CD image and running the installation script. I installed the minimal image, which meant I had to install the kernel header files matching my kernel, gcc, and make. I then ran the installation script and had no failures. On reboot unfortunately the extension that enabled folder sharing of the host’s filesystem failed. The dmesg error indicated a lack of kernel symbols. I then went looking in the Arch Linux forums (Manjaro is based on Arch) and discovered there was an Arch package with those extensions pre-built. Fine. I uninstalled the extensions I installed, then installed using pacman. On reboot the extension still failed to load because the module “taints the kernel”. The message is part of the screen capture at the top of the post.

I won’t put up with this. I would love to run this distribution because its tools are up to the very latest (gcc and Python in particular), and the kernel is the near-latest version 5.4. There’s an awful lot to like about this distribution. But this problem with the VirtualBox kernel modules, especially ones provided via pacman, is a show stopper for me. I need the ability to share files between my VMs and my Mac, or between VMs using the Mac shared folder. That feature works like a charm with every distribution I have except for Arch in general, and this version of Manjaro.

There’s also one other aggravation with Arch/Manjaro I really don’t care for, and that’s the attitude that crops up in the forums, and is exemplified by the comment “that’s not the way we do things in Arch.” Fine. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if it all worked without drama, but it doesn’t. And I’ve already had my run-ins with Arch on my Raspberry Pi (3 and 4) systems as well as an attempt in times past to just get an Arch VM running. The Raspberry Pi installations eventually all failed to properly update after a time, and the VM never worked, including the VirtualBox shared filesystem module.

In April Ubuntu 20.04 will be released with the latest kernel and tools, and I’ll step up to that and call it a day. If I need to keep on the bleeding edge, there’s always the non-LTS Ubuntu releases as well, and there are also ways to keep a Debian installation on leading release tools. I don’t need Manjaro and the Arch attitude that comes with being derived from Arch. All the other distros Just Work. In the future when my clients ask what Linux distribution to install and run, Manjaro won’t be one that I recommend.

— I might be retired but I still do a bit of consulting.