New to Arch - where is stuff, can I use Arch?

[MarkFoley]

I've just installed Arch on my RasPi, replacing my Wheezy (though it is safely on another card). I am a long time Linux user, but am new to Arch. I was a bit surprised to find that no compiler came with it, but did manage to figure out Arch's install tool (pacman) and the gcc package (base-devel, gcc-objc ... I think!). I found this information on the web, but that's a bit hit or miss. Where can I see a list and possibly a description of everything in the Arch repository?

If Arch is supposed to be a basic, no-frills distro, then I would assume things like installing compilers and various such start-up configs are something most every Arch installer must do. Is there a basic newbie HOWTO on finding, downloading, installing and configuring the fundamentals?

Also, I wonder if Arch is suitable for my purposes. I'm interested in building a wireless router -- which I've done in Slackware. Are there sufficient tools available to accomplish this for Arch? Specifically:

Can Arch be set to do ip-forwarding? In Linux this is done by putting the line `net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' in /etc/sysctl.conf.

Does iptables run on Arch?

Is there a hostapd available for Arch?

Can Arch run dhcpd?

I'm asking these things before looking in the respository because I don't know how to do that yet, but if these things are not something within Arch's perview, then perhaps I should not use Arch in this way.

Thoughs?

[flyinghappy]

Most things you want to do will be well documented here.... http://wiki.archlinux.org/ which is the biggest plus to Arch.

As for what is in the repositories.... archlinuxarm.org will have a lot of what you are looking for as well as a pretty good forum just for arch arm.

As for if arch can do these things. Shouldn't be an issue, it is after all Linux and will do anything that the other distros will do, there is just no hand holding at all with arch (or at least very little).

[MarkFoley]

Thanks for the tips. the link: http://archlinuxarm.org/packages is exactly what I was looking for! Also, pacman -Q gives a lot of info on installed packages. To get my development environment going I did:

pacman -S pacman gcc pkg-config
pacman -S make
pacman -S curses
pacman -S ed # (I never did like vi !)

There seems to be a lot of documentation out there on configuring a wireless access point, so I'll not give up on Arch just yet.

I am stuck on one thing. I'm trying to compile my uEmacs editor and it cannot resolve -ltermcap. I've search the web and the archlinux links with no luck. I resolved this on Raspian by: apt-get install lib32ncurses5-dev (or apt-get install ncurses-term, I forget which)

It is listed as a package at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/termcap/, but pacman -S termcap doesn't find anything.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for this for Arch?

[doorknob60]

It is listed as a package at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/termcap/, but pacman -S termcap doesn't find anything.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for this for Arch?

That is an AUR package, which means it is not available in binary form, and can't be installed directly with pacman. You need to download the tarball from there, and use makepkg to install it (note that you might need to edit a line or two in the PKGBUILD for it to work on ARM, probably just that arch= line). Here is more information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR

You can also use frontends to make the AUR easier, such as yaourt

[drirr]

As was already mentioned, you really should give the Arch wiki a good read.

As for the AUR stuff, this wiki article explains it pretty well. Not that most packages will have 'i686' and/or 'x86_64' as listed architectures, if you're going to compile those packages manually you'll have to take care of that. Either change it to 'any' or add 'armv6h' (ARM v6 hardfloat) and then try makepkg, beware that some packages might have code that doesn't work on ARM.

[alexjj]

Yaourt is in the aur repo that comes as standard, so you can pacman -S yaourt.

To install things from the AUR you can ignore the arch(itechture) by using -A with yaourt.

e.g. yaourt -AS ttf-ms-fonts

Also you don't run yaourt as root or sudo, just as your normal user.