arch linux or raspbian?

[diggle]

Hi,
So I was thinking of installing arch linux on my raspberry pi. I was just wondering, is arch supported as much as raspbian? also, can I check the statuses of the temprature sensors in arch? I wanted to mainly do this because I want to get the newest packages and there doesn't really seem to be a way to upgrade to raspbian unstable (but people have done it, so it's probably i'm not trying hard enough). Thoughts?

[jamesh]

Raspbian is the best supported distro. Arch has some support, but generally lags behind Raspbian which is where all development is done.

[diggle]

Hi,
So can you tell me how to switch to the raspbian testing branch? apparently just changing it in the source.list in /etc/apt doesn't work.

[ShiftPlusOne]

Depends on what you think you're asking. I can't think of anything you can do in Raspbian that you can't do in Arch. Try both and see which one suits your particular needs better.

[fruitoftheloom]

Hi,
So can you tell me how to switch to the raspbian testing branch? apparently just changing it in the source.list in /etc/apt doesn't work.

Yes you change wheezy to jessie in sources list then run update / dist-upgrade,.

Jessie will be next release so is now more Beta than Testing. Sid will become the Testing Branch after release of Jessie..

[jamesh]

Hi,
So can you tell me how to switch to the raspbian testing branch? apparently just changing it in the source.list in /etc/apt doesn't work.

What do you need that requires the testing branch? Or at least something more recent than the current Raspbian?

[ShiftPlusOne]

'support' and 'testing' definitely don't go together, so you've got conflicting requirements there.

[rpdom]

Sid will become the Testing Branch after release of Jessie..

Not quite, a new Testing branch with a new name (not yet announced) will be formed based on the Jessie at the time of release. Packages from Sid will start to trickle through to Testing once the Freeze is ended.

Sid is always called Sid and is always Unstable. (Sid was the name of the boy who broke the toys in Toy Story).

[mikerr]

IMO the biggest reason to move to arch on the pi is boot time.

I've had Arch booting in under 7 seconds with very little tweaking.
Raspbian is normally more like 30 seconds (although with major tweaks I got it to 17 secs)

[ShiftPlusOne]

The difference in boot times comes down to systemd vs sysvinit. Either one will work in Raspbian.

[DougieLawson]

The difference in boot times comes down to systemd vs sysvinit. Either one will work in Raspbian.

With Jessie (unless you spend time tearing it out) you're going to get systemd whether you want it or not.

[ShiftPlusOne]

The difference in boot times comes down to systemd vs sysvinit. Either one will work in Raspbian.

With Jessie (unless you spend time tearing it out) you're going to get systemd whether you want it or not.

Won't sysvinit remain an option, just not the default one?

[DougieLawson]

Won't sysvinit remain an option, just not the default one?

There is some sysvinit stuff left behind but the majority of tasks get mucked about with and moved to systemd (which is yet another thing to learn).

[rpdom]

The difference in boot times comes down to systemd vs sysvinit. Either one will work in Raspbian.

With Jessie (unless you spend time tearing it out) you're going to get systemd whether you want it or not.

Won't sysvinit remain an option, just not the default one?

You have to specify that you want to stay with sysvinit by installing a package that overrides the defaults, but it is possible.

I'm not yet decided whether systemd is a good idea or not. Is it worth saving a few seconds on boot times by potentially breaking a load of legacy scripts and obfuscating the boot sequence?

[DougieLawson]

I'm not yet decided whether systemd is a good idea or not. Is it worth saving a few seconds on boot times by potentially breaking a load of legacy scripts and obfuscating the boot sequence?

You can say that again.

On my Ubuntu Utopic Unicorn (14.10) system the switch to systemd has broken Apache and MySQL for me. They both start before any of the NFS mounts are complete. My DocumentRoot and all of my mysql databases on NFS. So I have to restart those after the system comes alive. I've not yet had enough time to stare at systemd to work out how to make those two processes be dependent on the NFS mounts being complete.

[rpdom]

I'm not yet decided whether systemd is a good idea or not. Is it worth saving a few seconds on boot times by potentially breaking a load of legacy scripts and obfuscating the boot sequence?

You can say that again.

I haven't actually hit any problems with systemd on the systems I've upgraded from Wheezy to Jessie yet. But I have hit a major problem on my main Debian laptop. The hardware acceleration support for the xorg video driver in Jessie has been dropped completely leaving me with a very slow and jerky GUI. Previously the hardware accel. was poor, but usable. I'm having to stay with Wheezy on that machine for now.

I've three of my Raspis and three of my x86 systems to Jessie so far without problems. I just need to sort out the other... actually I have no idea how many I've that I don't use on a regular basis. Could be another dozen or two that are in a working state.