Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Mar 16, 2006

I accidentally screwed up my Arch System last week. I was installing a rather big package (kde) and ran out of room on my root partition. I made the mistake of manually erasing some files which resulted in some wonky errors. Eventually my bash shell died and rebooting gave me a kernel panic. I'm unsure as to what led to this downward spiral, and frankly I'm not interested in repeating the experience to figure it out. However, I am infinitely glad that I keep my /home folders on a completely different partition. Chalk one up for foresight!

When the above incident took place I was working in Bombay. I did not bring any linux ISO's with me so needed to download another distribution in order to salvage my system and get back to work. Given that Internet speed and reliability are choppy here in India I quickly eliminated Suse. At 5 CD's, all of which could be required for install, I knew it would be a week before I would even see a command line.

Another choice was Ubuntu. I've used Ubuntu in the past (as recently as a late Dapper flight) and it is both rock solid and feature complete. The ISO is only 1 CD and I know once it's downloaded that I'd be immediately productive. This was very very tempting for me. The only two reasons I did not go down this route were first, I wanted to try KDE and did not want to experiment with Kubuntu and second, I want to see how all the Linspire Click N' Run integration plays out.

Since I'm very familiar with Arch linux I decided to go that way. The base ISO is only 158MB so within a few hours I was able to download, burn, and begin installation. The install is fairly easy if you know what you're doing. Maybe I'll write about it one day but for now the docs are more than adequate.

After the install I grabbed the ipw2200 package (for my Thinkpad chipset), elinks, and mutt. Now I had a functional way of checking emails and browsing again. I could work while building my system again in the background. All is about 3 hours. Again keep in mind the Slooooooooow Internet connection; if I had been back in my apartment, where bandwidth is good, it would have all taken about 30 minutes.

I rebuilt my entire system and am now back to full productivity. I opted to install both Gnome and KDE this time so I can do a full comparison and decide which DE I want to use for the next 6-12 months. One lesson I have learned is to clean out my pacman cache (pacman -Scc) to save space on my root partition. I have the same packages installed now but instead of taking 100% of / it takes only 58%.