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After many years of using Windows as my personal OS, I have decided to switch to GNU/Linux and build a system specific for my needs that is minimal (low hardware requirements) and fast.

My experience of Linux is somewhat limited: tinkering with my FreeNAS box and installing Puppy Linux on my wife’s wee laptop (HP Mini).

I decided to give Arch Linux a try.  Reading around a bit, I got the impression that this distro doesn’t make any assumptions regarding what the user wants: a bare system is provided and it’s then up to the user to configure and install packages as required.  The wiki also looked good.  So this distro clicked for me.

So my aim is an OS that I can pull to bits and understand from the ground up.

What I would like the OS to support:

  1. A Mono development environment.  I intend to carry on with development of a fork of my Rss feed reader, extending it to support Twitter feeds with a graph db under the hood (currently using sqlite).
  2. Node.js development.  So I can contribute to the Azure Xplat-CLI project on GibHub.
  3. Android development environment.
  4. Dropbox connectivity.
  5. And all the standard programs: email, web browser etc.  But simple and light.  I like simple :-).

So far I have managed to create and configure a base system following the “Beginners Guide” which I found easy to follow.  I had a couple of issues/problems:

  1. Booting the Arch Linux iso from a USB key, I got this error:  “Failed to load ldlinux.c32”.  I did some Googling and the issue was due to using my old friend “Rufus” to create a bootable USB drive :-(.  Quite surprising since I have used this utility for awhile now with no issue.  I switched to use ”
    Win32 Disk Imager” to create a bootable USB drive and the issue went away and I was presented with the Arch install screen.  Not sure what the issue was using Rufus.
  2. Wireless drivers.  I haven’t fixed this yet and am carrying on with a wired connection but looks like I need to do some work to download and install the correct drivers for my laptop.  This question matches up with my issue.