I'm bored, and feel like messing around with stuff again. I have a laptop with a P3 900mhz, and 128mb ram. It's currently running Debian (sarge I think) and Fluxbox, with ndiswrapper handling the wireless (it's an Atheros chipset) I was thinking of using it as a torrent box, because it's nice and quiet, so I can run it overnight. It only has a 20gb hard drive, so it's not like I can run much! Was wondering if it was worth trying another distro. I'm happy with how it's running right now, but I could probably use the experience of having a tinker around. Arch looks ok, anybody used it? Or should I stick with Debian, and either keep the current install, or install a newer version.
Arch is about as good as it gets for someone who wants to play, you will notice a significant performance increase over vanilla Debian as well if you configure it right.
It's much better than Gentoo for the idle tinkerer. It offers the same freedom without all of the pointless compiling of everything unless you actually want to.
I think Gentoo might take a while to compile on that system What's my best option for torrent clients? Any ones I can just run from the command line by remoting in?
I never set up Arch, but I'd recommend Gentoo just for sheer awesomeness. No, really, Gentoo will force you to understand what's going on, and what is possible. It will take a while to compile, but you have lots of reading to do
rtorrent doesn’t require a GUI, mldonkey has both a telnet and web interface, there is also torrentflux.
Ok so I have Arch installed (finally, it took nearly a whole day) I can't boot the normal version though, only the fallback one. Grub gives me "Error 11: Unrecognised Device String" I'm assuming I messed up editing the grub menu, but it seems to be very similar to the one that works. Also, kacpid is slowing the whole thing to a crawl. I know this is something to do with acpi, and I understand that I can disable it with acpi=off in the boot parameters. However, is this the correct way? I've done it before on previous installs, but only as a hack to stop my system locking up/kernel panicking, and I've never looked further to see if there is a proper way to fix it.
Why don't you read the wiki guide http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Search?search=acpi&go=Go Also when going through initial setup you tend to have a far easier time if you read the beginners guide.
I used the beginners guide to help me install, but there wasn't anything in there about acpi. I've had a look at the first page you linked to, but I can't make 100% sense of it. It tells me to load the modules to see which work, and then use dmesg to see if they work or not. Whereabouts in dmesg would I see whether it's working or not? How will this help me figure out why kacpid is pegging my processor? Sorry for the newbie questions
