Man celebrates 20 years of telling people, "BTW, I run Arch"
(Also Arch, itself, is now 20 years old.)
Today, March 11, 2022, marks Bernard Coulier’s 20th anniversary of the first time he was able to tell someone, “BTW, I run Arch.”
“It feels just like yesterday,” remarked Mr. Coulier. “That very first time I was able to tell someone that I run Arch Linux. And I keep doing it. It never gets old!”
Since then, Bernard Coulier has told someone “BTW, I run Arch” over 61 thousand times — nearly once each day… for the last twenty years.
Judd Vinet, creator of Arch Linux, posted the following announcement:
This is it. This was the dream. Twenty years ago I uploaded the first .ISO image of Arch to my FTP server. My goal, back then, was simple: Create a Linux distribution… and get as many people as possible to tell everyone they know that they use it.
After all… what’s the point of using Linux if you aren’t telling people about it? That’d be like being vegan and keeping that information to yourself. Pointless.
Thank you, Bernard Coulier, for helping my dream come true.
Considering the immense success of Arch, many users have been asking when Arch 2 would be released.
“We’re still working on it,” stated the Arch founder. “We realize that Arch is 20 years old now, and people would like some new, more up to date packages. We’ll get version 2 done soon.”
In all seriousness… today actually is the 20th birthday of Arch. So… Happy Birthday, Arch!
What follows is the (actually really-real) announcement of Arch Linux 0.1.
Mar 11 - Arch Linux 0.1 (Homer) released
I've finally got a bootable iso image on the ftp site. The bad news is that you don't get a pretty interactive installer. But if you wanted one of those, you would have gone with RedHat, right? ;)
Here's a short list of some future plans for 0.2:
Document ABS (Arch Build System) and provide a cvs-like update method so people can start building their own packages.
Finish the contrib area and start posting third-party packages.
Finish pacman 1.2 -- this will allow you to update your entire system with the latest stable version of all packages, all with one command.
Add a pretty interactive installer. ;)
Add more documentation -- our docs really suck right now. Please! If you have questions, just ask! Also, if you want to help out in any way, please let me know. I'm a student so my free time comes and goes at the will of my evil profs.
I'll try to get the docs up for ABS (Arch Build System) which, IMHO, is one of the best advantages of Arch. With ABS, you can easily create new packages, and it's trivial to rebuild existing packages with your own customizations.
And on that note, if you start to use the ABS and build your own packages, I welcome your submissions. My "development team" is working on a contrib area as we speak. ;)About
Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution based on ideas from CRUX, a great distribution developed by Per Lidén. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades. Arch is quite streamlined compared to some other distributions. Things that are relatively unused (by me, anyway) are not kept (info-pages, for example). A default Arch install leaves you with a solid base; from there, you can add packages to create the custom installation you're looking for. Arch has a package build system that allows you to easily create your own packages, which makes it very easy to rebuild a package with your own custom configuration. Arch also aims to use the newer features available to linux users, such as reiserfs/ext3 and devfs.Components
All components are optional, of course. It's your system -- build it however you want.
Linux Kernel 2.4.18
XFree86 4.2.0
glibc 2.2.5
gcc 2.95.3
OpenSSH 3.1p1
Mozilla 0.9.9
WindowMaker 0.80.0
Vim 6.1
Reiserfsprogs 3.x.1b
devfsd 1.3.22
... and more ...
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