Inspiredby CRUX, another minimalist distribution, Judd Vinet started the ArchLinux project in March 2002. The name was chosen because Vinet likedthe word's meaning of "the principal," as in "arch-enemy".
Originallyonly for 32-bit x86 CPUs, the first x86_64 installation ISO wasreleased in April 2006.
Vinetled Arch Linux until 1 October 2007, when he stepped down due to lackof time, transferring control of the project to Aaron Griffin.
The migration to as its system started in August 2012, and it became the default on new installations in October 2012.It replaced the system, used since the distribution inception.
The end of i686 support was announced in January 2017, with the February2017 ISO being the last one including i686andmaking the architecture unsupported in November 2017.Since then, the community derivative Arch Linux 32 can be used for i686 hardware.
On24 February 2020, Aaron Griffin announced that due to his limited involvement with the project, he would, after a voting period, transfer control of the project to Levente Polyak. This change also led to a new 2-year term period being added to the Project Leader position.
In March 2021, Arch Linux developers were thinking of porting Arch Linux packages x86-64-v3 roughly correlates to Intel Has well era of processors.
In April 2021, Arch Linux installation images began including a guided installation script by default.
In late 2021, the Arch Linux developers released Pacman 6.0, which enabled parallel downloads.
In February 2022, the Arch Linux developers began offering debug packages.
Repository security
Arch Linux's package manager lacked support for signed packages. Packages and metadata were not verified for authenticity by Pacman during the download-install process. Without package authentication checking ,tampered-with or malicious repository mirrors could compromise the integrity of a system. allowed verification of the package database and packages, but it was disabled by default. In November 2011,package signing became mandatory for new package builds, and as of the 21st of March 2012, every official package is signed.
In June 2012, package signing verification became official and is now enabled by default in the installation process.
Design and principles
Arch is largely based on binary packages. Packages target x86 and x64processors assist performance on modern hardware. the system is also provided for automated source compilation, known as the Arch Build System.
Arch Linux focuses on simplicity of design, meaning that the main focus involves creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools —the package manager, for example, does not have an official graphical front-end. This is largely achieved by encouraging the use of succinctly commented, clean configuration files that are arranged for quick access and editing This has earned it a reputation as a distribution for "advanced users" who are willing to use the command line.
Relying on complex tools to manage and build your system is going to hurt the end-users "If you try to hide the complexity of the system, you'll end up with a more complex system". Layers of abstraction that serve to hide internals are never a good thing. Instead, the internals should be designed in a way such that they NEED no hiding.
Installation
The Arch Linux website supplies ISO Images that can be run from DVD. After a user partitions and formats their drive, a simple command line script (pacstrap) is used to install the base system. The installation of additional packages which are not part of the base system (for example, desktop environment , can be done with either pac strap, or Pacman after booting into the new installation.
Guided automated install script
An experimental guided installer named arch install is included in all Arch ISO images released since 2021. It allows users to easily install and configure Arch Linux including drivers and disk partitioning network configuration, accounts setup, and installation of Desktop Environments
arch install
Package management
Arch Linux's only supported binary platform is x86_64. The Arch package repositories and User Repository (AUR) contains 58,000 binary and source packages, which comes close to Derbian's 68,000 packages; however, the two distributions' approaches to packaging differ, making direct comparisons difficult. For example, six out of Arch's58,000 packages comprise the software of which three in the user repository replace the canonical Abi word package with an alternative build type or version (such as sourcing from the latest commit to Abi word's source control repository), whereas Debian installs a single version of Abi word across seven packages. The Arch User Repository also contains a writer perfect package which installs several document format converters, while Debian provides each of the more than 20 converters in its own sub package.
Pacman
Example of pacman usage
To facilitate regular package changes, Pacman (a contraction of "package manager") was developed by Judd Vinet to provide Arch with its own package manager to track dependencies. It is written in C
All packages are managed using the Pacman Package manager Pacman handles package installation, upgrades, downgrades, removal and features automatic dependency resolution. The packages for Arch Linux are obtained from the Arch Linux package tree and are compiled for thex86-64 architecture. It uses binary packages in the tar.zst compression, with .pkg placed before this to indicate that it is a Pacman package(giving .pkg.tar.zst).
For example, packages can be installed via pacman-S packagename,while pacman-Syu can also be used to perform a full system upgrade.
As well as Arch Linux, Pacman is also used for installing packages under a fork of on Windows.