Installing Arch

My experience installing Arch Linux.
Today I installed Arch Linux, I was attracted to it by its philosophy of simplicity (leave it up to the user/admin what to install) and it's rolling releases (I love bleeding edge stuff, hipster alert)

Let me sing you the song of my people.

1. Put in the Arch Linux cd with the "Netinstall Image" burned to it, booted it. And went through the steps.
2. I ran into an error after going through and selecting a bunch of packages to download -- something like "Ruby depends on yacc, cannot resolve dependency" -- This sucked. "At least I was penning down all my pacakge selections"  I thought and figured I should just install a bare bones system anyway and install everything I want AFTER I got the system up and running.
   
   I selected these main packages (which installed without error):
   *base
   *xfce4
   *xorg
   *xorg-drivers
   *xorg-apps
   *xorg-fonts
3. It booted to a login prompt "login:" which I used root/password and could start xfce4 with "startxfce4"
4. And began install packages and configuring stuff, its best to do each package one at a time so you can alter the configuration files as needed.

Here's the list of packages I've installed so far (using pacman -S package_name):

• vim
• firefox
• pidgin
• xdg-utils (this fixed an error when clicking links in pidgin)
• sudo
• flashplayer
• gimp
• audacious
• gstreamer0.10-plugins(this is a group of 6 packages including the good, bad, ugly)
• mplayer
• mirage
• wireshark
• nodejs
• slim(this is the login manager I chose)

and I've removed:

• vi
• nano

I've added these lines to /etc/rc.local

#remove pc speaker kernel module
rmmod pcspkr

#command aliases
alias vi='vim'
alias python='python2'
alias ll='ls -l'
alias la='ls -a'

and /etc/rc.conf was kept default from the initial settings besides this line:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network crond slim dhcpcd)

We added slim and dhcpcd (networking is a pain during the install, I had to run dhcpcd (got lucky from autocomplete trying to run 'dhclient') in another tty.)

This was error that gave me trouble:

[root@none etc]# pacman -Q node.js
warning: database file for 'community' does not exist
error: package 'node.js' was not found

I fixed it by running: pacman -Syy
which does a Sync and yy refreshes the database files from the server (even if they appear up to date).

That's it for now. Going to restart now to see if that DAEMONS line will work. Godspeed you black emperor!

*EDIT*
I've realized its not really a good idea to add stuff to rc.local ...instead I put that stuff in /etc/bash.bashrc

rc stands for "run command" on start (something like that, there's lots of arguments)

*EDIT2*
My DAEMONS line looks like this now: DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network crond alsa)

Because dhcpd is broken for me (and it seems like some others, I should look into fixing/making a proper bug report now that I'm using arch on a laptop... )