Arch Linux Newsletter

Summary

Welcome to the Arch Linux Newsletter. This document attempts to give you an "at a glance" look at the world of Arch Linux.

Table Of Contents

Front Page News

1. Important glibc change
   
   glibc will no longer contain pre-generated locales. This means users who use something else than the C locale should take some steps when upgrading to the new glibc-2.3.6-2 package.
   glibc will try to autodetect the locales needed on your system and enables them in /etc/locale.gen. After this, it will run /usr/sbin/locale-gen.
   The glibc package will look in the $LANG variable and in /etc/rc.conf for the LOCALE setting. If you use any other locales than these, edit /etc/locale.gen and run /usr/sbin/locale-gen. This should generate all the locales you need.
   The package is uploaded to testing first , if no bugs are reported, it will go into current quite soon.
   
   For users who have been running 2.3.6-1 from testing, this autodetection won't work, as the /etc/locale.gen included in the package is under pacman's backup control and doesn't contain the required lines to support autodetection.
   
   
2. ArchCK in Extra, madwifi-ng in [unstable], ATI drivers renamed
   
   I have had to rename the ATI drivers a second time. Soon there will be driver packages in the repos for ArchCK as well, and I decided it was best to bite the bullet, and make the ati drivers concordant with this new naming scheme, rather than risk user confusion later on.
   
   The new drivers are known as:
   ati-fglrx (kernel module for 2.6.15-ARCH)
   ati-fglrx-archck (kernel module for 2.6.15-archck)
   ati-fglrx-utils (xorg7 stuff and tools)
   
   I have also just moved ArchCK and mkinitramfs to extra. If you wish to use fbsplash, you need to install gensplashutils and initscripts-gensplash from community. They are no longer a dependency of mkinitramfs - you must install them yourself. If you already have them installed, then theres no need to worry.
   
   madwifi-ng has been moved into unstable, as it's releases are based on svn snapshots. Enable the [unstable] repo and pacman -S madwifi-ng, or if you use ArchCK, pacman -S madwifi-ng-archck.
   
   My apologies about the ati-drivers rename but it was needed to prevent user confusion later on down the road. The upgrade path isn't too difficult, and is one you can attempt when you are ready, the current ati-drivers have yet to be removed.

Devland

1. Blaasvis will be releasing Gnome 2.14 to testing very soon. If you want a good set of Gnome packages, you should test them!
2. Since archck is the third 2.6 kernel going into our repos, we've had to think about our module release policy. We're going to follow the kernel naming convention and release modules named madwifi-ng, madwifi-ng-archck, and madwifi-ng-mm. Each of the module packages will depend on their respective kernel, but the base madwifi-ng package will be slightly different. If you build it with _kernver it will build a module for that kernel (ie. _kernver=2.6.15-custom makepkg).
3. Apparently the Archie livecd is on its last legs. We've decided that we want it to keep going, so we're going to make it an official project. We'll probably base the 0.8 install cd off of it.
4. All versions of gnupg before 1.4.2.2 contain a pretty serious bug to do with digital signatures. Please upgrade as soon as possible.
5. Dennis (our amazing disappearing doc guy) is thinking about moving the Install Guide over to the wiki. The English version would probably still be editable by only a select few people, but it will make keeping it up to date way easier.

Forum Highlights

1. stoncrest made a bash script to aid in finding strong wireless connections when there is more than one to choose from.
2. Elias wanted opinions on a script for PKGBUILD creation from an ebuild.
3. willy wanted an easy to understand setup for ssh from a remote host.
4. redbeard was looking for a nice Linux compatible wireless card.

Mailing List Highlights

1. Talk on a good command line program for encoding music.
2. What people think about computer uptime and when you really should reboot.
3. A question of what to do when more than one application can fill the dependencies of another application.

Package Highlights

• Glibc was moved out of [testing] and now no longer contains the pre-generated locales.
• The popular ArchCK kernel is now available in [extra].

FAQ

Q: What is the difference between AUR, COMMUNITY, and UNSUPPORTED?

A: AUR(Arch User Repository) is the name of the whole new system which is maintained by the TUs(Trusted Users). It lets anybody that signs up to upload PKGBUILDs to UNSUPPORTED but only TUs have access to COMMUNITY which is a binary repo that you can use with Pacman.

Q: Why aren't all packages in UNSUPPORTED added to COMMUNITY?

A: There are several reasons for that. The most important is that the package hasn't got many votes. It's also important that you vote for packages that already are in COMMUNITY, otherwise they could be disowned by the TUs and moved to UNSUPPORTED. Other reasons could be that the package is unmaintained upstream or has a licensing problem. Last but not least, no TU wants to do it.

Archstats

To Participate, visit: http://www.archlinux.org/~simo/archstats

Number of registered systems: 677
Longest recorded uptime: 496 days, 9 hours, 22 minutes, 38 seconds.
Average uptime: 12 days, 21 hours, 16 minutes, 2 seconds.
Least packages installed on a system: 40
Average installed packages: 415
Most packages installed on a system: 12479
Lowest Bogomips: 266.28
Average Bogomips: 3539.88
Highest Bogomips: 6914.04

Seti@Home

To Participate, visit: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=116975

Members: 21
Total credit: 187,580.61

folding@Home

Arch Linux Team Page

Team Number: 45032
Members: 38
Score: 368854
Ranking: 764 of 43317

Bugs

• AUR: Closed 3 - Opened 5
• Arch: Closed 52 - Opened 83

Closing

That's it for this time folks. If you have any opinions on the newsletter or have some things you wanna add, just send us a mail and we'll look into it.
Very best regards / Team Arch