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

No front page news this issue.

Devland

1. Roman Kyrylych has be hired as a bug hunter. He's been trawling the bug tracker, closing and assigning tickets as he goes.
2. There's a small debate about including debug symbols in gnome. They would make the released packages bigger, but they would also make it easier to submit bug reports to the gnome developers. What do you think we should do?
3. Varun Acharya (arch64 developer) is taking a leave of absence because of school. He has exams in January/February. Wish him luck!

Forum Highlights

1. scarney located a new Arch Linux review.
2. Dusty made a poll for thoughts on the Arch Linux wiki.
3. meow continued work on a script for downloading a single package from ABS.
4. filoktetes has been working on a version of Arch Linux for low end systems.

Mailing List Highlights

1. The reasoning behind Firefox being called Bon Echo in the latest release.
2. Feasibility of Arch Linux on unsupported architectures.
3. A security oriented version of PHP for Arch.

Package Highlights

• The latest nvidia drivers are in [testing].
• Important changes made to beryl-svn.

FAQ

Q: What is the difference between all the different repositories?

A: The [current] repository is the location of the packages available off of the install CD. The [extra] repository is the collection of packages that are outside of the install CD but maintained by the Arch Linux Developers. When a package is to be tested before release to [extra] or [current] it is placed in [testing]. [unstable] is the collection of packages considered to be unstable by the developers, but popular enough to be packaged for distribution. Finally the [community] repository is the location of packages that are in the AUR and have been adopted by a Trusted User who has packaged them for download.

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: 936
Longest recorded uptime: 494 days, 3 hours, 29 minutes, 25 seconds.
Average uptime: 11 days, 23 hours, 45 minutes, 59 seconds.
Average installed packages: 459
Average system memory: 738MB
Lowest Bogomips: 388.09
Average Bogomips: 3518.36
Highest Bogomips: 6807.15

Seti@Home

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

Members: 35
Total credit: 401,013.32

folding@Home

Arch Linux Team Page
Extended Team Statistics

Team Number: 45032
Members: 83
Score: 1243700
Ranking: 404 of 46487

Bugs

• AUR: Closed 0 - Opened 9
• Arch: Closed 97 - Opened 113

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