Arch Linux

In the cold of December we have but one thing to keep us warm: our laptops, trying to solve Advent of Code puzzles with inefficient algorithms. This year, 2024, is the tenth edition, and the puzzles are filled with more Easter eggs than ever before. Unfortunately, I’m not interested in Easter eggs, or solving the puzzles. I am a DevOps engineer, and I’m going to apply Infrastructure as Code principles to Advent of Code.

We plan to move glibc and its friends to stable later today, Feb 3. After installing the update, the Discord client will show a red warning that the installation is corrupt. This issue has been fixed in the Discord canary build. If you rely on audio connectivity, please use the canary build, login via browser or the flatpak version until the fix hits the stable Discord release. There have been no reports that (written) chat connectivity is affected.

We'd like to raise awareness about the rsync security release version 3.4.0-1 as described in our advisory ASA-202501-1. An attacker only requires anonymous read access to a vulnerable rsync server, such as a public mirror, to execute arbitrary code on the machine the server is running on. Additionally, attackers can take control of an affected server and read/write arbitrary files of any connected client. Sensitive data can be extracted, such as OpenPGP and SSH keys, and malicious code can be executed by overwriting files such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.popt. We highly advise anyone who runs an rsync daemon or client prior to version 3.4.0-1 to upgrade and reboot their systems immediately. As Arch Linux mirrors are mostly synchronized using rsync, we highly advise any mirror administrator to act immediately, even though the hosted package files themselves are cryptographically signed. All infrastructure servers and mirrors maintained by Arch Linux have already been updated.

Dear blog. This post is inspired by an old friend of mine who has been writing these for the past few years. I meant to do this for a while now, but ended up not preparing anything, so this post is me writing it from memory. There’s likely stuff I forgot, me being gentle with myself I’ll probably just permit myself to complete this list the next couple of days. I hate bragging, I try to not depend on external validation as much as possible, and being the anti-capitalist that I am, I try to be content with knowing I’m …

A eulogy for the greatest dog of all, and a friend I will never forget.

Like my blog? Here is how I set it up.

Arch Linux hasn't had a license for any package sources (such as PKGBUILD files) in the past, which is potentially problematic. Providing a license will preempt that uncertainty. In RFC 40 we agreed to change all package sources to be licensed under the very liberal 0BSD license. This change will not limit what you can do with package sources. Check out the RFC for more on the rationale and prior discussion. Before we make this change, we will provide contributors with a way to voice any objections they might have. Starting on 2024-11-19, over the course of a week, contributors will receive a single notification email listing all their contributions.

• If you receive an email and agree to this change, there is no action required from your side.
• If you do not agree, please reply to the email and we'll find a solution together.

If you contributed to Arch Linux packages before but didn't receive an email, please contact us at package-sources-licensing@archlinux.org.

After Turkey banned Discord, I had to jump through some hoops, fix my VPN, and learn a bit about how DNS works.

A collection of facts about yours truly. Guaranteed to be as accurate as my memory.

With the release of version 7.0.0 pacman has added support for downloading packages as a separate user with dropped privileges. For users with local repos however this might imply that the download user does not have access to the files in question, which can be fixed by assigning the files and folder to the alpm group and ensuring the executable bit (+x) is set on the folders in question. $ chown :alpm -R /path/to/local/repo Remember to merge the .pacnew files to apply the new default. Pacman also introduced a change to improve checksum stability for git repos that utilize .gitattributes files. This might require a one-time checksum change for PKGBUILDs that use git sources.

Some thoughts on why I started livestreaming my open-source development sessions and my future plans.

The past year I have been hacking around on tools utilizing TPMs, and one of the features I have been interested to learn more about is the device attestation features. After being a bit inspired by some ideas from people at work, the hackerspace and toots on mastodon, I figure out a SSH certificate authority would be a cool small project to hack on. Last year I wrote an SSH agent with TPM bound keys so this would nicely fit into the existing tooling.

In the previous article I investigated how to create a reproducible image but ended up with only managing to create two identical image directories. In this article we'll end up with a fully bit-by-bit reproducible filesystem image! Some things have changed since the last post, mkosi now no longer creates …

Arch Linux in August 2024 # Staff # We would like to welcome Quentin Michaud as part of the Arch Linux Package Maintainer team. RFC # A previously proposed Distribution Developer Manual RFC has been accepted with the intention to document how to run the distribution while leveraging GitLab’s collaboration features and streamlined workflows for maintaining and evolving the resulting specifications. We have proposed an RFC to license all Arch Linux package sources under the terms of the Zero-Clause BSD license.

A while ago I saw a post on LinkedIn that piqued my interest, not because it was any good, but because it was impressively wrong. It claimed that, to quote, “if every email user deleted just 10 emails, it would save enough electricity to power millions of households each year”. This is not only wrong, it is obviously wrong. In this post, I’d like to dive into why it’s wrong, how one might come to think it’s right, and perhaps what better message you could put out there to save the planet.

I've blogged before about creating vagrant images using mkosi as part of an investigation to move image creation to mkosi but also as I will be giving a talk at All Systems Go about Arch Linux images mkosi and reproducibility. With reproducible images in this article I mean that anyone …

Arch Linux in July 2024 # Pacman # Pacman v7.0.0 has been released as a major feature version. A new DownloadUser configuration option allows for dropping privileges when downloading files to a temporary directory. On top of this security measure, the new Landlock sandbox also prevents writing outside the restricted download directory. Additionally, makepkg removes GITFLAGS support, as it required breaking changes to git source handling. Furthermore this release addresses unstable git checksumming influenced by specific user configuration. On top, it now prevents PKGBUILD from overriding BUILDENV to avoid undesired side effects.

Last FOSDEM, there where some talks around mkosi using it for kernel hacking and systemd integration tests. These talks got me interested in mkosi, a systemd project for building OS images. After chatting some more with the maintainers, I considered the idea of moving the arch-boxes project to mkosi. (note …

After upgrading to openssh-9.8p1, the existing SSH daemon will be unable to accept new connections (see https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/openssh/-/issues/5). When upgrading remote hosts, please make sure to restart the sshd service using systemctl try-restart sshd right after upgrading. We are evaluating the possibility to automatically apply a restart of the sshd service on upgrade in a future release of the openssh-9.8p1 package.

Arch Linux in June 2024 # archinstall # The archinstall v2.8.1 update has been released, featuring several bug fixes and improvements to partitioning and desktop profiles, along with the introduction of experimental LVM support and the addition of Finnish translation. ArchWeb # ArchWeb 2024-06-12 has been rolled out, which includes an update to Django’s latest major version, Django 5.0 as well as small improvements within our Ruff configuration used as our Python linter.

Arch Linux in May 2024 # Staff # We would like to welcome Bert Peters (bertptrs) as well as Giovanni Harting (anonfunc) as part of the Arch Linux Package Maintainer team. RFC # An RFC has been accepted to introduce “Arch Linux Ports” as testbed for unofficial architectures until they are integrated in the main Arch Linux repositories. devtools # We have released devtools v1.2.0, featuring several new enhancements and improvements. This release includes distro flag changes, notably the addition of no-omit-frame-pointer flags and _FORTIFY_SOURCE level 3.

Rationale Emacs users try to avoid leaving their editor for other tasks. There is an shell (Eshell: The Emacs Shell), an integration into Secret Service API (Emacs auth-source Library 0.3) and countless other integrations. Search is a central element of the Gnome desktop environment. Many applications implement the Search Provider dbus interface to provide suitable results. The aim of this package is to make these search results also available within the Emacs editor.

I went on a trip to Mongolia to find out the meaning behind my name.

Arch Linux in April 2024 # Staff # Project Leader Election # Recently, we held our Arch Linux Project Leader election, and the current Project Leader, Levente “anthraxx” Polyák, was the sole nominee. As per our election rules, he has been re-elected for another term. Congratulations to Levente, and we wish him continued success in his leadership! RFC # An RFC has been accepted to grant all Arch Linux staff members, not limited to those in packaging roles, the privilege to initiate RFCs directly, aligning with the broad range of topics these documents encompass.

Recently we held our leader election, and the previous Project Leader Levente "anthraxx" Polyák ran again while no other people were nominated for the role. As per our election rules he is re-elected for a new term. The role of of the project lead within Arch Linux is connected to a few responsibilities regarding decision making (when no consensus can be reached), handling financial matters with SPI and overall project management tasks. Congratulations to Levente and all the best wishes for another successful term! 🥳