Arch Linux

We are happy to announce our newest public service: A manual pages indexing site at man.archlinux.org that publishes the man pages of all our packages and allows you to search and browse them. Check out, for example, the man page of tar. You can also find this service linked to in the sidebar as well as on every package detail page. Thanks to Wiki Admin lahwaacz for developing archmanweb for this purpose. While there are other man page indexing sites out there, it is our hope that publishing man pages matching the versions of our released packages further improves Arch accessibility and documentation.

A lot has happened since the last reproducible builds summit in Marrakesh 2019, this blog post is a summary of the progress made in 2020 of everything related to getting reproducible builds in Arch Linux. archlinux-repro Also known as repro this tool allows one to rebuild a package and check …

End of the year and third blog post! Hope everyone has had a nice new years eve :) The first news of the month is that Remi Gacogne was accepted as Trusted User. Congratulations to him and super exciting. Other then that I have had a meeting with the devops team discussing how we should implement the debuginfod system on our infrastructure. I have written up the ansible role for debuginfod and it was more or less decided that we want to host it on a small VPS for the service itself, and sync debug packages to the host to serve them.

Due to issues with our anti spam measures, we had to migrate those mailing lists, that were sent from @archlinux.org before to the @lists.archlinux.org domain. Submission to the mailing list is not affected and still works with @archlinux.org. Mails get redirected automagically. The only change that may need to be considered on your side are filters and rules matching the From or List-id header which changed accordingly.

Arch Linux got kubernetes packaged into the [community] repository the past week with the hard work of David Runge. I contribute to testing the packages so I thought it would be interesting to write up quickly the testing that was done. Originally I did the testing with docker but with the dockershim deprecation I rewrote the blog to utilize containerd instead. David has reworked the kubernetes archwiki article as well. It currently doesn’t cover all use cases and contributions welcome.

We have been slowly working towards the next pacman release. The major change for this release is the implementation of parallel downloads. Check out this video: It is time for this feature to receive some wider testing. Grab the package Continue reading →

Second month of doing these posts. In short not much has been happening the past weeks, but that would be a slight lie. I have sponsored rgacognes Trusted User application. The application was posted to the mailing list, and it’s currently being voted and decided by a weeks time. There has also been some discussion for years about bringing debug packages into Arch. This has largely been stalled but I brought it back to life again.

The Problem Someone enters an IRC support channel and proclaims their dovecot server has been hacked and a non existing user sends spam email from their server. The initial reaction might be something along the lines of Wat ಠ_ಠ With the following assumption that the user clearly did something wrong. Hosting email is difficult after all. I don’t quite recall how rest of the support went, but it was solved and the root cause was not found.

We are happy to announce that the talks held at Arch Conf 2020 have been edited and released :) The can be found on CCC Media, Youtube and in our archive. On our archive you can find a copy of all the edited talks, the submitted questions from the Q&A and the presentation slides. We have also included the DJ mixes from the break, the assets used for the OBS stream, and the break animation along with the background used for the presentations.

We are very happy to announce that accessibility features have been added to our installation medium with archiso v49. From release 2020.11.01 onward these are available via the 2nd boot loader menu item. A specific installation guide can be found on the wiki. Many thanks go to Alexander Epaneshnikov who integrated the features from the TalkingArch project into archiso's releng profile, which is used for creating the installation medium. Note: The boot loader timeouts have been set to 15s to allow blind users to select the menu item as the boot loaders themselves do not offer accessibility features.

I wanted to start writing these for myself as I have been reading quite a few monthly resports from Chris Lamb and other Debian contributors. They make for interesting content for readers curious about what distribution maintainers do during a month, and motivation for myself as not everything one does is visible work. I’ll try have some sort of structure with them, by starting off with the menial tasks, and add the meeting notes and misc contributions at the bottom.

pkgstats is a tool that gathers and analyses installed packages of Arch Linux users. It started as a small shell script back in 2008 and helps us among other things to determine which packages are no longer used but also which packages from the AUR are popular candidates. Previously I rewrote the server part and … Continue reading "pkgstats version 3: lookup package statistics from your terminal"

The libtraceevent package prior to version 5.9-1 was missing a soname link. This has been fixed in 5.9-1, so the upgrade will need to overwrite the untracked files created by ldconfig. If you get any of these errors libtraceevent: /usr/lib/libtraceevent.so.1 exists in filesystem when updating, use pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/libtraceevent.so.1 to perform the upgrade.

nvidia is currently partially incompatible with linux >= 5.9 [1] [2]. While graphics should work fine, CUDA, OpenCL, and likely other features are broken. Users who've already upgraded and need those features are advised to switch to the linux-lts kernel for the time being until a fix for nvidia is available.

Last weekend we had what I consider to be the very successful Arch Conf 2020. This included a talk by Michael Stapelberg about distri, his Linux distribution to research fast package management. Michael showed an example of installing QEMU in Continue reading →

The ghostpcl and ghostxps packages prior to version 9.53.2-2 were missing a soname link each. This has been fixed in 9.53.2-2, so the upgrade will need to overwrite the untracked files created by ldconfig. If you get any of these errors ghostpcl: /usr/lib/libgpcl6.so.9 exists in filesystem ghostxps: /usr/lib/libgxps.so.9 exists in filesystem when updating, use pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/libgpcl6.so.9,/usr/lib/libgxps.so.9 to perform the upgrade.

Schedule The schedule for the conference has been published for the conference and can be found in the CFP system. Please check out all the great talks we have! https://pretalx.com/arch-conf-online-2020/talk/ Stream The stream is going to be available through the CCC Video Operation Center, which will be hosting our main stream, and a re-stream on Twitch. C3VOC: https://streaming.media.ccc.de/archconf2020/ Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/archlinuxconf For questions during the Q&A sessions, one can use the IRC channel #archlinux-conf-q&a on Freenode, or write them on the Twitch chat.

On the 10th and 11th of October there is going to be an online edition of Arch Conf. The conference is going to have presentations from the Arch team along with community submitted presentations and lightning talks. We are proud to announce the first revision of the schedule! https://pretalx.com/arch-conf-online-2020/talk/ The conference timezone is CEST/UTC+2: https://everytimezone.com/s/40cc4784 Updates and additional information can be found on the conference page: https://conf.archlinux.org See you there! Cheers from the conference team.

We would like to hold a bug wrangling day on the 13th of September to reduce the large amount of open tickets. If you cannot take part in the bug wrangling day, then feel free to help us any time before that event. How? Please review all bugs that were reported by you and check if they are still valid. Please request a task closure on the bug tracker if the task may be closed. Otherwise please provide further information so that we can continue to work on the bug. We cannot fix bugs without your feedback. Questions? Join us at #archlinux-bugs channel on irc.freenode.net during 13th of September. As we live in different timezones not all devs and bug wranglers will be available at the same time, but feel free to report your issues to any dev available. Also please check your mailboxes that may contain notifications about comments made on your tickets.

Intro I spent the last three to four months working on the open source project in-toto as part of my Google Summer of Code stipend at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Followers of my blog might have read already about in-toto. If you do not know the project, I suggest you have a look on my introduction to in-toto. The introduction article has been written as part of my Google Summer of Code stipend and gives a good overview about the project and what its objectives are.

During the weekend of 10th and 11th of October there is going to be an online Arch Linux conference. The details are currently being worked on, but the Call for Participation has been published and people can submit their talk ideas until the 18th of September. All talks are expected to be recorded as it will ease the planning for the live portion of the stream, however there are going to be live Q&A session with the presenters if they are available.

Recently I have installed Arch Linux on a shiny new Lenovo Thinkpad T14 AMD. This blog article shall mainly be a reminder for me for the future, but feel free to use anything useful in it. I did not install Arch Linux for a long time (nearly over 8 years, lol). Therefore I never saw a need to automate an Arch Linux installation. I am aware, that there are solutions for automated Arch Linux installation.

tl;dr Just give me the link to the PR: https://github.com/in-toto/in-toto-golang/pull/56 Intro This blog post tracks my accomplishments during my Google Summer of Code 2020 Stipend at CNCF. I have spend around three months on working on https://in-toto.io. For tracking I am using the goal-setting framework OKR (objectives and key results). My main objective has been to implement in-toto-run functionality in the in-toto Go implementation. However, I have also fixed a few other issues on this journey and wrote a blog post about in-toto.

Due to the fact that the AUR has been migrated to a new server, the SSH HostKeys used to connect to the host have changed. These are the new keys fingerprints: Ed25519: SHA256:RFzBCUItH9LZS0cKB5UE6ceAYhBD5C8GeOBip8Z11+4 ECDSA: SHA256:uTa/0PndEgPZTf76e1DFqXKJEXKsn7m9ivhLQtzGOCI RSA: SHA256:5s5cIyReIfNNVGRFdDbe3hdYiI5OelHGpw2rOUud3Q8 The fingerprints above can also be found on the AUR home page when not logged in.