Arch Linux

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! 🥳

Let's delve into the realm of open source funding along with Ratatui's journey.

The vm.max_map_count paramater will be increased from the default 65530 value to 1048576. This change should help address performance, crash or start-up issues for a number of memory intensive applications, particularly for (but not limited to) some Windows games played through Wine/Steam Proton. Overall, end users should have a smoother experience out of the box with no expressed concerns about potential downsides in the related proposal on arch-dev-public mailing list. This vm.max_map_count increase is introduced in the 2024.04.07-1 release of the filesystem package and will be effective right after the upgrade. Before upgrading, in case you are already setting your own value for that parameter in a sysctl.d configuration file, either remove it (to switch to the new default value) or make sure your configuration file will be read with a higher priority than the /usr/lib/sysctl.d/10-arch.conf file (to supersede the new default value).

Okay, sorry for the clickbait. NixOS is not reproducible according to the Reproducible Builds definition. I keep reading people making this claim repeatedly on orange-site, even LWN.net made a similar claim when writing about Nix and Guix earlier this week.1 Along with their recently launched wiki. So, what is the Reproducible Builds definition?2 When is a build reproducible? A build is reproducible if given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can recreate bit-by-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts.

Please see the Arch main page announcement and take appropriate action. https://archlinux.org/news/the-xz-packa … ackdoored/

TL;DR: Upgrade your systems and container images now! As many of you may have already read (one), the upstream release tarballs for xz in version 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 contain malicious code which adds a backdoor. This vulnerability is tracked in the Arch Linux security tracker (two). The xz packages prior to version 5.6.1-2 (specifically 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1) contain this backdoor. The following release artifacts contain the compromised xz:

• installation medium 2024.03.01
• virtual machine images 20240301.218094 and 20240315.221711
• container images created between and including 2024-02-24 and 2024-03-28

The affected release artifacts have been removed …

Please join me in extending our profound "Thank you"s to 2ManyDogs who has hung up their ban hammer and now joins other former moderators in the infamous Fellows Taco Lounge. In addition, it is my extreme pleasure to welcome Schard as our newest moderation team member.

We hope y'all had a good start in the new year of 2024 — With the new year usually come new resolutions. If you don't have any so far, we have one for you: What if you decided to give Arch a bit of help with testing package updates this year? Arch uses testing repositories as a buffer for core/critical package updates (or any other package updates that would benefit from being tested first) before entering the stable repositories. Testing these package updates helps us to catch more bugs upfront and ensures flawless updates for the stable repos, and that is where you can help! By joining the official Arch Linux Testing Team, you'll get the ability to "sign off" packages in testing after vouching for their correctness (or reporting a bug otherwise). This helps Arch Package Maintainers catching eventual bugs upfront and helps to move packages out of the testing repositories faster and more efficiently. We are not necessarilly looking for in depth testing. Verifiying that a program launches correctly and that you're able to perform your usual routine with it is already a good test on its own. You can also check the general testing guidelines. This is a very effective and rather easy way to contribute to Arch Linux. The more testers we have, the more reliable packages updates will be. We hope to see some of you there, also join us on IRC on Libera in #archlinux-testing!

With the release of mkinitcpio v38, several hooks previously provided by Arch packages have been moved to the mkinitcpio upstream project. The hooks are: systemd, udev, encrypt, sd-encrypt, lvm2 and mdadm_udev. To ensure no breakage of users' setup occurs, temporary conflicts have been introduced into the respective packages to prevent installing packages that are no longer compatible. The following packages needs to be upgraded together:

• mkinitcpio 38-2
• systemd 255.4-2
• lvm2 2.03.23-3
• mdadm 4.3-2
• cryptsetup 2.7.0-3

Please note that the mkinitcpio flag --microcode, and the microcode option in the preset files, has been deprecated in favour of a new microcode hook. This also allows you to drop the microcode initrd lines from your boot configuration as they are now packed together with the main initramfs image.

Sharing my experience after giving a talk at FOSDEM 2024!

Problem statement As part of dabbling with self-hosting again, I installed CasaOS on an Oracle Cloud free Ampere instance to try it out. After setting it aside for a few weeks, when I logged in via SSH and tried to use sudo I realized I absolutely couldn’t remember my user’s password 😅 The standard operating procedure in this case is to either reboot the machine on a live system and use that to chroot into the local install, or fiddle with GRUB rescue/kernel command line.1 But since I could still install containers through CasaOS web interface, I thought I’d …

Arch Linux in January 2024 # Staff # We would like to welcome Vladimir LAVALLADE (Erus Iluvatar) to their new role as ArchWiki Administrator. Infrastructure # The DevOps team has recently provisioned a new EPYC 9454P build server for Arch Linux packaging. This high-performance server is meant to streamline the packaging process, ensuring more efficient building of resource hungry package builds. mkinitcpio # mkinitcpio v37.2 and v37.3 have been released.

As someone who has to use a laptop for work, I keep my laptop plugged in 8 hours or more a day, 7 days a week. The laptop's battery during these days would discharge and charge, slowly degrading the battery because only the last ~ 20% would be charged and discharged …

I recently realized stdout is much faster than stderr for Rust. Here are my findings after diving deep into this rabbit hole.

We are making dbus-broker our default implementation of D-Bus, for improved performance, reliability and integration with systemd. For the foreseeable future we will still support the use of dbus-daemon, the previous implementation. Pacman will ask you whether to install dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units. We recommend picking the default. For a more detailed rationale, please see our RFC 25.

Chromecast is one of those devices I just generally use a lot. They are small practical and enables me to stream video or music to my TV from multiple devices. But it also requires you to have a supported browser or video player. This is obviously a bit boring. There has been multiple command line chromecast streamers through the years. But their ffmpeg usage has been shoddy at best with no hardware decoding support and usually quite bad implementations.

Arch Linux in December 2023 # Staff # We would like to welcome Jakub Klinkovský (lahwaacz) as part of the Arch Linux Package Maintainer team. User meetup # During the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3), we hosted a user meetup. At this event, we presented our latest achievements and developments. Additionally, we held an open Q&A session to engage and connect with our community. dbscripts # We performed a thorough cleanup of the codebase, removing all legacy SVN functionality that is no longer necessary.

Terminology considerations “Server management interface”, “control panel”, “dashboard”… While investigating Free and Open Source graphical server management software, I had trouble establishing the categorical difference between the different solutions I was reading about. My use case being a “single user homelab/server” and not a multi-tenancy reseller/web hosting solution, I initially left aside the well established category of control panels (with the exception of HestiaCP). The projects that caught my interest were Cockpit, HestiaCP, Portainer, CapRover, CasaOS, Cloudron, and to a lesser extent, Yacht. But try as I …

We are happy to announce that the migration of the bugtracker to GitLab is done! 🥳 Thanks to everyone who has helped during the migration! This means the issue tracker and merge requests on the GitLab package repos are now enabled. The old bugtracker will subsequently be closed down. For archiving reasons there will be a static copy so that links (for example the randomly picked Task #56716) are still stable, migrated bugs have a closing comment pointing to the new URL on GitLab. Packaging bugs are now opened on the repo hosting the corresponding packaging sources, the "Add a new Bug" button on the package page on archlinux.org will automatically direct you to the correct place to open the issue. The workflow afterwards is mostly the same, first our Bug Wranglers will have a look at the issues and triage them, and then they will be handed over to the respective Package Maintainers to fix. A list of all issues can be found here. If you do not have an account for GitLab already (which authenticates against our SSO service), please write us a mail with your desired username to accountsupport@archlinux.org as advised in the banner.

Arch Linux in November 2023 # Arch Summit 2023 # The Arch Summit took place in Hamburg, Germany, on November 4th and 5th, bringing together Arch Linux staff and invited guests. The summit provided an opportunity for the staff to connect, socialize, and delve into discussions regarding various aspects of our distro. A range of topics were explored including but not limited to infrastructure and mirror management, rebuilders for packages, signing enclave, mkinitcpio, packaging tooling improvements, and community building.

Arch Linux in October 2023 # Staff # We would like to welcome Christian Heusel (gromit) to the Arch Linux DevOps team, expanding his responsibilities. bugbuddy # The initial version of Bugbuddy, our GitLab bug bot, has been introduced. This tool assigns package maintainers to confirmed GitLab issues in the packaging group. Notably, the code has undergone substantial improvement, now operating as a daemon process that can promptly respond to GitLab webhook calls.

In Grants for Operating Systems I discussed my journey through the grant application writing business since beginning of last year. To keep things light and somewhat focused, I left out a topic, that I would like to write about in more detail in the following sections. It's about selection bias in grants provided by Next Generation Internet (NGI), that can be applied for directly or through NLnet. Read more… (11 min remaining to read)

Over the past years I have written (unsuccessful) funding applications for free software projects, associated with the Arch Linux Operating System. This article is about my experiences with applying for numerous funds and my advice for people trying to get their work funded. TL;DR: Writing funding applications is extremely tedious and the selection process mostly intransparent and discouraging. Depending on what you apply for and who you apply with, you may never get funding due to other, additional factors. Read more… (8 min remaining to read)

We are introducing a change in JDK/JRE packages of our distro. This is triggered from the way a JRE is build in modern versions of Java (>9). We are introducing this change in Java 21. To sum it up instead of having JDK and JRE packages coexist in the same system we will be making them conflict. The JDK variant package includes the runtime environment to execute Java applications so if one needs compilation and runtime of Java they need only the JDK package in the future. If, on the other hand, they need just runtime of Java then JRE (or jre-headless) will work. This will (potentially) require a manual user action during upgrade:

• If you have both JDK and JRE installed you can manually install the JDK with pacman -Syu jdk-openjdk and this removes the JRE related packages.
• If you have both JRE and JRE-headless you will need to choose one of them and install it manually since they would conflict each other now.
• If you only have one of the JDK/JRE/JRE-headless pacman should resolve dependencies normally and no action is needed.

At the moment this is only valid for the upcoming JDK 21 release.

Here is how you can publish a Rust project with a single click of a button and automate everything.