Arch Linux Newsletter

June 27, 2004
1.0.0
Jason Chu jason@archlinux.org
Ben Mazer ben@benmazer.net

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

  1. Front Page News
  2. Dev Land
  3. ArchStats
  4. Forum Highlights
  5. Mailing List Highlights
  6. Tur Update
  7. Package Highlights
  8. New Packages
  9. FAQ
  10. Bugs
    1. Closed Bugs
    2. Opened Bugs
  11. Closing

Front Page News

Posted by Judd:
ISO images available via BitTorrent

I've added torrents for the two iso images (base and full). They are on the Download page now.

If you use BitTorrent, please keep your client open as long as possible after the download is complete, as it alleviates some of the bandwidth pull on our server, which means I don't lose as much sleep over the bandwidth costs. ;)

Thanks all.

This Week in Devland

Archstats Update

To Participate, visit: http://archstats.coding-zone.com/

Number of registered systems: 472
Date first system was registered: 20031017
Most recent update occurred: 20040627
Longest recorded uptime: 175 days, 22 hours, 51 minutes, 55 seconds.
Average uptime: 5 days, 3 hours, 52 minutes, 13 seconds.
Least packages installed on a system: 44
Average installed packages: 265
Most packages installed on a system: 733

Forum Highlights

Sweiss and a few other people are having problems getting the Flash plugin working with the latest Mozilla Firefox. No solution has been found. If you have any ideas, please contribute to the thread.

Mailing List Highlights

Discussion was raised again on a true "orphan" flag for pacman. Although pacman -Qe will display packages that aren't needed by any other packages, it can not be used to blindly delete "unused" packages, because many of the packages you installed would be removed. What is needed is a way to differentiate between user installad packages and real orphaned packages. Although this feature is planned, there is no immediate solution. A pacman wrapper could solve this issue, but no one has stepped up to write one.

TUR Update

After much blood and sweat, the gtk-sharp package was fixed by Brice and Tobias. With it's new ability to work, Gtk-sharp was moved into extra (our baby is growing up). More packages should follow.

Package Highlights

New Packages

FAQ

Q: I am receiving an "Error Loading Shared Library" error, what should I do?

A: This is usually a packaging error in which the maintainer missed a dependency. Please file a bug report. You can usually tell what package is missing from the library name. If the library is "libssl-VERSION.so.NUM" for example, you know you need the "openssl" package.

Another problem could be that a library was updated, but a package depended on an older version of that library, so the package must be rebuilt. This would require a bug report as well. You can use ABS to rebuild the package until an official update is released.

Bugs

Bugs Closed

Bugs Opened

Closing

Please remember, if you have anything you'd like to be in the newsletter, feel free to email either Jason or myself. We don't always get all the interesting news.

That's it for this week, stay tuned for more exciting Arch Linux news.