Arch Linux Newsletter

Feb 05, 2006
1.0.0
Jason Chu jason@archlinux.org
Jason "CanyonKnight" canyonknight@gmail.com

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. Devland
  3. Forum Highlights
  4. Mailing List Highlights
  5. Package Highlights
  6. FAQ
  7. ArchStats
  8. Seti@home
  9. folding@home
  10. Bugs
  11. Closing

Front Page News

  1. dvd+rw-tools: do not use 6.0-1 - update to 6.1-1

    update: dvd+rw-tools 6.0-1 and new linux kernels do not really like each other... you will get problems if you use 6.0-1 therefore forget about the workarounds and simply upgrade to dvd+rw-tools 6.1-1 and it should work again.

Devland

  1. The developers had their third developer meeting on the 22nd. Topics of discussion included the cd installer, more scheduled releases, new servers (so archlinux.org isn't down so often), pacbuild, the licenses package, and help docs. I'll go into more detail about these topics below.
  2. The cd installer will be re-written. Along with that, the whole cd will be re-organized to add more functionality during an install. Most likely, support for floppy installs will slowly disappear.
  3. We plan on having maintenance releases every 3 months, their version numbers will be X.Y.Z (like 0.7.1). Major releases will happen when there are large changes to the installation environment (udev, initrd, installer). The next maintenance release will be in April.
  4. Soon we will try to assemble a release testing team, to help streamline our releases a bit better. If you're interested in trying out new install cds before they're released (especially if you have less common hardware configurations) contact Judd (judd@archlinux.org) or Jason (jason@archlinux.org).
  5. The server running archlinux.org is overworked. We hope to get our hands on two new machines and set up hosting to further improve your archlinux browsing experience.
  6. Pacbuild is still coming along. If anyone is interested in offering a machine to do builds (i686, amd64, ppc, i586), it would be greatly appreciated. All you'd have to do is run a pacbuild daemon on your machine and it would take a bunch of your processor when packages needed to be built. My original i686 build box fried in a power surge.
  7. There is now a licenses package in base. The common licenses included in it are APL, CDDL, EPL, FDL, GPL, LGPL, MPL, and PHP. Please begin using the license variable as outlined in this document.
  8. The new version of pacman (2.9.8) includes an options=() array, inside which you can specify 'keepdocs'. This will stop makepkg from removing documentation in /usr/share/doc. This will be used for packages that make sense to have extra documentation with them (libraries, programming languages, etc).

Forum Highlights

  1. tpowa called for people to help with Linuxtag 2006 and allow Arch Linux to have a booth like last year.
  2. Panu located a review of Arch Linux in Linux Magazine , which is running in the March 2006 issue.
  3. tomfitzyuk wanted to get people's input on the various Desktop Environments, and which he should use.
  4. lumiwa wanted to know how secure Arch Linux is by default. It must be remembered security is not a product or result but rather a process that is always taking place.
  5. ben017f has a setup using User Mode Linux and wanted to know about anyone who has done work with it as well
  6. A thread was brought back to life that reminds us of qingy, a GUI allowing a user to log in without the overhead of X.org.

Mailing List Highlights

  1. The discovery of the dvd+rw-tools upstream problem affecting k3b which was later fixed. The front page news section has more...
  2. The question of why Arch Linux supports SMP by default and whether it really does effect ndiswrapper.
  3. There are many different ways Python is documented, each including different amounts of information. It was brought up how Arch Linux handles the documentation and which it uses.

Package Highlights

  1. Many changes to the udev package are going on in the [testing] repository, you can read about the new changes in Arch with udev 081 and udev 083 on the Arch Blog.

FAQ

Q: What is the difference between AUR, COMMUNITY, and UNSUPPORTED?

A: AUR(Arch User Repository) is the name of the whole new system which is maintained by the TUs(Trusted Users). It lets anybody that signs up to upload PKGBUILDs to UNSUPPORTED but only TUs have access to COMMUNITY which is a binary repo that you can use with Pacman.


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 upstreams or got a license 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: 653
Longest recorded uptime: 496 days, 9 hours, 22 minutes, 38 seconds.
Average uptime: 11 days, 13 hours, 52 minutes, 38 seconds.
Least packages installed on a system: 88
Average installed packages: 389
Most packages installed on a system: 2539
Lowest Bogomips: 266.19
Average Bogomips: 3520.10
Highest Bogomips: 6995.96

Seti@Home

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

Members: 14
Total credit: 127,241.79

folding@Home

Arch Linux Team Page

Team Number: 45032
Members: 32
Score: 274682
Ranking: 908 of 42612

Bugs

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