Arch Linux Newsletter

Sep 10, 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. X.Org 7.1 enters testing

    X.Org 7.1 has been uploaded to testing. Please test this release carefully, as it will be the main program taking care of all our displays once it moves to current.

    Be sure to update every driver on your system with a version for X.Org 7.1, the X.Org 7.0 drivers will not work. All drivers known to us have been rebuilt for X.Org 7.1.

    Users who need nvidia-legacy for their old nvidia hardware should take some precaution. Nvidia has not released drivers for these cards to work with X.Org 7.1, resulting in problems. For these users, Gentoo has a good article in their wiki: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_XOrg_7.1_With_Older_NVidia_Drivers

  2. Expat 2.0.0 in testing

    Expat 2.0.0 will enter testing soon. The new version of expat breaks library compatibility with older versions, so quite a few recompiles are needed.

    By the time expat 2.0.0 gets into testing, the known packages which need recompile have been recompiled. Please report bugs against packages in current, extra and unstable that need a recompile to work with expat 2.0.0 when you find them.

Devland

  1. The arch64 0.7.2 cd was released. Get it on the download page.
  2. Paul has been working on making diskless arch machines. He's looking into a mkinitcpio hook so you can easily use it.
  3. The IRC archlinux channel has been innundated with people who have hostname cloaks. If you're a user and think they're hip and cool, donate to us and get your very own archlinux/user/yournick cloak.
  4. Aaron has started discussion about /etc/mailcap and /etc/mime.types files being more managed. Currently a few packages supply their own (which causes conflicts), but if we want things to be more configurable, we'll have to figure out a system.
  5. We may see a return of the bug squashing days... watch this space for more information.
  6. Tobias Powalowski has a lot exams coming up so he's going to be backing off a little bit on his updates. Good luck with your tests! He's been gone from August 18th for 8 weeks.
  7. A few packages have been split up for different reasons: cups, mysql, cyrus-sasl, and postgres. All of them have caused splits in other packages. By breaking up the larger parts and the smaller parts of these packages, we're able to remove a good number of other packages by creating dependencies on the smaller, optional, less conflicting packages. Jan's work is so good, you should have had no problems updating between versions or installing these packages exactly the same way you used to.
  8. James has exams from August 26th to December 1st so he's going to be pretty scarce as well. Good luck!
  9. Because everyone is so busy, we're looking at bringing on some more developers. News shortly.
  10. Damir is gone 2 weeks from Sept 2nd. He's away on a biology course.
  11. Jan is gone on 3 weeks holiday as of sometime this week.
  12. Andy is gone for about a month, until October.
  13. Varun (ganja_guru) is busy from the 12th to the 20th.
  14. We are talking about the GPL's restrictions on making the source of packages available when you distribute binaries. Most likely we will mirror the sources of all packages soon.

Forum Highlights

  1. Askadar created a graphical front end for profile switching using netcfg.
  2. mucknert wondered what programs people use for e-mail in Arch Linux.
  3. baze asked about module loading in rc.conf which led to a explanation of the rc.conf module functions.
  4. mhakali let everyone know of a fast mirror in Sweden for Arch Linux.
  5. brazzmonkey was interested in prioritizing network traffic.
  6. Peibol was looking for a way to have the sysrq key combinations work properly.

Mailing List Highlights

  1. Setting up the proper permissions in Konqueror for removable media use.
  2. Discussion on what documentation would be useful when experiencing boot problems.
  3. Transferring files through the use of bluetooth.

Package Highlights

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 upstream or has a licensing 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: 836
Longest recorded uptime: 494 days, 3 hours, 29 minutes, 25 seconds.
Average uptime: 12 days, 2 hour, 47 minutes, 3 seconds.
Average installed packages: 451
Average system memory: 733MB
Lowest Bogomips: 266.05
Average Bogomips: 3527.41
Highest Bogomips: 6807.21

Seti@Home

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

Members: 35
Total credit: 369,869.44

folding@Home

Arch Linux Team Page
Extended Team Statistics

Team Number: 45032
Members: 70
Score: 997556
Ranking: 453 of 45317

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