wonder's Arch Linux Blog

Since the beginning of the world, trolls has conquered it, with each year passed, the trolls became stronger.

Behold, the greatest era in Arch Linux trolling history has now ended. pacman 4.0 was released last night having package signing.

What’s next? Is there something out there, so powerful, that can be compared with package signing trolls?

Howdy gang, long time no see…

As promised multiple times on forums, GNOME 3.2 beta2 was just released and guess what? We got it! Shinier and full of new features, noticeable are gdm’s brand new look, gnome-online-accounts, gnome-contacts, gnome-documents, epiphany web application support, new user menu and better chat integration. Along with that, nautilus received a new file previewer named sushi, feature that I like the most.

To use this new version you need to enable gnome-unstable repository, as top repository to pacman.conf:

[gnome-unstable]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Have fun testing these packages. Like always packaging bugs should be reported on our bugtracker, anything else considered bugs should be reported to GNOME bugzilla.

NVIDIA users be aware that xorg-server 1.11 from testing is incompatible with the current nvidia driver, even with IgnoreABI. You can switch to nouveau or add xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-synaptics xorg-server-common xorg-server to Ignorepkg.

Discuss this repo on our forums.

I was waiting this review for about 2 weeks now and i was lucky today. Lurking in the #twil channel, i’ve saw somebody mention that the show is beginning and they would review Arch. I’m saying lucky because is the first time i managed to watch it live.

With me in the #archlinux-tu channel was td123, Bluewind, louipc, CryptoCrack, teiresias, schuay and we started to talk about the show, doing bets and live commenting about what is happening. I said that they would bitch a lot about our python move and in general about our distribution.

Usually i anticipate very well the community reaction but this time i was wrong. Epic fail.

Instead Bryan and Chris  gave us a positive feedback and it seems, we, developers and trusted users, do a pretty damn good job.

Show notes and video

Youtube

P.S: You know what, stop, don’t use arch!

We used to have this section when we had a newsletter every month. Starting today, i’m going to announce modifications in our development team.

Recently five new TUs were joining us!

• Brad Fanella (itsbrad212) from the US, sponsored by Chris Brannon
• Florian Pritz (bluewind), from Austria, sponsored by Thorsten Töpper
• Lukáš Jirkovský (stativ), from Czech Republic, sponsored by Thomas Dziedzic
• Jonathan Conder (PirateJonno), from New Zealand, sponsored by Ionuț Bîru
• Jakob Gruber (schuay), from Austria, sponsored by Laurent Carlier

We give you a warm welcome and wish you to have fun in our team.

I guess everybody now knows that we have a new repository called multilib.  What does that have?

A multilib toolchain that supports both the 32bit (x86) and 64bit (x86_64) formats. This was the only requirement that we missed until now.

pacman -S virtualbox-ose

P.S for all users that are using  my unofficial vbox repo, i suggest to remove it from your pacman.conf because i would shutdown it in the next days.

I must say that i like this kind of actions where the community is interacting with developers and trusted users. It reminds me how awesome are our users.

So what happens in a bug day? We join #archlinux-bugs@Freenode and we work together on bugs submitted on our tracker, trying to see if is still valid, writing builds, searching patches and building packages.

Thanks to td123 (he’s our new TU member) who requested to do this action and doing a lot of work in community project, angvp (our new dev member) who did his first contributions in the main repository, Bluewind for directing and building packages along with us, keenerd making a bot that announce all kind of actions about bugs(opening, closing, edit) and everybody else who participated.

We ended up with something like this:

Hi guys,

i just made another video with commits from a whole year and it looks awesome. I’ve used a forked code swarm which had a lot of improvements compared with the original project.

Tools that i used to make this video:

• code swarm: http://github.com/wonder/code_swarm contains the forked code swarm + the configuration to generate this video (arch.config)
• kdenlive: even that i exclusively use gnome and I’m a big fan of gnome, kdenlive really rulz
• the music was chosen by macrobat from #archlinux channel. He was very inspired to chose this particular soundtrack. It fits perfectly. Many thanks again.

Is really nice to see how a project grows every day and how much time we invest in making arch was it is right now.

Enjoy

Video is located here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj8SUZUoZzU

I think everybody knows already that yesterday pacman 3.4.0 got released. After only one day, i can  say how awesome it is. The pacman development team really spoil us.

My top features that i  enjoy:

• repackaging: makepkg -R. Did you remember how did you do when you realized that you forgot to include something in the finale package? Commenting lines from build function and running makepkg -e? Now using an additional package function,  add the desired files and run makepkg -R, without messing with the build.
• the new architecture  option. I don’t want to remember many times did i managed to install an i686 package on an x86_64 system and noticed only after something was really broken. Now pacman would refuse to install and  an additional flag is need to force it.
• no more || return 1

What are your favorite features?

Today i’ll celebrate NO Gooogle Day, since google is making me to  watch some random pictures that i don’t want. I really hope that tomorrow everything is back to normal.

I have two points that i want to clarify about our ffmpeg package.

• the “downgrade” from 30526-1 -> 22511-1 is actually an update, but because my lack of glasses </joke>, i used the wrong revision number when i changed the version schema from a date to revision.
• don’t mark as out of date this package because 0.5.1 version is released,  don’t do  it even when 0.6 will be released. We don’t follow 0.5 branch and even 0.6 branch. We are following trunk because, as one developer once said,  “packaging yet another, “soon to be outdated” version that is not supported by us is not a good idea.”