March 2009 - Arch-announce - lists.archlinux.org

[arch-announce] ATI catalyst support dropped
by Recent News Updates 23 Mar '09

23 Mar '09

As many of you may have noticed, support for the catalyst ATI Linux driver, has been moved to the AUR (Arch Linux User Repository). This was partly due to lack of motivation from the maintainer in charge of the package and lack of support from AMD to the general Linux ecosystem. AMD has been great to the Linux community, and they are constantly improving their support, but they have a long way to go in terms of general Linux distributions support. Officially supported options include the xf86-video-ati and the xf86-video-radeonhd drivers. Both are discussed in the Arch Linux Wiki (search for ATI). Both drivers are high quality, and are constantly improving. I suggest the xf86-video-ati driver as it has been updated more frequently than xf86-video-radeonhd. The catalyst and catalyst-utils packages now reside in AUR, where they have been adopted by user “draje”. He has updated the package to the 9.4 version that was given to Ubuntu for the release of xorg-server 1.6. These drivers therefore explicitly depend on xorg-server 1.6 from [testing] -- it will soon be transferred to [extra]. Sorry for any inconveniences this may cause you. We do not want to hold xorg-server 1.6 in testing any longer solely because of a closed source driver. URL: http://www.archlinux.org/news/439/

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[arch-announce] Bug Day - Saturday 21st March
by Recent News Updates 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

On Saturday the 21st of March we will be holding a bug day to combat the ever increasing number of reports in our bug tracker. We will clear outdated reports, fix/implement those that already have patches provided or are trivial to fix/implement and discuss the pros and cons of implementing some feature requests. A rough TODO list that you can add to is on the <a href="http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bug_Day_TODO">wiki</a> Please join us in #archlinux-bugs on irc.freenode.net during the 21st of March. We live in many different timezones, so hopefully a dev will be present at all times during the day. URL: http://www.archlinux.org/news/438/

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[arch-announce] Newsletter for March, 2009
by Recent News Updates 06 Mar '09

06 Mar '09

The Arch Linux Newsletter team is proud to announce the <a href="http://www.archlinux.org/static/newsletters/newsletter-2009-mar.html">Newsletter for February 2009</a>. To discuss this newsletter, <a href="http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=510237">click here</a>. To read past issues of the Arch Linux Newsletter, <a href="http://www.archlinux.org/static/newsletters/">here they are</a>. URL: http://www.archlinux.org/news/437/

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[arch-announce] xorg-server 1.6.0 in testing
by Recent News Updates 02 Mar '09

02 Mar '09

The upcoming version of xorg-server will have a lot of workarounds and patches removed. Doing so, the package becomes easier to understand, as even its maintainer has no idea what is happening anymore. When upgrading to xorg-server-1.6, you will see these file conflicts on most systems: error: failed to prepare transaction (conflicting files) xorg-server: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri.so exists in filesystem xorg-server: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so exists in filesystem It's safe and advised to overwrite these files. The symlinks were previously created from post_install by the xorg-server and nvidia-utils packages. It is advised to install xorg-server first by using "pacman -Sf xorg-server", after which you can upgrade the rest of your system. This release of xorg-server requires a rebuild of all video and input drivers. Older drivers will fail to load with an ABI mismatch. Drivers in our repositories will receive an update to match the xorg-server ABI. Nvidia has updated their latest drivers with support for this version of xorg-server. AMD does not support xorg-server-1.6 yet in their Catalyst drivers. AMD users are advised to switch to the xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd drivers instead, or keep any X.Org related updates on hold via IgnorePkg in pacman.conf. This can be done by putting xorg-server in IgnorePkg in pacman.conf. All other updates should have conflicts set, so it will be clear which additional packages should be added to the IgnorePkg list on your system. Note that there will be no support for older versions of xorg-server when this version moves to extra. URL: http://www.archlinux.org/news/436/

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