April 2008 - Arch-general - lists.archlinux.org

[arch-general] Arch Linux presentation in free software events
by Hugo Doria 28 Apr '08

28 Apr '08

Last week we had a great Free Software event here in Brasi: The International Forum of Free Software (with nearly 8000 people). I had the pleasure of presenting (with Douglas Soares and Kessia Pinheiro) the Arch in a lecture. The lecture was very nice and the room was completely full. We managed to show very well the distribution and gain more new users for the Arch. We also had a stand to show the distro, take questions and install Arch for the users. The brazilian community is getting bigger and bigger everyday. =) Yesterday i did the same thing in another event: FLISOL (Festival of Latin American Free Software Installation). The result was awesome too. Photos can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdoria/2434570553/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdoria/2446385279/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdoria/2447216974/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fisl90/ And the presetation (in pt-br) here: http://hdoria.archlinux-br.org/palestras/fisl9.odp What i want to know is: Someone has made any presentation of Arch in events? How has been the receptivity of people? What you guys think about this? -- Hugo Doria http://hdoria.archlinux-br.org

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[arch-general] which forum to announce new AUR packages?
by David Rosenstrauch 27 Apr '08

27 Apr '08

Is there a section of the forum to announce new AUR packages? I saw a section to *request* them, but not one to announce. Should it get announced there? Or is announcing not really done anymore? (I recall it used to be done back when AUR was "incoming".) TIA, DR

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[arch-general] Can't see all of installation console
by gipper gipper 27 Apr '08

27 Apr '08

I'm able to boot the installation cd no problem. Everything looks fine. I can read the entire screen - for the boot prompt. At the boot prompt I type: arch As the kernel proceeds to load my video mode switches to an unusable mode. The boot process proceeds and, from what I can tell, drops me into the shell - as it should. However, I can't see the prompt - it's way below the bottom of my screen. The video mode is not the same as the boot CD or bios mode at powerup. For some reason the kernel decided to switch to some awful, unusable mode. I've tried every combination that I can think of at the boot prompt: - vga=normal - vga=ask (tried a bunch of these with and without "scan" option) still no luck. I haven't been able to find a combination that gets the console into a usable form. I'm trying this fresh install on a separate partition because I had done a pacman -Syu a week ago on a different partition (that I've used for years) and that kernel update (last week) proceeded to cause this same sort of crummy console behavior. On that partition I am able to login on the console and startx. However, the console is unusable itself. In the process of trying to fix that I thought that a fresh install on another partition would yield some clues. But, the fresh install can't even get into the /arch/setup step because I can't see the entire screen. So, what's changed in the kernel in the last few months that has caused my Diamond Viper V770 AGP RIVA TNT2 to not play with the kernel anymore? I expected a boot from an install CD to NOT have this problem. But it does. So, my old (trusty) Arch partition has a crummy console mode - but I can still get to X - but I'm annoyed at the crummy console video. And my test, new installation can't even really get going because I can't see the /arch/setup stuff in the crummy console mode. If I were new to Arch today, I'd be moving on, because I can't even see the installation screen in its entirety. But, for me, Arch is the only way to go - so I've gotta fix this. Do I have to roll my on kernel? ACK!!! I hope not. any ideas? TheGipp

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[arch-general] Arch64 specific mailing list?
by Grigorios Bouzakis 24 Apr '08

24 Apr '08

Hi, i am getting my new shinny Quad Core desktop machine tomorrow and i am thinking of running x86_64 on that machine. I never really did bother getting familiar with that part of Archlinux until now since i didnt have a reason to. Browsing the wiki and forum today made me realise that there is no x86_64 specific mailing list. There is only the arch-ports one but this one seems to be mostly PPC related. Is there any chance of having a seperate mailing list for x86_64 any time soon? Adding the i686 to the arch-general description too & even renaming the list to archlinux-i686 or similar would imho be great too since we all agree the x86_64 port is supported officially and is here to stay. Yes, i know it has been renamed not too long ago but i think its a good idea. Greg

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[arch-general] texlive (again?)
by Jan Spakula 23 Apr '08

23 Apr '08

Hello Archers, I want to bring up the TeX distributions issue. Current status: - tetex in extra: unmaintained (upstream) though still usable, some parts are already getting outdated (pdftex, some latex packages); - texlive in community: firmicus keeps it pretty up to date, the dist itself is actively developed. Proposal: Switch to texlive eventually officially (for now keeping tex-related pkgs in community). How it can be done: - from the dev side: 1) "officially" announce that the switch *is* going to happen. 2) move tetex and all packages depending on it from extra to community (that's only: kile, latex2html, lyx, texmacs) (the trouble is that these makedep on tetex: evince, kdegraphics, yodl; but maybe just keep tetex on the build machine for a time being?) - from TUs: 3) gradually replace tetex deps by texlive deps in community packages - from users: 4) gradually replace tetex deps in AUR by texlive Comments: - 3) and 4) don't need to happen instantly - we'll just have 2 tex dists at the same "level" in community for a while - note that none of the above programs link anything against tetex, they just need working tex compiler (which texlive definitely provides), so they don't even need to be recompiled - the official statement is important, so that we can nag maintainers to change dependencies ;) - there's been on/off-going discussion about this on the forums (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=358172 - tomk has said "Regarding the possibility of bringing texlive into the official repos, there are currently two missing ingredients among the existing dev team: interest and time. AFAIK none of us is a habitual tex user, and that would be the first requirement." - so this proposal asks for the opposite: bring the so far official tetex down to community, to level it out with texlive and make the switch powered by the users possible.) What do *you* think? PS. Sorry for the long e-mail (about 15-times longer than I usually write). -- Jan Spakula

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[arch-general] cairo and cairo-lcd conflict preventing me from getting updates
by Alec Hussey 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

Hey everyone, Ive been kind of frustrated lately because I haven't been able to update any of my pacakges because of a conflict between cairo and cairo-lcd. Here is the output from pacman. [maddog39@desktop ~]$ sudo pacman -Syu :: Synchronizing package databases... core is up to date extra is up to date community is up to date :: Starting full system upgrade... resolving dependencies... looking for inter-conflicts... :: cairo conflicts with cairo-lcd. Remove cairo-lcd? [Y/n] n error: unresolvable package conflicts detected error: failed to prepare transaction (conflicting dependencies) :: cairo: conflicts with cairo-lcd I obviously want to keep that package and I even entered it in pacman.conf under HoldPkg and seems to have no affect. I dont know what I should do. Thanks! Alec Hussey

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[arch-general] Launchpad.net
by A. Klitzing 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

Hi there, I registered "Arch Linux" to launchpad.net [1]. I like the idea of a corporate platform for linux distributions. I don't want to replace existing infrastructure (flyspray, ...). But it will help (me and some other, I think) to mark a bug to be presence in Arch, too. I used a lot of bugtrackers and the bugtracker of launchpad works very nice (even LP lacks flyspray-support at the moment [4]). Maybe someone wants to work with Arch and launchpad, too, like forwarding bugs to Arch if needed. I'm open to add people to that team [2] or give ownership to developers. Also I asked for Arch-Support on PPA [3]. But that will be a low priority. Best regards, André Klitzing [1] https://launchpad.net/archlinux [2] https://launchpad.net/~archlinux [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cms.launchpad.user/3508 [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/28738

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[arch-general] kernel26 2.6.25-1 enters [testing]
by Thomas Bächler 21 Apr '08

21 Apr '08

The new 2.6.25 kernel and most of the external modules are in [testing]. Changes: - Complete configuration overhaul - Removed phc patch - Removed mactel patch The removal of these patches was because a) there are no new patches available for 2.6.25 and b) I am trying to reduce the amount of patching, especially if it only benefits a few people or can be potentially dangerous. If there are any problems due to the configuration changes or new kernel bugs, please let me know. If you want to know more about the real changes, read here: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_25 I didn't update any modules, so if there are new versions available for any, please inform their maintainers. The following modules are currently broken. I didn't do any research on those yet, so if anyone knows something, please let me know. - atl2 (Simo, could you have a look, you must probably update it) - catalyst - martian - openswan-klips - slmodem (USB symbols are now GPL only, this driver will never work again unless it's rewritten in userspace - is this only a USB driver or also a PCI driver?) I wish you all happy testing.

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[arch-general] alternate dependencies?
by Neil Darlow 21 Apr '08

21 Apr '08

Hi, Seeing the earlier post re. tetex and texlive perhaps there is a case for extending pacman to support alternate dependencies. By this I mean a package could depend on one of a choice of packages. The syntax could be something like: depends=( tetex|texlive ) where the individual dependencies retain their current features e.g. versions etc. Opinions welcomed. Regards, Neil Darlow

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[arch-general] kdelibs 3.5.9
by Jakub Schmidtke 21 Apr '08

21 Apr '08

Is there anybody using KDE in Arch at all? It has already been a month since submitting bug report about any KDE editor based on Kate being severely broken in KDE 3.5.9 (http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9891 ) and even though kdelibs package was updated in the meantime, this bug hasn't been fixed. There was no response or a comment, and there is almost no work needed to resolve this issue, since I provided a patch (taken from KDE mailinglist - this bug is confirmed regression fixed in KDE's svn) and a PKGBUILD. I use modified kdelibs package anyway, but I think this is something that really really should be fixed.

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