November 2016 - Arch-general - lists.archlinux.org

[arch-general] Announcing pacpak
by pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) 22 Feb '17

22 Feb '17

Hello, A specter is haunting the GNU/Linux ecosystem: the specter of per-user containerization. Software like Flatpak and Snappy promise fully sandboxed GNU/Linux application bundles (instead of merely launching an application with fewer privileges but without hiding the operating system, like Bubblewrap or Firejail do). Bundles ship with the version of their dependencies which they need. Dependencies are not force-upgraded with the operating system, but easily upgradable by the bundle creator. The same files in different bundles and versions are deduplicated to save space. Applications can be containerized once for all modern GNU/Linux operating systems. Unlike Docker, Flatpak works without root privileges. Flatpak allows you to run, say, a sandboxed and containerized copy of LibreOffice where opening an infected file can only cause harm to what the sandbox has access to, but not compromise the integrity of the system as a whole. Untrustworthy games can be isolated and run without fear of a system compromise. More generally, most GUI applications should probably be installed to and run from a Flatpak sandbox. This has major implications for traditional package managers. Pacman would be demoted to providing the base system on top of which Flatpak bundles downloaded from elsewhere are run (e.g. from gnome.org or from reallytheofficialwebsiteoflibreofficeipromise.com). However, I would prefer having a unified pacman-like interface for installing containerized and non-containerized applications. I believe a PKGBUILD is a good way to specify how to build an application for Flatpak as well. I do not want to lose the many packages from Arch and derivative distributions. tl;dr: Therefore I started writing a tool called pacpak which uses pacman to populate Flatpak application bundles. Its interface is meant to be similar to pacman’s. For example, in order to install gedit into a Flatpak application using a bundle of the gnome packages as a runtime, you install pacpak from the AUR and use: $ pacpak -S Base xterm You can run the resulting application like this: $ flatpak run $(hostname).app.xterm pacpak is still in its early alpha stages. I do not currently have the time to devote more than a day per week to its development. However, I’d like some feedback on the basic idea. I am also looking for a home for the project in the longer term, since I do not currently like to administer a bug tracker on my own rented server and dislike centralizing all free software development on GitHub or Sourceforge (I’d rather administer my own then). This will only be helpful once all the basic features are implemented of course. I would be glad if pacpak or a similar tool eventually becomes an official Arch project. Let me conclude by thanking those who develop Flatpak, those who package and maintain Flatpak for Arch and all the other Arch and free software developers we rely on. Regards, Florian Pelz

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[arch-general] What's with Ray Rashif?
by sekret＠posteo.se 17 Feb '17

17 Feb '17

Hey guys! I'm not writing this mail to complain, I'm just wondering! I use ardour quite a lot and of course I wanted the update to version 5 as soon as possible. The first release 5.0 didn't build here, so I thought ok, maybe the maintainer of this package is struggling with it too. The current version is 5.3 which compiles and runs just fine. So now I wonder why we don't get an update. So I looked at the other packages of the maintainer, see this link https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?packager=schiv and well, I see a lot of red there! So I must wonder: Is Ray still active? Best sekret

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[arch-general] Single Drive Fresh Install (mbr/grub2) Fails to boot (can boot existing from .iso??)
by David C. Rankin 31 Dec '16

31 Dec '16

All, After 7 years and 30+ installs, I thought I had seen it all. I have a new (used) laptop, that I put a fresh 1T drive in, partitioned and loaded arch. The laptop can't find the drive to boot? Huh? There is only a single drive in the laptop, but it will only boot if booting from grub hd1 (instead of hd0). The failure isn't a "grub prefix/root" problem, the problem is the laptop cannot even find grub to begin with when it is booting on it's own. The only way booting happens is to boot the installer (from USB) and then "Choose existing OS" and edit the prefix (from 0 -> 1). Which itself is wonky, because booting from USB creates the USB thumb-drive as /dev/sdb to begin with and the hard drive as /dev/sda where it should be. This is a strange laptop, it has 2 hard drive bays (HP Elite 8760w). The bios is configured to scan both (as well as USB and PXE) for boot. I can boot the install .iso without issue, install went fine, but in order to boot the new install, I have to "Boot existing OS" from the .iso menu, then 'tab' and change hd0 0 to hd1 0 (I took the existing Win10 SSD out of the same bay I put this drive in - which is also a simple mbr boot - no UEFI). The setup is dead simple (.iso is sdb below) $ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sdb 8:16 1 980M 0 disk ├─sdb2 8:18 1 40M 0 part └─sdb1 8:17 1 792M 0 part sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk ├─sda7 8:7 0 880G 0 part /home ├─sda5 8:5 0 500M 0 part /boot ├─sda1 8:1 0 1K 0 part ├─sda8 8:8 0 1G 0 part └─sda6 8:6 0 50G 0 part / and $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0xff7d45aa Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 2048 1953525167 1953523120 931.5G 5 Extended /dev/sda5 * 4096 1028095 1024000 500M 83 Linux /dev/sda6 1030144 105887743 104857600 50G 83 Linux /dev/sda7 105889792 1951383551 1845493760 880G 83 Linux /dev/sda8 1951385600 1953525167 2139568 1G 82 Linux swap / Solaris grub is installed to /dev/sda with grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda (no errors on install), and grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg I've searched for anything related to HP laptops or this model, but only find issues failing to boot the install CD or the newer UEFI pages like https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HP_EliteBook_840_G1. Has anyone encountered something similar? There is no longer a /boot/grub/device.map file installed by grub2, but given the fact the bios isn't seeing the drive at all for boot, I don't see how mapping hd0 to hd1 would make a difference. Does anyone have a link or any idea what the issue may be? I'm happy to send whatever additional information may be required. I'm ssh'ed into the box right now, I just need to get the boot and plasma ironed out. Any ideas? Thanks. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.

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[arch-general] Whatever happened to speps?
by David Runge 28 Dec '16

28 Dec '16

Helloes, I was wondering, if anyone knows anything regarding the current status of speps. I tried to ping him about some long-outdated packages (supercollider, pd), but haven't gotten a reply in a week. With supercollider we're currently already at 3.7.2 and with pd at 0.47. The latter will also require some fixes, because unpatched/unmodified it's unusuable in its current state (in a JACK setup). Not to be annoying, it's just that an outdating of more than 6 months is very unusual (in the case of supercollider) and I'm using them regularely. I'd be happy to help get the packages back on track. Best, David -- https://sleepmap.de

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[arch-general] Screen lock stopped working
by David Rosenstrauch 22 Dec '16

22 Dec '16

I've noticed that my screen lock / screensaver has stopped engaging as of a couple of days ago. I check the settings (which I haven't changed recently), but they seem to be set correctly. Anyone have an idea what package upgrade might have caused this and/or which bugs I should watch for a resolution? I'm running XFCE desktop btw. Thanks, DR

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[arch-general] GRUB doesn't boot Windows behind Secure Boot
by Giovanni Santini 07 Dec '16

07 Dec '16

Good afternoon, I have been using GRUB for a long time, but I'm having a strange issue. My setup consists of ArchLinux as main OS and Windows 10 and Ubuntu 12.04 as secondary OSes. Turning up Secure Boot in my firmware options results in such an error when chainloading Windows: /EndEntire file path: /ACPI(yadda)/PCI(yadda)/Sata(0,0,0)/HD(yaddayadda)/File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot)/File(bootmgfw.efi)/EndEntire error: cannot load image. The strange thing is that disabling Secure Boot make it works. Not really sure what I'm missing here. -- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5

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[arch-general] Installation: How to get HDD > LUKS > GPT working in a clean way
by Merlin Büge 05 Dec '16

05 Dec '16

Hey everybody! I'm currently installing Arch on my laptop (Thinkpad T400), and have decided for a rather unusual partition scheme: A single LUKS container directly on the disk (SSD) with a GPT partition table and two partitions inside it: one for SWAP, the other one for the system and everyting else, formatted with Btrfs. The laptop runs libreboot, so I have GRUB2 as a payload inside the flash chip which I use to decrypt the LUKS container and load a GRUB configfile located at /boot/grub/grub.cfg (generated by grub-mkconfig). This works fine. While experimenting with GPT inside LUKS before the installation I've noticed two issues, with at least one of them being present also after installation: First, after unlocking the LUKS containter the two GPT partitions don't become visible to the kernel automatically. I have to manually do partprobe /dev/mapper/<dmname> to inform the kernel about the two new partitions. partprobe is part of parted. My idea was to create a custom hook just after the 'encrypt' hook, which would simply run the above command. I tested this and it seems to work. Question: Is there an even simpler solution to that problem? For example an alternative to partprobe which is already in 'base'? The second issue was that I could not (after unmounting the Btrfs partition and deactivating the swap partition of course) directly close the LUKS mapping via cryptsetup luksClose <dmname> It gave me: device-mapper: remove ioctl on <dmname> failed: Device or resource busy [...] device-mapper: remove ioctl on <dmname> failed: Device or resource busy Device <dmname> is still in use. Instead, I had to remove the partition mappings first via dmsetup remove <dmname>1 <dmname>2 This was getting me rid of the aforementioned error messages. As expected, I get these error messages also during system shutdown -- but only whith the shutdown hook in initramfs. Without it, I presume the system does not even try to close the LUKS container (which would make sense, since there is no initramfs created by default for shutdown afaik), therefore also resulting in no error messages being shown. What could I do about this? I'd like to have my system closing the LUKS container correctly -- therefore I need to remove the partition mappings before that. I've read a lot in the last days and weeks about Btrfs, SSDs, coreboot, etc. to make sure I don't run into many issues. Though these two don't come unexpected, I don't know how to solve the latter one, because systemd shutdown and shutdown initramfs are still a little miracle to me... I'd really appreciate any help! This is all on an up-to-date vanilla 4.8.10-1-ARCH. I attached two shutdown logs with debugging enabled: one with and one without the shutdown hook applied. They look very similar though. (I made sure to reboot twice after building the initramfs before taking the shutdown log.) My HOOKS array is: HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block keyboard keymap encrypt pp \ filesystems fsck shutdown" (pp being the hook which runs partprobe against the mapped LUKS container) Best Regards, Merlin -- Merlin Büge <toni(a)bluenox07.de>

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[arch-general] abs & sourceforge.net
by piequiex 02 Dec '16

02 Dec '16

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This is what I got from sourceforge while trying to build some packet. *.tar.xz: HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines *.tar.xz.asc: HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines REFRESH(5 sec): http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/*.tar.xz? r=*&ts=*&use_mirror=* SourceForge ____________________ Browse Enterprise Blog Deals Help Create Log In or Join - -- Have a nice day! ~~~ This PGP signature only certifies the sender and date of the message. It implies no approval from the administrators of nym.mixmin.net. Date: Wed Nov 23 21:01:11 2016 GMT From: piequiex(a)nym.mixmin.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlg2A5cACgkQViYZwngkfDuwAgCfRBbgl2WhZdjdcHOYwwNgLF7R xn8AmgMin8Im1MuAvzGAyTxm7hCZHIIl =lpcA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[arch-general] xterm segfaults selecting true-type and unreadable - OK with fixed
by David C. Rankin 30 Nov '16

30 Nov '16

All, I was cleaning up the default xterm look and feel with tweaks to ~/.Xresources. The primary goal was to get a good looking terminal to use in i3, etc.. as I'm having difficulty stomaching what kde has become -- meaning I'll have to do without my go-to konsole. I have xterm to my liking with a very simple Xresources: xterm*termName: xterm-256color Xterm*saveLines: 4096 XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true xterm*VT100.geometry: 111x63 xterm*faceName: DejaVu Mono:size=8:antialias=false xterm*font: 7x13 XTerm*colorBDMode: true xterm*background: #131518 xterm*foreground: #eff0f1 XTerm*scrollBar: true XTerm*rightScrollBar: true The only problem is selecting 'unreadable' from the font menu results in a segfault. If I switch back to the 'fixed' bitmap font (e.g. turn true-type off), 'unreadable' works fine. I've tried setting 'XTerm*font1: fixed' and 'XTerm*font1: DejaVu Mono', etc. which prevents the segfault, but also makes 'unreadable' stay the same size as 'default'. Does anybody know how to make 'unreadable' work with a true-type selection? -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.

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[arch-general] On containers. WAS: Re: snapcraft.io ...
by Martin Kühne 30 Nov '16

30 Nov '16

This whole sandboxing and containerisation idiocy is such a pain. Oh look, the apps are not secure, the apps sometimes crash. But you know what, let's take a high level approach, because we're such great managers. Let's NOT make better apps and a better stack by actually writing better multimedia libraries. No, let's instead just lock the stuff in which we use anyway, so they can't do more harm than absolutely unavoidable. Let's face it: those wheels are BROKEN, and what we actually need is an effort to reinvent them a few more times so some of them might hold further scrutiny. Slightly off topic, I know, I'll be back at planning my own world domination myself. cheers! mar77i

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