fidzu : Arch Linux

Ionuț Mircea Bîru wrote:

Recent releases of libpng and libtiff have required a rebuild of all packages that depend on them; these have just been moved from [testing] to the main repos. As usual, remember to fully update your system and check your unofficial packages (especially the cairo-* packages from AUR) for required rebuilds.

The update might output messages similar to:

g_module_open() failed for /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-svg.so:
libpng14.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

These can be safely ignored if you use our official cairo package; otherwise you may need to reinstall librsvg.

05 Feb 2012 11:43am GMT

Recently, I've seen a bunch of questions to the tune of "how do I cut back on the number of modules in my initramfs?" To be brutally honest, this is sort of an annoying question. In general, the type of person who asks this question doesn't understand what the autodetect hook is doing and fails to realize that it's doing a 90% effective job of exactly this. lsinitcpio would have happily shown you exactly what's on the image. In addition, this sort of mindless pruning doesn't really cut back on boot time (stop using xz compression!) and only serves to remove functionality from your initramfs. In case you're still bent on doing this the manual way, I'll outline what's involved.

What's it take to boot?

Perhaps surprisingly little. In the simplest case, mounting your root partition requires drivers for:

• storage bus (PATA, SATA, SCSI, etc)
• block device
• filesystem

For purposes of simplicity, I'll ignore things like mdadm, lvm, and crypto stacks. With only 3 modules (plus dependencies), the kernel is able to discover your storage bus, create a block device for the drives attached, and understand the underlying filesystem. It's really that simple. In my case, if I didn't have these boiled into my kernel, it'd be simply: ahci, sd_mod, and ext4.

How do I know what I need?

There's a variety of tools at your disposal to figure this out. For starters, 'mkinitcpio -M' will scan your PCI bus and probe your root filesystem, returning a tidy list of modules, sans dependencies. You can be almost sure that you'll find your answers in this list. This isn't very useful though. You might not recognize these modules by name. So, take a look at something like 'lspci -vk'. In particular, search for something like SATA or PATA in the output.

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SATA AHCI Controller
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. P5Q Deluxe Motherboard
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 66
        I/O ports at 9c00 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 9880 [size=4]
        I/O ports at 9800 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 9480 [size=4]
        I/O ports at 9400 [size=32]
        Memory at f7dfc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
        Capabilities: [80] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/16 Maskable- 64bit-
        Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [a8] SATA HBA v1.0
        Capabilities: [b0] PCI Advanced Features
        Kernel driver in use: ahci

This looks promising! It even tells you 'ahci' is in use. Add that to the pile. You might have a motherboard with both PATA and SATA connectors. Make sure you grab the driver for both. We can confirm which one is in use soon enough.

Figuring out your needed block device driver is actually not guaranteed to be straightforward. We can employ the use of udevadm to knowledgeably walk around sysfs, and in particular, walk up the chain from our root device to the PCI backplane. Assuming /dev/sda1 is your root device, check out the following:

$ udevadm info --attribute-walk -n /dev/sda1 | grep 'DRIVERS=="[^"]'
    DRIVERS=="sd"
    DRIVERS=="ahci"

This gives us confirmation that we chose wisely with ahci, and it points out 'sd'. Based on what 'mkinitcpio -M' tells us, we can make an educated guess that this is the 'sd_mod' driver. Add that to the pile.

For your filesystem driver, it should literally be the name of the filesystem in use. There's a few exceptions - reiser4 being one of them. Chances are if it's not a 1:1 match, you're already familiar with this particular gotcha.

Alternative brute force method

There's another way of doing this with a bit less guessing involved. Simply make sure that your initramfs image is properly setup to boot (make sure it has udev and drivers for your keyboard), and reboot, appending 'break=postmount' to your kernel commandline. When you arrive at the rootfs shell prompt, run 'lsmod'. Ignoring anything like usb input drivers, that's what you need to boot. You'll, of course, also see module dependencies listed. Modules like ahci use libahci for functionality shared elsewhere, and ext4 uses mbcache and jbd2.

Trim the fat

With your module list ready to go, it's time to tear apart mkinitcpio.conf. Since you're explicitly finding and loading modules, you're going to be very light on hooks. Based on the above, you could put together the following config:

#
# /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
#

MODULES="ahci sd_mod ext4"
BINARIES="fsck fsck.ext4"
HOOKS="base"

And that's it. We don't need udev, since anything in the MODULES variable will be explicitly loaded. mkinitcpio is also kind enough to do dependency resolution for us. I still advise you to keep (or add?) fsck to your image, as checking your filesystem before it's even mounted is greatly beneficial. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out additional modules for things like: usb keyboards or raid/lvm root devices.

For your maiden voyage, I highly recommend creating a separate image in case you've forgotten something.

# mkinitcpio -g /boot/initramfs-linux-tiny.img

Either add another entry to your bootloader, or feel free to modify it on the fly at bootup. If this image isn't sufficient and init won't mount your root, go back through sysfs another time and check your work. Pick through the output of 'mkinitcpio -M' and check over what the modules do with 'modinfo'. The description may not be very useful, but the path within the module directory can be very telling.

That's pretty much all there is to it. A little bit of understanding about your hardware and some familiarity with the common kernel modules can go a long way.

04 Feb 2012 8:00am GMT

A tool for a very specific sort of word puzzle.

03 Feb 2012 11:00am GMT

Hi Arch community,

Arch Linux (archboot creation tool) 2012.01-1, "2k12-R1" has been released.
To avoid confusion, this is not an official arch linux iso release!

Homepage and for more information on archboot:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Archboot

Summary:
- pacman4 introduction, new LTS 3.0.x kernel and uefi shell

Hybrid image file and torrent is provided, which include
i686 and x86_64 core repository. Please check md5sum before using it.

Hybrid image file is a standard CD-burnable image and also a raw disk image.
- Can be burned to CD(RW) media using most CD-burning utilities.
- Can be raw-written to a drive using 'dd' or similar utilities.
This method is intended for use with USB thumb drives.

Please get it from your favorite arch linux mirror:
https://downloads.archlinux.de/iso/archboot/2012.01/
<yourmirror>/iso/archboot/2012.01/

/boot for PXE/Rescue files are provided here:
https://downloads.archlinux.de/iso/arch … 12.01/boot
<yourmirror>/iso/archboot/2012.01/boot

Changelog:

GENERAL:
- kernel 3.2.1 / LTS kernel 3.0.17
- pacman 4.0.1 usage
- RAM recommendations: 512 MB

Kernel changes:
- bump to latest 3.2.x series and bump lts to latest 3.0.x series

Removed features:
- None

Environment changes:
- added pacman4
- bumped lts kernel
- added kmod insted of module-init-tools
- synced with latest mkinitcpio changes
- added uefi shell

hwdetect changes:
- added fsck hook
- added shutdown hook

setup changes:
- adopt pacman4 changes
- adopt lts kernel changes
- added btrfs compression option
- allow btrfs on lts kernel
- added separate /usr detection
- fixed manual mounting of install media
- try to detect (using dmidecode) whether the UEFI boot has occured in a Mac

quickinst changes:
- adopt pacman4 changes
- adopt lts kernel changes

Further documentation can be found on-disk and on the wiki.
Have fun!

greetings
tpowa

28 Jan 2012 7:35am GMT

What many people do not realize is that my archlinux.org email address is really just an alias for a Hotmail account. That's right… I do my Linux development with a Hotmail address! Deal with it… I am not changing. Recently I got annoyed at the Webmail extension for Thunderbird as it breaks every time the [...]

26 Jan 2012 10:31am GMT

Its been 4 months since i last release a iso. Here is my torrent iso: http://people.slitaz.org/~godane/slitaz-tank-2012-01-24.torrent Iso is 367mb. Kernel is update to 3.2.1. Also of other updates are in iso also. I sadly don't know all of them. root password is root tux password is tux Login in as root and use local-mirror on [...]

24 Jan 2012 10:56am GMT

Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

The FOSDEM conference takes place on 4/5 February in Brussels, Belgium and our attendance this year is bigger than ever. On the list of Archers coming we find developers Роман Кирилич (Roman Kyrylych), Tom Gundersen, Thomas Bächler, Jan Steffens, Pierre Schmitz and myself.

We're putting together meetups on Friday afternoon, evening and Saturday evening. Our program is not definitive yet, so to stay up to date (or make suggestions) check the wiki page or the meetups thread on the arch-events mailing list.

Hope to see you there!

23 Jan 2012 1:37pm GMT

Dave Reisner wrote:

With module-init-tools being declared a dead project by its current maintainer, a new project has stepped up to take its place: kmod. This is intended to be a drop-in replacement, though deprecated functionality in module-init-tools has not been reimplemented.

If, upon upgrade, pacman moves /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf to a .pacsave, you should move it back. This file, and any other config read by module-init-tools, is still read by kmod. However, the kmod package will no longer include a blank config file. You'll find the same (if not more) documentation in the manpages and --help output for the binaries.

21 Jan 2012 8:18pm GMT

As my friend, Jason Chu recently noted, I am primarily a git user who has discovered a need to understand and use Mercurial. I am trying to refrain from judgment on Mercurial, as I'm easily bored by bikeshed discussions and holy wars. I have a pragmatic "use what you like and let me use what [...]

20 Jan 2012 4:32pm GMT

The basic and expanded templates I use to begin most of my bash scripts: template-basic #!/bin/bash # scriptname - description of script scrpt=${0##*/} # script name # Display usage if no parameters given if [[ -z "$@" ]]; then echo " $scrpt <input> - description" exit fi # Text color variables txtund=$(tput sgr 0 1) # Underline txtbld=$(tput bold) # Bold bldred=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 1) # red bldblu=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 4) # blue bldwht=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 7) # white txtrst=$(tput [...]

20 Jan 2012 1:10pm GMT

I don't often post reviews of hardware. However, RIM is getting a bad rap lately, and all the cool kids are using Android or IPhone these days. I have been severely disappointed with the three Android phones I've had to date, and I have had too many bad experiences with touch keyboards to take the [...]

19 Jan 2012 10:53pm GMT

Caution: Spoilers follow! If you are looking for a good game and like JRPG's, then you can not go past Xenoblade Chronicles. Well, you can if you live in North America where it still has not been released yet and will not be released until April… Now you know how it feels to live in [...]

19 Jan 2012 12:58pm GMT

Dave Reisner wrote:

Pacman 4 has landed in [core]! Thanks to 24 contributors producing 893 commits, you'll find many new features. The one explicitly worth calling out is PGP signing. However, until the last few details regarding database signing and keyring distribution are ironed out, this is disabled in pacman's default config. If you're interested trying out package verification, please refer to the documentation on the wiki about pacman-key or Allan's blog post.

As always, please make sure to merge your pacnew files!

16 Jan 2012 9:55pm GMT

Update: Reader Elder Marco has pointed out that WordPress.com does have support for syntax highlighting of source code built-in (which I had never heard of before) that might be a preferred alternative for some. An example of both is below. Vim is a great all-around editor. It also does very good at syntax highlighting. With [...]

14 Jan 2012 2:23am GMT

I didn't get the memo, but there appears to be a movement to demonstrate emerging web technologies with a simple todo list application, much as hello world is used to introduce programming languages. In my last post, I introduced using jQuery with Pyjaco, the PYthon JAvascript COmpiler. Since then, I've made several contributions to the [...]

08 Jan 2012 10:15pm GMT

I've been meaning to write about a lot of stuff in separate posts, but they kept getting delayed, so I'll just briefly share everything in one post.

Thailand

In July I did a 3-week group journey through Thailand arranged by Explorado, but organized by ("outsourced to") the 2 guides of roots of Asia, who did an amazing job. The whole concept was exploring "the real Thailand" by means of Eco-tourism. We've been in Bangkok (twice), Chiang Mai city, a mountain village in the province of Chiang Mai, through the jungle, at a fisherman village in Phuket and at the tropical island of Koh Pha ngan. The latter was at the end of the trip and was timed perfectly to get some deserved rest in a more touristy (although not too busy) area, but the majority of the trip was spent far away from the typical touristy areas so we could be submerged in honest, authentic Thai culture and visit authentic locations, often we were at locations where seeing a group of white folks is not common. We've been at unique authentic temples, stayed with various locals and hill tribes, shared meals with them, took the same transport they did (at one point an entire village collected their bikes so we could borrow them to do a bike trip through rice fields and some of the most beautiful lakes I've ever seen). We've had plenty of beautiful moments during those 3 weeks. Like visiting the home of one of the local Thai who built his entire house out of clay, by himself and some friends, or visiting the ancient temple where our guide got married, in a forest in the hills, it was the most beautiful temple of the entire trip, but no other tourists go there because it's not really known (and should probably be kept that way). Or going to a bar in Chiang Mai city (one evening on my own, the next I brought a fellow traveler) to have some good times with some locals. The Eco-conscious part of the travel means:

• green travel (minimize impact on the environment, "leave no trace"). Other than taking the plane over there and back we did a pretty good job, we've used public buses, night trains, biodegradable soap, etc
• local foods (no import, minimal packaging, wrap in banana leaves, etc)
• supporting Eco-conscious projects (like elephant nature park, which is an entire volunteer-based reserve to give mistreated elephants (which has been a big problem in Thailand) a better life, where we washed and fed elephants)

This has been a great experience, and although I found the culture in the South disgustingly based on profiting from tourists, and the cities are too polluted and dirty, I've seen cultures so respectful of nature and each other, living by values I've been trying to apply at home - but being frowned upon in our western society because we're so brainwashed by consumerism, which was beautiful and heartwarming.

Photo album

Berlin

I've been in Berlin for the first Velocity conference in the EU, which was quite good. The best part was probably the "Velocity Birds of feather" (whatever that means) unconference the day before at betahaus, which was great for meeting some folks such as the soundcloud.com guys (which BTW, is the site we host our music on), although lots more interesting folks attended the conference itself (and it was packed). Berlin itself was nice too. Lots of history (Berlin wall, world war(s)), lots of impressive architecture (old and new), very cheap (albeit mediocre in quality) food, lots of Italian food, a bit cold though.

New York city

I'm still recovering from the awesome time I just had in NYC. I've been way more busy over there than I anticipated. I should have stayed 2 or 3 weeks instead of 1 :). I've met various locals (one of whom who'd love to become a city guide as 2nd job because she just loves showing people around, so that just turned out great!). I didn't go for the typical touristy things (I skipped things like the WTC memorial, empire state building, statue of liberty, to the extent you can skip them, as they are very visible from pretty much all over the place). Instead, I wanted to get a feel of the real city and the people inhabiting it. I've seen parts of Queens, central and North-West Brooklyn, lots of areas (but not enough) in Manhattan and even Staten Island, been to a rock concert, comedy, improv and cabaret shows, the movies, more bars than I can count and mostly ate out with company (just as real new yorkers do, of course, though for breakfast that feels a bit weird). I even went shopping (not mall-shopping, but groceries in the supermarket, the Williamsburg Foodtown - that's what it's called - clerk advised me to enjoy every last second in the US, phrased in a way as if any other place in the world sucks in comparison, which is ridiculous, but turns out I followed his advice anyway) because I stayed at an apartment in Williamsburg, I also had 2 roommates, with whom I ironically couldn't spend as much time as I wanted to as I was so busy meeting up with all those other people, I also visited the Etsy and Vimeo offices (both are awesome) and met up with Dave Reisner (who is one of our latest Arch Linux devs, and who lives in NJ, but don't tell anyone) and who forgot to show me around in the Google office ;-) And I realize some of the past sentences are a bit long and busy but that's one of the things I learned at New York I guess. For one week, I almost lived like a real New Yorker, and it was interesting (but exhausting).

Move to Ghent

Enough about the trips. Back to daily life. I moved to the city of Ghent. Riding by bike to work every day along the scenic Coupure is fun. I am quite proud to say nearly all of my stuff in this apartment is second hand and I've been lucky to receive some free stuff as well (thanks Bram!). Not (only) because I'm cheap money conscious but I like to give things a second life instead of buying something new, lowering the impact on the environment. Even if it doesn't look too well, as long as it's functional. And this is exactly one of those values I mentioned above which is often not understood in our Western society but I was pleased to find out this philosophy is the standard in large parts of Thai culture.

Death metal

We've done 3 gigs (which had great reception, luckily) and we've got planned a few already for 2012, one of which will be at the From Rock Till Core festival in Merelbeke. We also did a semi-professional photo-shoot, and I made a website (you can tell I'm not a designer).


That wraps up 2011 for me. Good times.. Happy new year everybody!

08 Jan 2012 5:10pm GMT