Author Archives: Allan

Battle of the Arch Spin-Offs

According to Distrowatch, there are eleven “distributions” “based” on Arch Linux. I use “distributions” in quotes, because some are far less of a distribution than others and “based” gets quotes because some are so based that they are really Arch Linux in a poor disguise…

I have seen a bunch of new release announcements for several of these distributions in the last few days, so I thought I would take some for a spin and see what I am missing out on.

All distributions were tested in VirtualBox with a 128GB disk and 2GB RAM.

Contender #1: Chakra – 2012.12 Claire

The Chakra Project is my #1 contender as it is a real Linux distribution. They do use our PKGBUILDs (sometimes too directly…) but they rebuild everything for themselves. Chakra also has quite an interesting take on the rolling release model, opting for a “stable” core of the distribution and rolling release userland. So toolchain updates are rare, but the newest KDE will be packaged within days. I have issues with their “stable” core, because stable means no updates at all. Even minor bug fix updates are not considered and I am sure there is no backporting of any security fixes either as their team is too small to handle that. For example, I would not be running pacman-4.0.2 or even an unpatched pacman-4.0.3 as my distributions package manager. Another thing unique to Chakra is the pure KDE set-up. Any popular software that is not Qt based (e.g. firefox, GIMP) is supplied in a bundle. I find these a very bad idea, as many of the same libraries are on your system multiple times but in separate bundles, and it also appears that these are easy to break and under-maintained.

Onto the installer… Chakra wins points for being the only pure graphical installer out of the distributions I consider here. I did a review of the installer early in 2010 and there seemed a complete lack of improvement. The Live DVD booted fine and welcomed me with a window that pointed out the difference between Chakra and Arch, and noted that pacman is not designed for a GUI frontend (debatable…) so it will be replaced one day. Starting the install gives three screens worth of install notes which no-one has ever read and if anyone did read them, I am confident they did not care that their website is being redesigned. The partitioning took me to an external tool (KDE Partition Manager), which I actually found rather difficult to use. It took me several attempts to get everything set so that the installer would let me continue.

Once I finished the install, I rebooted… to a prompt. Whatever autodetection is done to get the KDE session up a running post-install had failed in VirtualBox. So no further review was done.

Contender #2: CinnArch – 2012.12.21

I had heard good things about the Cinnamon desktop, so CinnArch was my next choice. This distribution is Arch Linux – when I look at the package information for glibc, I see that I packaged it. The only difference is that an additional repo is provided with the packages needed for Cinnamon desktop to run.

The installer boots to a nice live system. There is two installation options – “CLI installer” and “Graphical Installer” but the latter is not selectable so “CLI” it is… In this case, CLI means an ascii-graphical menu driven installation environment that was easy to follow. The only steps that I found amusing was finding the fastest mirror to install from, which (with only slight exaggeration) took longer to complete than downloading the packages from the slowest mirror would have. And then on with installing the packages. Or not… It turns out that the installer detects I am using VirtualBox and tries to install the virtualbox-guest-modules package, which currently has a broken dependency and so can not be installed. There is no way to skip this that I could find.

So lets play around in the live media to see what might have been. It turns out that CinnArch provides two repos: cinnarch-repo and cinnarch-core. I could not find the justification for requiring a second repo. The repo looks fairly good on a quick glance, with all packages signed and a keyring provided. Theoretically, you can just enable that repo and install cinnamon from there, but I could not find where to see a list of keys that the developers use that would enable me to install the keyring package and then verify the rest of the packages. One thing I was concerned about was the filesystem package that was being provided for reasons I could not ascertain. The biggest issue with providing a repo for Arch Linux is that you need to keep up with our rolling base. That means your repo needs to have rebuilds available when we push (e.g.) a library update with an soname change. Providing an unnecessary filesystem package seems to only make things difficult for them. This was also my first time seeing the Pacman-XG GUI for the pacman package manager. That is enough said about that…

Contender #3: Manjaro – 0.8.3 XFCE edition

I was not expecting much from Manjaro given I had read this review of a previous installer. But given the “success” of the last two distros, it has a chance… Some things from that review had not changed – in the live environment there is still the unnecessary password of “manjaro” for both the user and root. And I was not endured by the green colour scheme or the logo which is used for the “start” menu. But to give Manjaro credit, I successfully installed using the old style Arch ascii-graphical install, which was easy for those that are use to that. Reiser3 as the default filesystem still confuses me.

So what do you get from Manjaro? It seems to be Arch delayed plus extras. The idea is that the Arch repos are delayed reaching you for a few days while everything is sorted out to give you an easy upgrade. This happens by adding a package manjaro-system which is always upgraded first and runs a script that automatically handles any manual intervention that would be required on a pure Arch Linux system. As a heads up, this uses a feature of pacman called SyncFirst that is removed for the upcoming pacman-4.1, so they may need to rethink their entire system soon.

The first difference I noted was it ran a 3.4.24 kernel, so that have held that back from being updated to the newest release, but at least it is the newest 3.4 series release. Looking at the glibc package once again, I am the packager, but it is a repo called [platform]. The Arch [extra] and [community] repos appear to be used as-is, so the need for [basis], [platform] and [addon] repos to replace our small [core] repo is strange. Also, this was the first time I had ever heard of a GUI for pacman with the imaginative name pacman-gui. It allows you to run pacman -Sy, which just refreshes the databases – a crazy thing to do without immediately updating in a rolling release distribution that does not provide multiple versions of a library. And it is not much of a GUI either, as it just launches a terminal that runs the pacman command you just clicked. There was also a LibreOffice installer that called pacman in the background.

The Winner?

Sadly, I do not think there was any winners today. Chakra had the most polished live environment, but failed to boot to the desktop. CinnArch failed through no fault of its own, which is sort of a fault of its own for not being a real distribution. Manjaro installed, although I saw nothing to make me want to recommend it.

The may be the most painful statement I have ever made… but ArchBang might be the winner!

Edit: Twelve hours later and the bug on the Arch end preventing the CinnArch install has been fixed. CinnArch installed and booted to the desktop without an issue.

Poor Man’s Pastebin

I was going to add a pastebin to my site (for reasons I can not determine other than “because”), but that ended up being too much effort. Then I remembered that GNU Source Highlight can output HTML… So here is my pastebin client in less than ten lines of bash!

#!/bin/bash
 
file=$(mktemp ~/web/paste/XXXXXX)
 
[[ ! -z "$1" ]] && lang="-s $1"
 
cat - > ${file}.in
source-highlight -i ${file}.in -o ${file} ${lang}
rm ${file}.in
 
lftp -e "put -O /dir/to/paste ${file}; bye"
     -u user,password sftp://example.com
 
echo "http://example.com/paste/${file##*/}"

Done. Just use “foo | pastebin” to send the output of foo to the web. Or for files, use “pastebin < file". If auto-detection of highlighting style is bad, just use "pastebin <lang>" with one of the supported languages. The seemingly wasteful cat is because GNU source highlight can not autodetect the style from a pipe if it is not provided.

Advantage of a Simple “Database” Format

One fairly common criticism of the pacman package manager is that is very slow due to not using some sort of binary database as its backend. I found suggestions to use sqlite dating back to 2005 (although I am sure they go back further) and mailing list activity peaked around late 2007. Speed is one of pacman’s main features – and it beats the competition by a wide margin according to Linux Format – but I guess people want it even faster.

The problem is that we use a filesystem based “database” where each package has its information stored in multiple files. This means that we can get fragmentation of our “database” and the reading of all these files from the filesystem can be quite slow. Usually most of this is cached by the kernel after the first read so speed improves markedly after the first usage.

This was improved a lot in the pacman 3.5 release (March 2011). The sync databases started to be read directly from the downloaded tarball and the local database had the “desc” and “depends” files for each package merged into one file. This increased the speed of reading from the sync databases massively and was a reasonable improvement to the local database too.

So the local package “database” could be improved by reducing it to one or a few files. But every time I think about changing it, I am reminded why I like the plain text file format. I was updating a reasonably out of date computer when I had an issue with the python-pygame package being renamed to python2-pygame. All packages needing in the Arch Linux repos were rebuilt with the new dependency name, so it did not need a provides entry. But my solarwolf package from the AUR still depended on the old name:

$ pacman -S python2-pygame
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...
:: python2-pygame and python-pygame are in conflict. Remove python-pygame? [y/N] y
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: solarwolf: requires python-pygame

As we have a file based database, adjusting the dependency is easy without rebuilding the package. Just open the relevant file and edit away (or use sed…)

$ vim /var/lib/pacman/local/solarwolf-1.5-5/desc

Now I can see my local database has an issue using the handy testdb tool – solarwolf depends on python2-pygame, but that is not installed.

$ testdb
missing python2-pygame dependency for solarwolf

But now I update as usual, installing python2-pygame which removes python-pygame, and my local pacman database is fully consistent.

I am sure all of this would still be possible if the database was in some other format, but it would have required more tools than a simple text editor. Of course, most people should never need to edit their local database, but I have introduced changes to it several times during pacman development and I consider being able to easily fix or revert these in the category of a “good thing”. And yes, I develop and test directly on my production system…

Of course, it is better to use a real database in performance critical situations. But pacman really does not fall into that category.

Advise

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I enjoy being given obvious advise but then I become concerned some people need it:

“Do not drive a car if this medication makes you dizzy”

Posted in Tweet on by Allan – Comments Off on Advise

Interesting Links – November 2012

Software related:

  • Fedora 18 was delayed until next year
  • GNOME dropped fallback mode but the “old-style” GNOME look may appear via extensions
  • Another month, another udev fork – is this number three? This time is is done by people at Gentoo and is called udev-ng… no, its eudev. But is that fork any good? Some opinions…
  • glibc-2.17 is in freeze and it looks like it will be a relatively easy update
  • A “new” package manager – Guix – which is just Nix with some Guile thrown on top…
  • A post about Upstart working in Debian – speed comparisons are the most interesting thing there
  • And while we are speaking of upstart, what does Lennart think?

And things that entertained me:

  • This song was stuck in my head…
  • Which lead me to some great ukulele playing (including weirdness such as this)
  • And that reminded me of a great comedy sketch
Posted in Links on by Allan – Comments Off on Interesting Links – November 2012

Reboot

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Today I learned buses are like computers… To fix an issue the driver was told to shut it down, wait a minute, then start it again.

Posted in Tweet on by Allan – Comments Off on Reboot

Interesting Links – October 2012

Another month, another bunch of links…

Software and release announcements:

  • openSUSE released RC1 of their 12.2 release on the ARM architecture. RC2 has made an appearance too!
  • Speaking of ARM, multiplatform support was merged into the kernel.
  • There was probably earlier releases, but this was the first time I noticed the Cinnarch distrolet.
  • There is a fork of Arch Linux initscripts, which I do not recommend given the lack of understanding of bash shown by some of the changes…
  • Wayland 1.0 had a fairly quiet release announcement.
  • I “discovered” the pkgng package manger for FreeBSD. I need to look at it in detail to see if there are ideas to steal for pacman.

There were many posts about UEFI and secure boot:

Other collected Linux-ish links that interested me:

  • Ubuntu has a donation screen shown on the way to the download. I accept Amazon.com gift vouchers!
  • A tutorial on how to remove watermarks in GIMP.
  • Details of the systemd journal file format.
  • A report on issues with major updates in Gentoo.

And some fun stuff…

  • Anime News Network’s Fall 2012 preview guide.
  • I am enjoying xkcd’s What If – especially this one
  • The Handbook of the Birds of the World is being adapted into an online version.
  • My idea got made into a cartoon! Well… sort of… not really… But I am mentioned.

Heights

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Was there ever an astronaut with a (mild…) fear of heights? I want to know if at some height it becomes too abstract for the fear to hold.

Posted in Tweet on by Allan – Comments Off on Heights

Bad code

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If you are looking for an old style Arch Linux boot-up, I’d avoid this project with commits such as this.

Posted in Tweet on by Allan – Comments Off on Bad code

Unmoderated Mailing List For Arch Discussion

It seems I have gained a “fan” or two over the last week. But this guy is my current favourite. Shutting down the arch-general mailing list for a day resulted in me getting the following email:

Subject: wrong move
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:16:03 +0100
From: P .NIKOLIC <p.nikolic1@btinternet.com>
To: Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org>

Very bad move .

You will just inflame it for later if you have not learnt that yet what
are you doing running a mail list .. ?..

Pete .

Thanks Pete. Lets see who gets angry at me the most…

Subject: List admin
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:42:44 +0100
From: P .NIKOLIC <p.nikolic1@btinternet.com>
To: arch-general-owner@archlinux.org

I wish to know who is the main arch-general@archlinux.org admin

i wish to start a vote to remove Allan McRae
or at least demote him . He appears to be prone to panic attacks and
ill judged moves ie shutting the list down ..

Before anyone says anything else i run 4 lists myself , all motor sport
related .

The other point is if certain people would just answer the question
instead of going off on some tangent it would help lessen the wars

You may not agree that is not my problem i see what i see this list
needs someone that does NOT panic

Pete

It would be a fair assumption that if I have the ability to shut down an email list, then I might have administrator access… A lack of reply and this email arrives:

Subject: Mail owner
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 08:26:01 +0100
From: P .NIKOLIC <p.nikolic1@btinternet.com>
To: arch-general-owner@archlinux.org

I am once again calling for the removal of Allan McRae as an
unsuitable person to be in control of a mailing list ,

He is Childish despotic offensive officious obnoxious and is
stomping around like some little Hitler .

He has go to GO

Pete

The use of “despotic” was particular non-inventive given that was already used on the arch-general mailing list earlier that day. So the Godwinism was the best that could be done.

I subtly mentioned these emails in a reply to arch-general in order to let him know that I have seen them. That resulted in:

Subject: Un warrented transference of mails to list
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 19:07:26 +0100
From: P .NIKOLIC <p.nikolic1@btinternet.com>
To: Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org>

Excuse me .

I kept OFF the list for a reason , you are in a flat out panic spin
this shows a mile off by your actions .

If you are unwilling to run the list and let it run then i suggest
you retire and let someone else do the job .

You are getting as bad if not worse than some of the bird brains on
the suse lists that is the reason a good number of new users have
appeared here Like me they were getting sick of the blatant junk from
the list owners .

This mail was sent OFF list for a reason get with it .

Oh and i still say RETIRE if you cant handle it ..

Pete

If you did not want emails to be public, perhaps you should not have sent them to an email address that you had no idea who the recipient was. Or, even better, just do not send them at all. I actually made an exception to not answering any of these emails and replied with that friendly piece of advise.

But that was not the end of it…

Subject: tosser
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 08:53:15 +0100
From: P .NIKOLIC <p.nikolic1@btinternet.com>
To: Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org>

Allan

you are by far the biggest silly little boy i have ever had the
misfortune to stumble on.

How the Arch Linux community ever managed to get a twat like you as
the mailing list owner i will never know but hey there will soon be a
new mailing list .

Ban my aunt fanny word of warning WATCH your list you
think you have stopped me THINK AGAIN 🙂 … Oh and IP filtering
will get you nowhere at all

have fun

Pete .

I feel sad for his inability to form good insults. Using “biggest” and “little” together shows a poor grasp of the English language. This would be fine for non-native speakers, but from his email address I conclude that he is in the UK and given there is a person who dislikes immigrants with the same name on Google+ (who has me in a circle…), I will assume he is a native English speaker too.

Which finally gets me to the point of this post. It appears Pete will soon be creating a mailing list where people can rant about Arch Linux and the direction it is moving all they want with no fear of being censored. Thanks Pete!