Ionuț Mircea Bîru wrote:

On October 23rd the data center where our server is located had a power failure. The server was rebooted and at the first look everything was fine.

In the morning we noticed that the performance was bad and started to investigate and found out that one of the hard disks was failing.

The drive has been replaced and is now synchronizing.

Update: A few hours after the server was back online, MySQL found out that the bbs db had been corrupted. We have restored a backup from Mon Oct 24 09:47:59 CEST 2011. Unfortunately all forum posts made after this date have been lost.

We are sorry for the long downtime.

Tom Gundersen wrote:

Summary: Please manually delete /etc/profile.d/locale.sh before updating. If . /etc/rc.conf fails in your login shell, please read the full announcement.

Changes to locale handling:

/etc/profile.d/locale.sh is now a static file that sources the correct config files in order to set your locale, rather than being generated at boot. The benefit of this is one less write to /etc, and it allows changes to the locale to take effect without rebooting (just relogin).

We add support for /etc/locale.conf. The settings in this file takes precedence over /etc/rc.conf, and those who use shells that cannot source /etc/rc.conf are required to move to this new format. /etc/locale.conf contains a new-line separated list of variable assignments. The variables we support are LANG as well as the LC_* variables (with the exception of LC_ALL). The format is shared with systemd.

Eric Bélanger wrote:

The hostname utility was removed in net-tools 1.60.20110819cvs-1. The inetutils package, which was recently moved into the base group, will provide hostname from now on. Please make sure to install inetutils especially if you have problems with network utilities.

Ionuț Mircea Bîru wrote:

As promised multiple times on the forums, GNOME 3.2 was just released and we have it! Shinier and full of new features, noticeable are gdm's brand new look, gnome-online-accounts, gnome-contacts, gnome-documents, new user menu and better chat integration. Along with that, nautilus received a new file previewer named sushi.

Packaging changes:

• gnome-power-manager moved to gnome-extra since most of its functionality moved to gnome-settings-daemon and the package basically only contains the statistics viewer
• aisleriot, gnome-contacts, gnome-documents, gnome-disk-utility, tracker and sushi added to gnome-extra
• gobject-introspection support was dropped from {python,python2}-gobject2 2.28 and moved to {python,python2}-gobject 3.0.1. Maintainers should change accordingly if their packages rely on gobject-introspection.
• gnome-system-tools dropped since most functionality was moved into gnome-control-center
• splitting libgdu out from gnome-disk-utility. gvfs based file managers should benefit from this split.

If you have problems login into the session, try resetting your settings by moving away ~/.config/dconf and ~/.gconf.

As always, packaging bugs should be reported on our bugtracker and anything else considered bugs should be report to the Gnome bugzilla.

Rémy Oudompheng wrote:

TeXLive has been updated to match 2011 release. The package texlive-bin does not include biblatex-biber, the Perl replacement to biblatex, as the required Perl dependencies as numerous and unpackaged at the moment.

It is possible that post-install scripts show errors during the update. Note that only the second "recreating formats" message is relevant (format recreation is triggered by both texlive-bin and texlive-core installs). There are reports of eptex format generation failing (see bug report FS#25250) on some upgrade paths, but the problem does not appear when upgrading from a fresh TeXLive 2010 installation.

Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

Hi,
time for a much needed update to the Arch installation media, as the last release (2010.05) is not only quite outdated, but now yields broken installations if you do a netinstall (because the old installer is not aware of the changed kernel/initramfs filename in our new Linux 3.0 packages).

What has changed in this period of more than a year?

AIF (installation tool):

• Experimental support for btrfs and nilfs2.
• Support syslinux bootloader, as well as grub.
• Changes to configuration formats to support new rc.conf and linux3.0
• Make selecting source more flexible (multiple local and/or remote repos)
• Show package descriptions when installing packages
• Run with debugging and logging enabled by default, add /arch/report-issues script
• Make automatic profiles switch source depending on whether core or netinstall system is running
• Remove support for tcp_wrappers in accordance to Arch Linux policy

libui.sh (bash UI framework):

• Made long checklists much easier in CLI mode, by using $EDITOR
• More flexible initialization

Archiso (image builds):

• Snapshot of current core, including kernel 3.0.3-1, pacman 3.5.4-3, glibc 2.14-4, mkinitcpio 0.7.2-1, initscripts 2011.07.3-1 and netcfg 2.6.7-1
• Big overhaul: use dm-snapshot instead of aufs2
• All needed files to boot for custom USB media installed on /arch
• Allow changing NBD export name
• Allow using serial console (kernel parameter: console)
• Allow starting custom script (kernel parameter: script), autologin tty1.
• Add self integrity test (kernel parameter: checksum=y)
• Add support to mount iso in loopback mode
• Added packages: btrfs-progs-unstable crda curl dhclient dialog dnsmasq hdparm netcfg nilfs-utils openconnect rp-pppoe rsync vpnc wpa_actiond
• Removed packages: aufs2 aufs2-util joe ndiswrapper ndiswrapper-utils tiacx tiacx-firmware
• Remove x86test, add HDT to initial syslinux menu
• Add support for booting from memdisk
• XZ compression for SquashFS and initramfs.

Obviously there's more, such as bunches of code cleanups and bugfixes, but this should be the most important.

The Official installation guide has been updated to reflect the changes where necessary.

• Download
• List of packages

Please assure tickets exist in the bugtracker - Release Engineering project for any issues you may find. To get in touch, join the arch-releng mailing list or visit the #arch-releng IRC channel

Dave Reisner wrote:

Join #archlinux-bugs channel on freenode IRC on Sunday August 21st, and help us squash some bugs! Punch and pie will be served.

Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

Due to Linux kernel version 3.0 being moved into [core], the kernel26 package has been renamed to linux. Also, filenames of the kernel and initrd's have changed as follows:

• vmlinuz26 becomes vmlinuz-linux
• kernel26.img becomes initramfs-linux.img
• kernel26-fallback.img becomes initramfs-linux-fallback.img

To prevent you from breaking your system after the update, symlinks are created so that your bootloader configuration pointing to the old files will still work. However we recommend updating your bootloader configuration and deleting the symlinks afterwards.

Rémy Oudompheng wrote:

netcfg 2.6.6 has been moved to [core]. It has accumulated quite a lot of features contributed by many people since last year's 2.5.4. Versions 2.6.1 to 2.6.6 were bugfix releases to the initial netcfg 2.6.

• initial support for IPv6 configuration: IPv6 will be disabled unless you specify IPv6=something in your profile file. See man netcfg-profiles(5) for the available options
• more detailed wireless options (ad-hoc mode, network by BSSID)
• more options for bridge connections
• a ROUTES array to define custom routes in profiles
• a configuration file /etc/conf.d/netcfg which is currently only used by net-auto-wireless
• new connection types: openvpn, vlan, tuntap
• a manpage netcfg-profiles(5) detailing available options

More details about the changes and links to the bug tracker entries can be found in the NEWS file. Old profiles are expected to remain compatible.

Please read optional dependency list to know what to install for your particular configuration.

More features, mostly requested and contributed on the bug tracker will be added for release 2.7. Discussion about netcfg development and features now happens on arch-projects mailing-list. Don't hesitate to drop a mail there if you want to participate or contribute patches.