[Stable Update] 2024-02-21 – Kernels, KDE, VirtualBox, Calamares, ROCm, Firefox, Thunderbird – Stable Updates

With a newer version of plymouth than 22.02.122 you may experience an unbootable system with a black screen. This might be due to not having early KMS enabled. If you have an Nvidia GPU you could set nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1 to the kernel parameters in your bootloader config to avoid the need of KMS. However, with Wayland around the corner, KMS will be needed.

To “fix” the current problem, we have downgraded plymouth once again to have more time to find a proper solution to migrate most of your installations to a working state with newer plymouth versions.

sudo pacman -Syuu

Those who don’t have issues can enjoy the newer version of plymouth. And those who want to help can read on more about this topic here: WIP: Black Screen – help with researching cause and solution

With polkit 124-1 there were changes made to etc/pam.d/polkit-1. So check if you made local changes to the file. See also: ropid comments on Today’s update moved polkit-1 to polkit-1.pacsave without providing a new config

Yes, replace bashrc-manjaro with bash

pacman-contrib is now split out from pacman. If you have anything installed that depends on pacman-contrib, update with:

sudo pacman -Syu pacman-contrib

We all known that kernel 6.7 is very feature rich. One of the features is the inclusion of Nvidia’s GSP Boot firmware into Initramfs. However this will increase your image by 150 MB and the fallback image might be 240 MB in size. A way would be to remove kms from mkinitcpio.conf and redo your initramfs images. A discussion regarding that can be found at Arch Gitlab: kms hook increases the initramfs size heavily starting with 6.7 kernel (#238) · Issues · Arch Linux / Mkinitcpio / mkinitcpio · GitLab

To reduce size add fallback_options="-S autodetect -S kms" to /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux67.preset

2024-01-09 – Jan Alexander Steffens

We are making dbus-broker our default implementation of D-Bus, for improved performance, reliability and integration with systemd.

For the foreseeable future we will still support the use of dbus-daemon, the previous implementation. Pacman will ask you whether to install dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units. We recommend picking the default.

For a more detailed rationale, please see our RFC 25.

– Arch Linux – News: Making dbus-broker our default D-Bus daemon

In some cases, however it is better to keep the legacy way. Here are some examples: Dbus-broker warnings

grub-install [plus the needed options depending of been EFI or BIOS]
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

For more specific information on grub-install, please refer to this guideline: [root tip] [How To] Primer on handling a grub package update

Additional information to that topic can be found here:

The Author of the original patch Johannes Berg had reviewed Léo Lam’s patch by now. So everybody who had tested 6.6.5-3 or 6.1.66-2 should reply to the upstream mailing list with a Tested-by tag as described here: [Stable Update] 2023-12-10 – Kernels, Plasma, Phosh, Systemd, Cinnamon, Gnome, libpamac – #95 by philm

The current native ALPM package of Blender provided by our mirrors may fail with AMD GPUs. As an alternative you may want to use Blender-Bin from the AUR, flatpak version, snap version or load it directly from Blender. More infos here: 17:4.0.1-2 Segfault on start (#2) · Issues · Arch Linux / Packaging / Packages / blender · GitLab

With the update of mkinitcpio 37 make sure you have the base hook in your /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file, unless you use systemd hook instead. See also wiki for all hook documentation.

– Arch Linux – News: Incoming changes in JDK / JRE 21 packages may require manual intervention

In KDE Plasma, Powerdevil fails and energy settings (Power save v Normal v Performance) are unavailable. See:
Powerdevil fails, Energy settings unavailable

FS#79884 : [gnome-shell] Restarting gnome-shell using Alt+F2 and entering R, causes a crash

It is recommended to remove all third-party extensions before updating, then install the compatible versions after updating and rebooting. All Most extensions in the Manjaro repos are already updated.

A “newer” version of kpeoplevcard accidently existed, so to install the current version, either update with sudo pacman -Syu kpeoplevcard or sudo pacman -Syuu.

2023-09-22 – David Runge

With shadow >= 4.14.0, Arch Linux’s default password hashing algorithm changed from SHA512 to yescrypt [1].

Furthermore, the umask [2] settings are now configured in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile.

This should not require any manual intervention.

Reasons for Yescrypt

The password-based key derivation function (KDF) and password hashing scheme yescrypt has been chosen due to its adoption (readily available in libxcrypt, which is used by pam [3]) and its stronger resilience towards password cracking attempts over SHA512.

Although the winner of the Password Hashing Competition [4] has been argon2, this even more resilient algorithm is not yet available in libxcrypt [5][6].

Configuring yescrypt

The YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR setting in /etc/login.defs is currently without effect, until pam implements reading its value [7]. If a YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR higher (or lower) than the default (5) is needed, it can be set using the rounds option of the pam_unix [8] module (i.e. in /etc/pam.d/system-auth).

General list of changes

• yescrypt is used as default password hashing algorithm, instead of SHA512
• pam honors the chosen ENCRYPT_METHOD in /etc/login.defs and does not override the chosen method anymore
• changes in the filesystem (>= 2023.09.18) and pambase (>= 20230918) packages ensure, that umask is set centrally in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile

[1] yescrypt – scalable KDF and password hashing scheme

[2] umask(1p) — Arch manual pages

[3] PAM – ArchWiki

[4] https://www.password-hashing.net/

[5] [RFC] Add argon2 backend. by ferivoz · Pull Request #113 · besser82/libxcrypt · GitHub

[6] Add support for Argon2 by maandree · Pull Request #150 · besser82/libxcrypt · GitHub

[7] pam_unix: Support reading YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR from /etc/login.defs · Issue #607 · linux-pam/linux-pam · GitHub

[8] pam_unix(8) — Arch manual pages

– Arch Linux – News: Changes to default password hashing algorithm and umask settings

With the filesystem 2023.09.03-1 and bashrc-manjaro 5.1.016-3 updates there may be pacnews for the following files if you have local modifications:

• /etc/shells
• /etc/bash.bashrc

This would be a good time to test @Ste74’s new manjaro-pacnew-checker program. See Check and manage pacnew files for more info.

See this post for how to revert to using r8168 driver or install r8168-dkms driver from AUR
Problem with 6.5 kernel and-r8168 module

R8168 driver not loaded on kernel 6.5 after testing update 2023-09-22

All 3 versions of network-r8168 drivers are working again following [Testing Update] 2023-09-27

• linux65-r8168 8.051.02-7
• linux61-r8168 8.051.02-5
• linux515-r8168 8.051.02-4

Mesa drivers are affected when there is no matching LLVM version they are complied on. If you use a 3rd party repo like mesanonfree you may want to install llvm15-libs until those get recompiled. See for releases: Releases · mesa-freeworld/mesa-nonfree · GitHub

Known issue: “Manjaro Hello” does not start after Update

rm -f ~/.config/autostart/manjaro-hello.desktop

Known issue: Bluetooth headset showing multiple entries in KDE after update

More info here.

The latest lib32-libgudev update does not cooperate with the version of the same package provided by steam, and steam seems to attempt making calls to both leading to the crash.

Details: bug report, arch task, arch forum thread.

• Workaround #1 (causes steam to avoid making any calls to lib32-libgudev by using a different library altogether)

  • sudo pacman -S lib32-libnm

• Workaround #2 (forces steam and any other application to always use the new lib32-libgudev)

  • sudo pacman -S lib32-libudev0-shim

• Workaround #3 (use steam-native-runtime, which doesn’t have the issue)

  • sudo pacman -S steam-native-runtime

The Arch git migration is now complete .

The [community] repository has been merged into [extra] and is now empty.
It may take a bit of time for mirrors to catch up (more details here).

Update your system and handle the pacman

sudo pacman -Syu "pacman>=6.0.2-11"

In order to remove the defunct [community] repo changes must be made to /etc/pacman.conf.
Changes will be provided in a file with the extension .pacnew.
Pacman provides the utility pacdiff to manage these files and will use vim -d for comparison if the environment variable DIFFPROG is not set.

pacdiff -s

If you would like to use a different comparison tool you may prepend the env var:

DIFFPROG=meld pacdiff -s

Then sync with the repositories again:

sudo pacman -Syu

And you can also remove the now unused repository.

sudo pacman -Sc

NOTE: Be aware that this last command will also remove all packages in the pacman cache that are not currently installed: in other words, backup copies of packages that you have uninstalled at some point will no longer be stored on your hard drive.

In most cases, this probably will not cause headaches. To prevent even minor aches and pains, see the Arch Wiki for information on cleaning the cache

A while ago the Steam Runtime developer maintaining the library detection/promotion “greatly encouraged” that the Steam package would (opt)depends on lib32-libnm and friends. The bugs have been opened since alas

In the absence of an updated steam package with updated dependencies,
A workaround is to install lib32-libnm

sudo pacman -Syu lib32-libnm

Steam will not launch – #12 by cscs
FS#79006 : [lib32-libgudev] Recent Update broke steam
Steam crashes at launch with libgudev 238 · Issue #9805 · ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux · GitHub

2023-06-14 – Felix Yan

The openblas package prior to version 0.3.23-2 doesn’t ship optimized LAPACK routine and CBLAS/LAPACKE interfaces for compatibility. This decision has been reverted now, and the ability to choose a different default system BLAS/LAPACK implementation while keeping openblas installed is now provided to allow future co-installation of BLIS, ATLAS, etc.

The default BLAS implementation will be used for most packages like NumPy or R. Please install blas-openblas and blas64-openblas to make OpenBLAS the default BLAS implementation, just like the old behavior.

Unfortunately you will get errors on updating if you currently have OpenBLAS installed as the default BLAS implementation:

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required by cblas
:: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required by lapack

Please append your preferred default BLAS implementation to the regular -Syu command line to get around it. For example:

sudo pacman -Syu blas-openblas

or

sudo pacman -Syu blas

– Arch Linux – News: OpenBLAS >= 0.3.23-2 update requires manual intervention

2023-06-18 – Antonio Rojas

Starting from version 2023.66594-9, TeX Live packages have been reorganized to mirror upstream collections. Even though the new texlive-basic replaces the old texlive-core, many of the texlive-core contents (including language specific files) are now split between different packages. To find out which Arch package contains a specific CTAN package, you can use the tlmgr utility, eg.

$ tlmgr info euler | grep collection
collection:  collection-latexrecommended

which means the euler CTAN package is contained in texlive-latexrecommended. You may also use pacman -F to query for specific files.

A new metapackage texlive-meta is available to install all subpackages (except for language specific ones), and the new texlive-doc package provides the full documentation for offline use.

– Arch Linux – News: TeX Live package reorganization

pamac-gtk 11.0.1 uses Gtk 4 that is not supported on Xfce or Cinnamon
user can replace pamac-gtk with pamac-gtk3

sudo pacman -S pamac-gtk3

Check ~/.profile for any commands that don’t execute properly (but return non-zero exit code instead). May include ~/.bash_profile and .zprofile too. Downgrading to SDDM 0.19 also restores desktop after login.

The issue has been reported upstream.

Since the last stable update provided an older toolchain our kernels and binaries got compiled against GCC 12.2.0-1. A similar issue was already posted at Arch years ago: [SOLVED] Kernel 5.5.2 is built with the wrong version of gcc / [testing] Repo Forum / Arch Linux Forums. Therefore users of DKMS have to wait for kernel updates compiled against the new toolchain or downgrade to the older one.

Update (2023-06-05): We pushed a rebuild of all regular kernels against the new toolchain to all branches. Real-Time Kernels we still have to check.

There is a bug with xdg-desktop-portal-gnome (more details here).

sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-kde

sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt

sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-wlr