[Stable Update] 2023-07-17 – Kernels, Pipewire, KDE Frameworks, Systemd, Firefox, Wine – Stable Updates

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 by Xfce
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

There was an issue with zfs-utils 2.1.11-1 package having the initcipio files wrongly installed. Please update to zfs-utils 2.1.11-1.1 and re-run mkinitcpio -P. If you have an already unbootable system, you may recover by using an install media and chroot into it to complete the update.

A bug report was opened on 468217 – xf86-input-libinput 1.3.0 DPI and mouse acceleration issue on KDE Plasma X11 and a temporary fis is also mentioned on Mouse acceleration – ArchWiki

• Based on the manual, unlike filesystem UUIDs, UUIDs for encrypted devices must be specified without dash separators. So check /boot/grub/grub.cfg for entries like cryptomount -u 3722dfb2-3b32-414b-bd59-4329fa92b6a9 and try to remove the dash separators. You have to redo that whenever you update a kernel or call update-grub on your own. You can read more about it here
• A message “no such cryptodisk found” may appear on the following reboot, but should not prevent you from continuing by typing any key. This happens if you forgot to remove the dashes in /boot/grub/grub.cfg after update-grub got called.

We may add a alpm-hook to grub package to do that monkey job for you automatically. As an alternative you may reinstall grub, as the newer version can handle both cases, including the dashes.

For more details:

[Testing Update] 2023-03-25 – Kernels, Firefox, Deepin, GNOME, NVIDIA, Wine – #42 by philm

With kernel 6.2.3 when you simply plug in a usb external drive, mount it and umount it, then the journal has a kernel Oops. A bug report, that includes the journal output was submitted at. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217174 Discussion can be found here: Re: Possible kernel fs block code regression in 6.2.3 umounting usb drives — Linux Stable Kernel Updates

Seems there is a regression introduced with 5.15.99 kernel update: [i915]drm:add_taint_for_CI [i915]] CI tainted:0x9 by intel_gt_init+0xae/0x2d0 [i915] (#8284) · Issues · drm / intel · GitLab. My thoughts here: [Testing Update] 2023-03-11 – Kernels, Mesa 22.3.7, Phosh, LibreOffice 7.4.6 – #31 by philm

FS#77975 – [nvidia] 530.41.03-1 high refresh rate problems

– Arch Linux – News: Switch to the base-devel meta package requires manual intervention

2023-01-13 – Pierre Schmitz

The php packages have been updated to the latest version 8.2. In addition to this, a new set of php-legacy packages have been introduced. These will follow the oldest but still actively supported PHP branch. This enables users to install the latest version but also introduces the option to use third party applications that might rely on an older version. Both branches will be kept up to date following our rolling release model. php and php-legacy can be installed at the same time as the latter uses a -legacy suffix for its binaries and configuration files.

In addition to this, the php7 packages have been removed as they reached end of life. The imap extension will no longer be provided as it relies on the c-client library which has been abandoned for many years.

– Arch Linux – News: PHP 8.2 update and introduction of legacy branch