Arctic Linux - Alpha 1.24

Arctic Linux Alpha 1.24 — Arctic-linux-a1.24.iso, x86_64, 695 MiB.

The image can compile now, and wireless survives the install.

The compiler is on the medium

clang and lld ship on the image. Until now a machine had to download a 1 GiB toolchain before it could build anything — on a network that might be the thing being repaired. That is most of why this image is 695 MiB rather than 383.

alpm ins -s <pkg> works from the live session.

Wireless

Three separate faults, all of which ended with no network:

The address never arrived. wpa_supplicant -B returns as soon as it has forked — before it has associated, and long before the four-way handshake. DHCP went out of an interface still reporting NO-CARRIER, failed, and reported associated, but DHCP failed. The passphrase was fine; the association completed a second later. It waits for the link now, and asks for a lease three times before giving up.

The connection did not survive the install. A_NET defaults to dhcp, which writes a wired profile, so a laptop installed over wifi rebooted into a NetworkManager that had never heard of the network the install had just used. The credentials are carried across as a second profile now — the wired one is untouched, and NetworkManager takes whichever is actually there.

Nothing could list a network before iw was put on the image in 1.2.

The console

• arcticfetch no longer runs on login. It is a thing to run when you want to look at it, not something to print over every shell.
• zsh loads autosuggestions and nothing else. Syntax highlighting recoloured the line as you typed it and fought with anything else writing to the terminal.
• The boot banner is a thin rule, the release and the kernel, and another rule — instead of a full-width row of = in seven colours that got worse the wider the screen was.

alpm speaks one language now

ins and del are gone. add installs, rem removes, repo add adds a repository. Two names for one thing meant every example, script and page had to pick one; the old verbs answer with what to type instead of failing as an unknown command. The help is a list of what you would actually type, with the five common ones at the top.

alpm add <pkg>            alpm rem <pkg>
alpm add -s <pkg>         alpm rem -a <pkg>     what it left behind
alpm update               alpm rem -d <pkg>     dependencies too
alpm fetch all            alpm rem -f <pkg>     force it
alpm repo add <url>

Graphics install at all now

llvm shipped llvm-lit's count and not into /usr/bin, and toybox owns both — so installing llvm stopped on a file conflict, and mesa depends on llvm, so the entire graphics stack failed with it. Both are test harness and are gone from the package. mesa and vulkan-loader install.

e2fsprogs takes chattr, lsattr and logsave, which are its own.

Also

• initialization is listed and documented as the default init, in install.conf as well as the installer.
• systemd-libre is no longer offered: it is not packaged, and a choice that can only fall back to something else is worse than no choice.
• The advice printed when there is no compiler said alpm ins base-devel, which is not a package. It says alpm add llvm.

A boot partition that did not mount was ignored

The install carried on and wrote the kernel, the initramfs and the bootloader into a plain directory on the root filesystem rather than onto the partition the firmware reads. Nothing said so, the install reported success, and the machine did not boot.

Both paths check it now — the one that partitions the disk and the one that uses partitions made by hand — and both ask /proc/mounts rather than trusting mount's exit status, because a mount that succeeds onto the wrong thing is the failure worth catching.

Known

• LXDE and LXQt have recipes but no packages. Xfce, openbox and icewm are packaged.
• A package's declared dependencies are not checked against what it actually links — dwm installs and then fails on libharfbuzz.so.0.
• systemd-libre and s6-66 are not packaged.

Install

dd if=Arctic-linux-a1.24.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Run wifi-connect if you need wireless, edit /etc/arctic/install.conf, run arctic-install.