PHP 8.0 and PHP 7 legacy packages are available

The php package has been updated to version 8.0. Please refer to the upstream migration guide. As some applications are not compatible with PHP 8 yet we provide a php7 package which can be installed alongside version 8. Packages that depend on PHP reflect this update and will require php7 if needed. You might need to update your configuration accordingly. PHP 7 binaries and configuration have the "7" suffix:

• /usr/bin/php -> /usr/bin/php7
• /etc/php -> /etc/php7
• /usr/bin/php-fpm -> /usr/bin/php-fpm7
• /usr/lib/systemd/system/php-fpm.service -> /usr/lib/systemd/system/php-fpm7.service
• /run/php-fpm -> /run/php-fpm7

We also provide third party modules compiled for PHP 7:

• php7-apcu
• php7-geoip
• php7-grpc
• php7-igbinary
• php7-imagick
• php7-memcache
• php7-memcached
• php7-mongodb
• php7-redis

Note that support for php7 will be limited and likely be dropped in about a year depending on how soon the majority of applications will be compatible with version 8.

https://archlinux.org/news/php-80-and-php-7-legacy-packages-are-available/

#news

FOSS Activities in January 2021

And January is over! Time has frankly been moving fast the past days. Packaging wise, things has been fine. Added tailscale and some other minor packages, but had a real purge of old packages from resigned maintainers. Also dropped ntop to the AUR which hasn’t been actively developed for years at this point. I’m curious when people are going to bug me about that one :) On the security side of things there has been quite a lot happening just the past week.

https://linderud.dev/blog/foss-activities-in-january-2020/

#planetarch

Chromium losing Sync support in early March

Google has announced that they are going to block everything but Chrome from accessing certain Google features (like Chrome sync) starting on March 15. This decision by Google is going to affect Arch's chromium package a bit earlier, on March 2, when Chromium 89 gets released. We know for sure that data syncing will stop working (passwords, bookmarks, etc.). Other features such as geolocation or enhanced spell check might continue to function for a bit longer. Extensions integrating with Google Drive might misbehave and LibreOffice will lose access to documents stored there. Other distros such as openSUSE and Fedora have already removed the soon-to-be-limited API keys from their Chromium 88 packages. Fedora's advisory provides a great deal of perspective on this and I also found this Hackaday post to be quite informative.

https://archlinux.org/news/chromium-losing-sync-support-in-early-march/

#news

Moving to Zstandard images by default on mkinitcpio

As linux-lts moved to the 5.10 version, all official kernels of Arch Linux now support zstd compressed initramfs images, so mkinitcpio is switching to zstd compressed images by default with version 30, which is currently on [testing\]. If, for any reason, you are using a kernel version prior to 5.9, make sure to change mkinitcpio.conf COMPRESSION to use one of the compressors supported, like gzip, otherwise you will not be able to boot images generated by mkinitcpio.

https://archlinux.org/news/moving-to-zstandard-images-by-default-on-mkinitcpio/

FOSS Activities in February 2021

Yo! New month, new update! The start of this month was marked with FOSDEM! I held a talk about secure boot and the tooling stuff I have written, sbctl. It’s a tool to help you manage secure boot keys and signing files. With help from sbsigntools it also does live enrollment of keys. The talk went great (I think) and it was fun to see how FOSDEM pulled off the conference with matrix and jitsi.

https://linderud.dev/blog/foss-activities-in-february-2021/

Wayland in 2021

A year ago I wrote about my Wayland setup on Linux. This year I would like to give you a small update on how I am going with Wayland on Arch Linux and how it is my daily driver at home and work. The setup itself stayed pretty much the same: Operating System: Arch Linux Window Manager: Sway Status bar: Heavily customized Barista bar Screenshots: Bash script utilizing Grim + Slurp Screen recordings: Bash script utilizing wf-recorder Sharing Text: Bash script utilizing wl-clipboard Dynamic Menu: bemenu Password Management: A combination of gopass, bemenu and bash Screensharing: xdg-desktop-portal-wlr + pipewire You can find my full setup in my dotfiles repository on Github.

https://shibumi.dev/posts/wayland-in-2021/

Monitoring Arch Linux with Prometheus

For monitoring the Arch Linux infrastructure we've moved on from Zabbix to Prometheus as it fits more into our infrastructure is code goal. This required some research into how we could achieve the same monitoring with Prometheus. Our Zabbix setup monitored Host, MySQL, Borg and Arch Linux related metrics. For …

https://vdwaa.nl/arch-prometheus-monitoring.html

Installation medium with installer

The installation medium now provides a guided installer. This addition to the default method of installation (based on the installation guide) is similar to the other methods. If you use this installer, do not forget to mention it when asking for support and also to provide the archinstall log, when asked.

https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installer/

FOSS Activities in March 2021

Yoooo! Another month has passed which means another status update. The python2 removal has been steady and several packages has been removed this month. Currently a query for python2 on archweb returns 139 matches. At the start of the month it was around 160-170. Progress! I have suggested we remove checkdepends on python2 packages to ease the cleanup of dependency cycles. The response has been lukewarm at best so we’ll see how that progresses.

https://linderud.dev/blog/foss-activities-in-march-2021/

Go Embed and Angular

Hi, there. Today’s article will be a rather short article. In this article I would like to showcase Go 1.16 new embed package. If you are familiar with Go you might know embedding functionality already from famous other libraries like go-bindata. The problem with go-bindata has been that upstream vanished one day and then multiple forks appeared and every company or person was doing their own thing with embedding assets into Go programs.

https://shibumi.dev/posts/go-embed-and-angular/

FOSS Activities in April 2021

Yo! Hope people have had a lovely spring. This month has passed quickly! I have put off writing the monthly post because I was busy with a weekend project. My master thesis was about how to apply transparency logs and reproducible builds to give package rebuilders the ability to produce tamper evident logs. This is handy since any one package build can easily be proven to be part of the log, and you can very easily fill inn the history from one point in time to another by hashing files in the correct order.

https://linderud.dev/blog/foss-activities-in-april-2021/

Boost your productivity with ZSH and Alacritty

In today’s article I would like to shine some light on my local terminal setup. My setup consists of ZSH and Alacritty. ZSH or the Z shell is an extended variant of the Bourne shell (bash). It comes with a few useful features and extensions. Many people use the ZSH mostly for nice shell prompts or tab completion. This article will be about more advanced features, like custom shortcuts. Alacritty is a terminal emulator written in Rust.

https://shibumi.dev/posts/zsh-and-alacritty/

Move of official IRC channels to libera.chat

As some of you may have read over the past days, there has been an ownership dispute over the freenode.net network. The IRC network has been used by Arch Linux and many other projects over the past decades as a platform for discussion and support. The dispute led to the exodus of most former freenode staff from the network and the founding of a new network: libera.chat Starting today, Arch Linux and its sister projects Arch Linux ARM and Arch Linux 32 will begin migrating the official IRC channels from freenode.net to libera.chat. Please bear with us as this can take some time to be fully settled in. We thank the freenode community for the many years of great service and collaboration.

https://archlinux.org/news/move-of-official-irc-channels-to-liberachat/

Sorting out old password hashes

Starting with libxcrypt 4.4.21, weak password hashes (such as MD5 and SHA1) are no longer accepted for new passwords. Users that still have their passwords stored with a weak hash will be asked to update their password on their next login. If the login just fails (for example from display manager) switch to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and log in there once.

https://archlinux.org/news/sorting-out-old-password-hashes/

Automated Website Testing with Selenium

Today’s blog article is a more unusual one. If you know me in person you would not connect me to web development, but yet here we are. So, how do I got here? One student at my university has asked me if I could help and have a look on their code. He was working on unit tests with Selenium on a very beginner friendly level. This is how I got more interested in this topic.

https://shibumi.dev/posts/automated-website-testing/

Arch Reproducible Progress July 2021

At the end of July, I had some days off and some more time to focus on some unreproducible packages in Arch Linux and get some of the issues resolved. This post goes through the resolved issues by category. gzipped man pages By default if a manpage is compressed with …

https://vdwaa.nl/arch-repro-july-2021.html

Kubermatic on Hetzner

Hello and welcome to another article about Kubernetes. In this article we will go through the Kubermatic installation on Hetzner Cloud. But first of all let us go through a few questions: What is Kubermatic and why do I need it? Kubermatic abstracts different Kubernetes clusters and providers for you. It does not matter if you want a cluster on Amazon, Google, Hetzner, vSphere or on-premise. With Kubermatic you can easily bootstrap new clusters in your favorite location with your favorite cloud provider or on-premise.

https://shibumi.dev/posts/kubermatic-on-hetzner/

Hardening Executables

Quite a while ago, Arch Linux has turned on many binary security features via compilation flags (2016)1 or turned off options that are known to help exploit software (debugging symbols, RPATH). Now we have 2021 and Arch Linux made good experience with the additional security options. We made good experience on Arch Linux with the following flags so far: FULL RELRO (Full Relocation Read-Only)2 STACK CANARY3 NX-Bit4 PIE (Position Independent Executable/Code)5 Setting no RPATH6 Setting no Symbols FORTIFY7 Some of these flags are known to have effects on performance.

https://shibumi.dev/posts/hardening-executables/

mkinitcpio v31 and UEFI stubs

A few months ago I wrote up some code for mkinitcpio which teaches it how to create UEFI executables utilizing the systemd stub. The change can be found here: https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/pull/53 This is a short introduction to why the feature is great, how it makes it easier to boot your system, and how it can be used to better secure your system with something like secure boot. The Boot Process For the past decade most computers have two ways to boot.

https://linderud.dev/blog/mkinitcpio-v31-and-uefi-stubs/

Monthly Report (August 2021)

This is the monthly report of what I’ve been up to in August 2021. 🙌 Reproducible Builds There are many different reasons to be interested in Reproducible Builds. When I originally got involved in the project I wasn’t a maintainer in any Linux distribution yet, instead I was wondering if there’s a way to distribute pre-compiled artifacts as an independent open source dev without carrying all the responsibility alone. A few years later I’ve now published a manual called i-probably-didnt-backdoor-this. It contains a hello world program and instructions on how to reproduce the various pre-compiled artifacts, explains all build …

https://vulns.xyz/2021/08/monthly-report/

Xandikos CardDAV/CalDAV server

In looking to moving my phone to LineageOS, I've started thinking about moving my mail, contacts and calendar data to my own server. After researching solutions for a while, I decided to try out xandikos. A simple Python carddav/caldav server intended for a single user with a basic feature …

https://vdwaa.nl/xandikos-server-setup.html