New Calamares

While creating our next iso 20.1.1 we stumbled on an issue we had not discovered before.

Starting 19.12 it seems we can not dualboot anymore.

We have figured out why that is and because of this we have created a new calamares and made a new iso 19.12.17.

If you never dual-boot that there will be no difference at all.

You can dualboot with 19.12.15-16 but not on the main lines. You need to choose a deeper menu (fallback) in grub and boot from there to get to the partition you installed first. The last operating system will always work.

If you build your isos now, you will get this improved calamares installer and you can dualboot again.

Calamares addition

Adding a line in our current calamares installer so that

• IF there is internet
• IF user asked for nvidia installation
• IF online linux kernel is newer than iso kernel

then latest linux kernel will be installed as well.

The nvidia package is always build against a certain linux kernel and both should match.

Packages installed on iso

• xdo
• xdotool

New Package for Conkies on Plasma

We worked first on the conkies of Plasma. We wanted them to work out of the box for this desktop and improve them were necessary.

Later we decided to give the plasma conkies its own package to keep things organised. 

After improving the plasma conkies we took a look at our standard conky package and applied some of these improvements there as well.

arcolinux-conky-collection-git package got an update because of the plasma conky project.

IF ON PLASMA, install the package with

sudo pacman -S arcolinux-conky-collection-plasma-git

Delete the current conky folder or move it to an other folder for backup.

Then do a skel to get the new conkies in or copy/paste just the conky folder over like shown in the video.

New fun script called unix

No explanations necessary

Neofetch update

Neofetch got an update. We have changed the size of the medallions images.

Neofetch now needs xdotool to display images. So install the package with

sudo pacman -S xdotool

Final version

Some of our conkies have now a plasma variant. We will not make doubles of them all. Just the nice ones we are missing.

Final version

Zver reported that .gtkrc2.0 is needed for our sysinfo script – that is back in
had been taking out because gtk2 right… it has consequences for the script
since the build is an automated process – we will build a new version
100% perfection is the goal

Less is more

All the latest changes have this in common that the isos need to be maintainable with this small crew.

So a less is more vision has been on our mind these last weeks.

Getting rid of packages if we can do so for example oblogout packages.

Now we take a look at all the icons that you can easily install afterwards via pacman or yay/trizen.

We are removing the following packages from the ArcoLinux iso

• papirus-icon-theme
• arc-icon-theme
• adapta-gtk-theme
• breeze-cursors-lh
• breeze-obsidian-cursor-theme
• xcursor-vanilla-dmz-aa
• faba-icon-theme
• halo-icons-git
• moka-icon-theme
• paper-icon-theme
• zafiro-icon-theme
• xcursor-simpleandsoft

It will result in 150MB less on the iso.
You make your own nemesis script and include your packages

sudo pacman -S --noconfirm --needed adapta-gtk-theme
yay -S --noconfirm --needed paper-icon-theme
...

Automatically update your mirrorlist on a daily basis

We have gotten rid of the reflector service to update our mirrorlist.

The solution is now a cron job. Cronie will handle it automatically on a daily basis.

sudo pacman -S arcolinux-cron-git

surfn-arc-breeze has been created for plasma with dark toolbar

During the development of ArcoLinuxB Plasma we did not like all the Surfn icons.

Icon themes are never gonna be 100% to your liking on all desktops.

Plasma is quite different from all the rest of them. Hence the idea to make an icon theme that is created only to be used on Plasma.

Now you can install and use

sudo pacman -S surfn-arc-breeze-icons-git

arcolinux-arc-kde

During the development of ArcoLinuxB Plasma we liked the arc-kde theme the most.

However the icons that were provided with it we did NOT like.

So we have created a variant of this theme without the icons through a simple PKGBUILD.

Now you can install and use

sudo pacman -S arcolinux-arc-kde

pacman.conf

We added a a new repo to be future-proof.

More and more applications are growing in size. We now have a repo that can handle any size.

Add these lines to your /etc/pacman.conf or do a clean install.

[arcolinux_repo_xlarge]
SigLevel = Required DatabaseOptional
Include = /etc/pacman.d/arcolinux-mirrorlist

minor change to standard tint2 theme

Black border of 1 pixel set to zero. It was only noticable if you have a bright background.

bashrc improvement

Thanks to a suggestion from Bobo on discord we change our skel alias to include also a backup

from

alias skel=’cp -rf /etc/skel/* ~’

to

alias skel=’cp -Rf ~/.config ~/.config-backup-$(date +%Y.%m.%d-%H.%M.%S) && cp -rf /etc/skel/* ~’

Your skel alias will create a separate folder with a backup of your .config folder with a date and a time. If your .config folder contains a large amount of data you will need to work around that.

You can always use Meld afterwards to compare the .config folder and the newly created backup folder of .config.

Your settings are saved before a skel.

Check if you got && and not | in your skel!

Rebuild of all packages from 3thparty

Mid November there was a large update of many packages. Just one package (that we know of) menulibre did not work anymore after those updates.

Just to be sure we have rebuild all third party packages against the new updates to be ready for the new iso build beginning of December.

Since it is a rebuild of the same packages and versions, depending on what you do, you might see a corrupted packages message. Delete the old cache files of pacman with

sudo pacman -Scc 

and respond with yes twice.

Changes to ArcoLinux iso

Removed from Iso

• i3-gaps-next-git
• terminus-font
• vivaldi-codecs-ffmpeg-extra-bin

Added to iso

• i3-gaps
• font-manager-git
• lshw

Reflector service

We decided against keeping the reflector service.

As a general rule we do not put anything that causes frustration on the iso.

The service sometimes worked and sometimes not.

It is out of the iso.

We will investigate with betatesters what is the best way to automatically get the fastest servers for Arch Linux.

In the meantime we do as we have always done – if the download is slow we type this in our terminals

• mirror
• mirrora
• mirrord
• mirrors

Or you make your own one and put it in your bashrc-personal.

It will only look at the countries near to Belgium.

alias mirrore="sudo reflector --verbose -c BE -c FR -c DE -c LU -c NL -c GB --protocol https --age 8 --sort rate --number 10 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist"

November Switch

Moving from development to stable.

Different repositories.

Different applications.

Different calamares.

Deleting old githubs.

Deleting old packages.

Less packages.

Less maintenance.

Downsizing in number of isos.

Easy to install multiple desktops on  one system.

Script to decrease bandwidth usage.

Git pull all your local githubs after this action.

New calamares – autologin

New code has been added to enable autologin on all  desktops.

i3-gaps

Moving from i3-gaps-next to i3-gaps. Coming from Arch Linux. No need to build via AUR.
Less maintenance.

New oblogout theme called adeos-cores-64

It is a reworked version from adeos-cores by TheUncleMez on discord.

This is smaller in icons (64 pixels) and will be our standard for the coming months.

Change it with your alias

noblogout

You see that the sardi oblogout is still active.

It does not matter. The last one in the list always wins.

New structure in packages.x86_64

We want you to be able to easily edit this file.

We have changed our names and packages.

Naturally this file should reflect the new structure of our iso.

###########################################################################
# ARCOLINUX FOLDER
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# ARCOLINUX DESKTOP FOLDER
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# ARCOLINUX CONFIG FOLDER
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# ARCOLINUX DCONF FOLDER
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# ARCOLINUX CALAMARES
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# CALAMARES DEPENDENCIES
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# ARCOLINUX CONFIG CALAMARES
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# DESKTOP SPECIFIC
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# XFCE
###########################################################################

..

###########################################################################
# ISO SPECIFIC
###########################################################################

..

new names for calamares

In order to keep track of all the changes and for you to keep building while we do our development,

there is a new calamares packagename and a new calamares config packagename.

Downsizing – NO LTS CALAMARES needed anymore

new module in calamares – nvidia

Downsizing – just one presentation for all isos

New module calamares – select LTS kernel

We had a separate script to build LTS isos. There is no need for that anymore. This resulted in 64 isos.

Downsizing. – down to 33 isos

One iso provides the LTS kernel.

Downside is that you will need internet to get it installed.

If there is no internet, the lts kernel will not be installed and installation will finish with the standard linux kernel.

new module  in calamares – pacman database

After a clean install pacman will already have a database and you can immediately start installing packages.

walkthrough  in new calamares

Downsizing – just one presentation for all isos

capture the essence of ArcoLinux during installation

Downsizing – just one presentation for all isos

Fix for lightdm showing error

Lightdm is just working fine.

At some point it showed us a message during shutdown.

Fixed that on the iso.

Issue is filed on their github.

Reflector service

This service was already present and did not start.

It runs on a weekly basis and gets the latest Arch Linux mirrors in.

DOWNSIZING

General rule is getting rid of (ArcoLinux and Arch Linux) packages if we can do without it.

For example a package that can work both for ArcoLinux and ArcoLinuxD then we omit one.

new build script

Second build script for ArcoLinuxB to use the packages in your own pc rather than download them everytime.

Faster and less bandwidth.

NEW CALAMARES MODULE – intel and amd

We have written a new module that will detect if you have an AMD or an INTEL machine and will make sure you have amd-ucode or intel-ucode installed on your system.
Check the folder /boot to see one of both images.

Downside is that you will need internet to get it installed.

If there is no internet, the packages will not be installed.

Calamares 3.2.16

Begin November Calamares released a new version.

More information about this release in the link.

https://calamares.io/calamares-3.2.16-is-out/

lshw – interesting tool

With a line of code you can get data from different parts of your computer like the graphical card

sudo lshw -C display

We decided not to have it on the iso yet until we need it for scripts for calamares for example.

XFCE4 terminal dropdown

Ability to scroll up during installation enabled.

Polybar for openbox simplified

On the ArcoLinuxB-Xtended iso openbox is given a polybar. On a smaller laptop the polybar was rather full. So we changed some modules around to get some more breathing room.
This will ofcourse also apply to Openbox if you install the polybar on it.

Hblock

Hblock received a place in the settings menu of Xfce.

Easy access to block sites.

Tint2 theme created

After the change of the wallpaper the standard tint2bar was too dark to even distinguish the 4 virtual desktops we have.

So we created a new theme – arcolinux-xtended. 2 tint2 packages have been updated for it.

variety

It is safe to assume that the website desktoppr.co is not coming back online. We update our variety settings.

Taking this opportunity to alter variety NOT to change the wallpaper after a certain time.

All tiling window managers have the super+k keyboard shortcut to lock the screen with slimlock.

Super + k

All tiling window managers have the super+k keyboard shortcut to lock the screen with slimlock.

drop down terminal

All tiling window managers have the F12 keyboard shortcut to get the xfce4-terminal dropdown terminal.

Other received a version of their own dropdown terminal like deepin.
If the desktop in question does not have the ability to create a drop-down terminal we use yakuake (plasma) or xfce4-terminal for the others.

We will make an F12 of some kind available on most desktops.

qtile terminal

Standard terminal is set to termite as in other TWM.
Super + t is always going to stay urxvt.

Combining  desktops with each other

The dconf database moved out of the desktop or config package and has now its own package just for the dconf folder and file in your ~/.config/dconf/dconf.

This gives you the flexibility to install gnome and  budgie and mate and … with each other.

More later.

creation of ArcoLinux Xtended

We can now combine with more ease different desktops together.

We tested this out in the project ArcoLinuxB Xtended.

We have recorded every step of the way.

8 hours and 19 videos later we have a new iso just for TWM

Tiling Window Managers are a special breed but once you passed a hurdle you will love them.

All tutorials can be found on arcolinuxd.com

New wallpaper to mark the major change we went through

Thanks to the work we have done in adding more packages for every desktop and dividing them up into

• desktop essential elements (arcolinux-bspwm, …)
• non-desktop essential elements (arcolinux-config-bspwm,…)

we have now more flexibility with our packages.

We can now combine with more ease different desktops together.

Wallpaper repository

By now everyone has seen all the wallpapers from Submicron.
We are NOT deleting the repositories or the wallpapers.

But we do not sync with it by default. Pacman.conf has been changed  not to include them by default.

Want them back… delete the hashtags at the beginning of the line.

termite font

We have lowered the font size in our terminal – termite from 12 to 11.

i3wm bar changes to i3status

To be able to quickly install i3wm we do not set i3blocks as standard. That needs to be build with yay from AUR.

Installing i3 on any ArcoLinux computer is now as easy as

sudo pacman -S i3-gaps i3status arcolinux-i3wm-git

arcolinux-conky-collection

Follow general rule that applications from ArcoLinux go in /usr/local/bin.

It will be easy for the developers/betatesters/users to find ‘our stuff’.

Moving am-rotate-conky from arcolinux-pipemenu to arcolinux-conky-collection and renaming to conky-rotate like conky-toggle.

More consistency in our naming of packages and where the apps are put.

The consequence is that many packages needed an update (see image below)

All desktops have been changed to that the keyboard shortcuts work.

Super + C – conky-toggle (Alt + C if the desktop did not allow it)
Ctrl + Alt – conky-rotate to the next
Ctrl + Alt – conky-rotate to the previous

Separating all TWMs

We have these tiling window manager for the moment

1. awesome
2. bspwm
3. herbstluftwm
4. i3
5. qtile
6. xmonad

These will be the future tiling window managers

1. dwm
2. jwm

Some of these use the same files. When installing them together the files will clash and you will not be able to install it (not via pacman).
We have therefor changed the configs of some tiling window managers.

Sxhkd is now situated in the folder of each TWM if we use it. So there can be no conflicts on that end.

That means that we can combine tiling window manager on one computer that would have clashed in the past.

This is one of the advantages of the new naming convention and the creation of the new packages.

Just 1 0blogout for all desktops

We added a script to Oblogout.
Now we can shutdown all current tiling window managers (and future ones) and openbox.

New isos will get this by default.

ONLY FOR TILING WINDOW MANAGER + OPENBOX

If you keep rolling, you need to do the following steps.

sudo pacman -Scc
update
sudo pacman -S arcolinux-oblogout

Pacman  should remove your current package e.g. arcolinux-oblogout-bspwm, …

else

sudo pacman -R arcolinux-oblogout-XXX

then

sudo pacman -S arcolinux-oblogout

If a message appears about signature invalid then say yes. You skipped sudo pacman -Scc.

Renaming of packages – consistency

Why do we rename some of our packages?

It should be clear in the name of the package where the data is going to be put.

arcolinux-config – means the data is going to be stored in ~/.config

arcolinux-local – means the data is going to be stored in ~/.local

arcolinux-local-applications means installation in .local/share/applications – we skip the share folder

arcolinux-local-xfce4 means installation in .local/share/xfce4 – we skip the share folder

 These packages had to be renamed in order to follow the naming convention:

As a result all ArcoLinux, ArcoLinuxD and ArcoLinuxB scripts need to change.
You may encounter issues.
Report them.

Packages for Desktop Settings

We are talking about packages that will actually improve a particular desktop.
All these files contribute to the uniqueness of the ArcoLinux Desktop.

In bold are the new packages.

1. arcolinux-awesome-git
2. arcolinux-bspwm-git
3. arcolinux-budgie-git
4. arcolinux-cinnamon-git
5. arcolinux-deepin-git
6. arcolinux-dwm-git
7. arcolinux-enlightenment-git
8. arcolinux-gnome-git
9. arcolinux-herbstluftwm-git
10. arcolinux-i3wm-git
11. arcolinux-jwm-git
12. arcolinux-lxqt-git
13. arcolinux-mate-git
14. arcolinux-openbox-git
15. arcolinux-plasma-git
16. arcolinux-plasma-nemesis-git
17. arcolinux-qtile-git
18. arcolinux-xfce-git
19. arcolinux-xmonad-git

As a result all ArcoLinux, ArcoLinuxD and ArcoLinuxB scripts need to change.
You may encounter issues.
Report them.

All kinds of packages for the .config folder – not related to desktop

We are talking about packages that will add configs and settings inside your future .config folder.
With this naming convention users will know that arcolinux-config means that any and all ‘non-desktop-related’ configuration files are to be written into ~/.config.

It has nothing to do with the ‘desktop‘ but everything to do with the rest of the theming and/or applications.

In bold are the new packages.

1. arcolinux-config-awesome-git
2. arcolinux-config-bspwm-git
3. arcolinux-config-budgie-git
4. arcolinux-config-cinnamon-git
5. arcolinux-config-deepin-git
6. arcolinux-config-dwm-git
7. arcolinux-config-enlightenment-git
8. arcolinux-config-gnome-git
9. arcolinux-config-herbstluftwm-git
10. arcolinux-config-i3-git
11. arcolinux-config-jwm-git
12. arcolinux-config-lxqt-git
13. arcolinux-config-mate-git
14. arcolinux-config-openbox-git
15. arcolinux-config-plasma-git
16. arcolinux-config-plasma-nemesis-git
17. arcolinux-config-qtile-git
18. arcolinux-config-xfce-git
19. arcolinux-config-xmonad-git

arcolinux-config-git is the package for the ArcoLinux iso (Xfce, Openbox, i3).

As a result all ArcoLinux, ArcoLinuxD and ArcoLinuxB scripts need to change.
You may encounter issues.
Report them.

Jump in calamares version from 3.2.10 to 3.2.15

Thanks to the great support of the Calamares team and Adriaan in particular we can now use the calamares application to get our vmlinux-linux kernel on the iso. This extra functionality is there for any Arch Linux distro out there.

The unpack module of Calamares has been changed so that ArcoLinux can use it to get the linux kernel at the right place, at the right time with the right name.

Changing calamares and its configuration has a huge impact (read workload) on ArcoLinux. At least 34 packages get changed by it.

Want to read more about this Calamares release and the previous ones?

alias fc is changed in update-fc

We have changed the alias fc to update-fc.

There is an application with that name these days.

We use update-fc if you installed a new font and you want to use it immediately without rebooting.

Standard slim lock theme has changed 

Applications that have been dropped

• terminus-font
• temps
• font-manager
• xterm

Software packages that have been added

• ttf-hack

xfce4-terminal as dropdown on XFCE4

F12 is the keyboard shortcut that sets this terminal.

touchpad

Added new file pointers to the XFCE settings

• Double tapping on
• Reverse scrolling

for synaptics devices

bashrc

new alias sr = sudo reboot

Xresources has been changed to get a nicer terminal for urxvt

linux-lts

All packages have been rebuilt to get the newest linux-lts package.

Removed obsolete package

Temps is a weather application that is not longer working and is no longer maintained. All isos will not include it in the future builds. Reference to this package gone in Xfce-thunar package and Openbox package.

Change from base group to base meta-package

Following packages are no longer installed

• dhpcd
• jfsutils
• python-attrs
• reiserfsprogs
• s-nail
• qt5-script

Variety

With the development of herbstluftwm we have made it possible to set our wallpapers with variety.

Insync

Insync is a paid application to sync google drive.
Co-maintainer of the PKGBUILD from AUR.

Other packages that were orphaned are now maintained by me.

1. insync-nemo
2. insync-caja

LTS kernel updated

All isos will have the linux-lts 4.19.75 kernel on them.

ArcoLinux Wallpaper

Just a switch of one wallpaper – tron is out – escape to italy is in.

Fun script

Cmatrix from Arch Linux repository gives NO transparency in terminal.

Cmatrix-git from AUR DOES provide transparency.

Switch users

In Xfce4 you can switch users if you install gdmflexiserver – this was never implemented.

Now xfce4 has its own application to switch users.  Whisker menu code has been changed to add “xfce4-session-logout -u”.

All developments after July iso release are included

All changes after the release of either 19.07.9 or 19.07.11 are now incorporated in 19.09.1