ArcoLinux v21.09 – Holiday Release

HOLIDAY RELEASE OF 2021

Beginner and Advanced

With the many additional features and options provided in recent releases, we expect some users will be overwhelmed by the choices.

For those just starting to explore the Linux world we have added an easier way to install ArcoLinux.

We have now the beginner installation and the advanced installation.

Adding a Bare installation to the ArcoLinuxD ISO’s will bring back why we created the ArcoLinuxD ISO in the first place.

For those who remember the Antergos days – this was the Antergos base installation.

You end up in TTY and you install the rest of the packages yourself.

sddm
mate
sound
bluetooth
…

BIOS / UEFI

Thanks to Bukii on the forum we were able to investigate how the ArcoLinux ISO behaved on his hardware.

We concluded that the nouveau driver (xf86-video-nouveau) and the nvidia driver can not be on the same system.

We have implemented two new choices to avoid the nouveau driver.

Nvidia

We have added a pacman hook to automatically run mkinitcpio -P for nvidia, nvidia-lts and nvidia-dkms.
More info here.

Calamares

Calamares 3.2.41.1 is used for this version.
More info on https://calamares.io.

Virtualbox

One of our betatesters aka Surfie had an issue with the virtualbox-guest-utils-nox used in the archiso releng – we switched back to virtualbox-guest-utils.

Qemu and Vmware

Qemu and VMware are not activated by default anymore because of error message users see from Vmware.
VirtualBox has been and will be our default supported virtual machine to test out ArcoLinux.

Vmware users only need to activate the service. The package open-vm-tools is installed.

Go from a very small screen to the maximum resolution.

sudo systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service --now

Now press Ctrl + Alt + Enter twice to have the correct resolution.

Pacman init service failed

On the morning of 02/08/2021 our pacman-init.service failed. We have solved the issue by changing the service file and making videos to fix the keys. Haveged has been removed as service and application in the process.

We created a new alias called “keyfix” to fix issues pacman and its keys.

Archiso 57-1

We have changed 3 files regarding network configurations.

New Calamares option

Calamares lets you now choose the filesystem when you erase your disk:

ext4
btrfs
jfs
f2fs
reiser
xfs

ArcoLinux Desktop Trasher

We give you a means to remove any desktop on your system.

The application contains a list of applications for every desktop. It uses groups as well as single packages.

Over time Arch Linux will change the content of groups or may remove packages.

The ArcoLinux Desktop Trasher is therefor over time an “attempt” to remove desktops.

You might have to remove single packages that are part of the desktop yourself.
We can not remove packages you installed independently.

Two options to remove a desktop

The ArcoLinux Desktop Trasher will look at the content of /usr/share/xsessions and provide a list
The ArcoLinux Desktop Trasher has a static list to select from

Calamares – personal changes

Standard size for swapfile has changed from 512MB to 2GB.

New Calamares software catalogue

We have been steadily adding applications to our repos.

All the applications that are new can now be selected in Calamares.

50 new packages added

ArcoLinux Candy Beauty

Building upon the Beautyline and Candy icons we have completed them for the ArcoLinux users.

All icons (on Xfce4) should be there.

ArcoLinux Logout theme sweet

We have created a matching logout theme called sweet.

ArcoLinuxS Lts

Because of tutorials on ALCI we decided to build an ISO with Linux-Lts on board.
We keep the linux kernel as fail-safe. In ALCI we get rid of the Linux kernel.

GRUB and UEFI

Nomodeset lines can have extra parameters if you need them – we decided against using them by default:

noapic
noacpi
nosplash
irqpoll

/personal folder

We have added the folder /personal to your ISO. You can use it to add personal configs, setttings, packages, databases to your ISO that you will build yourself via https://arcolinuxb.com tutorials.