Hello everyone!

Hope y'all are good: sorry I have gone for so long, but last months have been pretty busy at work and now during December I am also spending some extra time doing the advent of code, so I thought not so much about AstroArch.

This post is likely the last one for the 2023 and I want to tell you few things!

First of all, I want to THANK all people that are using astroarch, this year the user base grew esponentially, from 3 users there are now at least 2 dozens or more using it, it makes incredibly proud and happy, you drive this project and there is nothing more important than this to me!

This year we have seen the first contributions! This is the philosophy I like, I can't say how grateful I am to have received few contribs, either as requests, missing features or even a full guide to install some things that work better. This are the base of a beautiful and strong community!

So, why am I saying all of this? Cause I don't feel good with myself when I go silent and there is movement on the forum.

Here's the plan for the upcoming week and 2024.

First I want to ship indi 2.0.5 asap, I think it may be ready by tomorrow evening. After that I don't expect much activity for another ~2 months, I tried the building steps given by Stephan and I believe reworking the project that way will be a major improvement for everyone, so that will be my next focus - shipping a reworked 1.8 version that should correct some annoying bugs that have been around since few months (striped theme on dolphin and missing icons to anyone?)
This will absorb an incredible amount of time unfortunately, rebuilding things from scratch and make sure they work is a lot of trials and errors and when you want to achieve 100% reproducibility you find yourself nuking things and redo them even few times per day, and flashing stuff on SD and scripting may be time consuming

I will be on holiday starting next week, so maybe (although unlikely) I may have 1.8 ready by beginning of 2024.

I also hear you, having a mega thread which now reached 19 pages is not the best thing I will ask Jasem if we can have a proper forum section next to stellarmate/astroberry in the forum so hopefully things will be cleaner.

I wish you all and your families a peaceful time during the upcoming holidays (and a lot of clear skies of course).
I'll see you all next year!

Mattia


PS: for AUR packages, there is already paru installed and you can install packages from the AUR simply using paru -S package_name

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Hi all, just shipped the new image 1.7 for AstroArch - you may update with update-astroarch but I suggest to flash the new image this time due to some colors/fonts changes

No big changes but pay attention to chrony that is now the time keeper instead of ntp/timesyncd

Small visual adjustment mainly, tried to patch the dark theme (not a complete success but at least Kstars is now readable)

The term has now nice infos, tells you some good wisdome sentences and if there are any packages that need update

The problem with WiFi should be solved now as the Kwallet is disabled by default

Add some documentation here and there and a fallback browser since chromium got broken after some udpates (is now fixed)

Fixed the i2c config which got borked after some of my changes

The release cycle for 1.8 starts now, I do not plan to bring in anything bug unless there is some specific asks by you guys, but I am planning to focus on HDMI and replacing the default VNC with krbf or possibly, which is my dream, replace completely X with wayland

Stay tuned!

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Hey Steve, you could try here archlinuxarm.org/forum/

If it's a generic question about Arch feel free to drop it on discord, I work with Arch since few years.

If it's related to the raspberry, it depends, the ArchLinuxARM forum may be a good fit but more than often I had to look for generic informations about the raspberry pi (based on raspbian) and apply the knowledge related to Arch

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Hello sc!

I am very glad you are another Arch user and to hear you built a system off the idea!

To your points:
- ArchWiki recommendations: not sure which recommendations I haven't followed, the only big derailing I used is the boot.txt cause some models of raspberry pi 4 (BCM0) do not boot if kernel params are not changed, also that is necessary since the arch kernel won't boot with sddm+plasma (at least it wasn't working until few motnhs ago), what else diverged from the archwiki?
- packages: I provide few packages by myself (like SDDM) cause those broke the system few times and I didn't have the opportunity to dig deeper after spending hours trying to understand what changed there, but not sure about any systemd package?
- KDE oddities: are you referring to the dark theme? If so please share your findings cause I am fighting with that since this summer

if you want, please share with me (even privately, via discord or mail to matto.astro AT gmail DOT com), I would be more than happy to include your changes into the default image as it is my understanding that those would be an improvement for the whole community! I'd really use a hand with some open items but being alone on the journey doesn't make things easy

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