Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Enjoying the latest software on Arch Linux

I had installed Arch Linux on one of the partition in Sep 2008 but did not use it much since I was forced to use vesa driver because ati driver had a bug and it did not work on secondary monitor. Although Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron had the same bug I could update the driver through Debian Sid in June 2008 after the bug was removed.

Arch Linux is a rolling distribution and latest packages are periodically transferred from testing to main repositories and you need to just upgrade the packages through pacman.

Xorg 7.4 was moved to extra repository on 30th Nov 2008 and I was eager to use it to test the driver. I upgraded Xorg and on reboot found that although the ati driver worked for the secondary monitor the touchpad did not work. After exploring I found that this version of Xorg had input hotplugging enabled by defaut. After reading on this page I added the following packages:
xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-vmmouse xf86-input-synaptics

and it worked.

Then I did the system wide upgrade and now I have:
Linux Kernel 2.6.28
Xorg 7.4 (xserver 1.5.3) working without xorg.conf
Gnome 2.24
Open Office 3.0.1
GIMP 2.6.4
All latest packages on LXDE

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