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Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from March 2014. The article has been slightly improved.
I finally found some time to update and expand E5 a bit. The biggest news is surely the release of the _e5-x11_, _e5-gtk_ and _e5-fltk_ repositories. On the top of that packages have been updated and more than 80 new ones added (mostly to extra). This update also fixes a few issues that E5 had before.
New to E5? You may want to read the previous posts first:
First public Arch:E5 repository published
More e5 repositories available (default, devel, extra)
Most notably the _docbook_ issue has been resolved. It took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong there. I was able to narrow down the problem to be solely related to the _docbook-xsl_ package as simply replacing the E5 one with the package from Arch made the problem disappear. This made me guess that probably some other E5 components (docbook-xml?) were semi-broken. I tried this and that to no avail.
Eventually I decided to build a package on a pure Arch system using the PKGBUILD from E5. Result: Broken package! Building the package again with an unmodified Arch PKGBUILD? Result: Working. Hm! Since it is an arch-independant package I hadn't really changed anything except for setting the epoch value. And in the end it turned out: Leaving out epoch makes the package work, setting it breaks it!
Even though it bugs me to make an exception the epoch "rule" for this package, I've removed the epoch value for _docbook-xsl_ for now. If anybody has any idea exactly what's going on there, feel free to tell me. I'm very much interested in it but don't have the time to dig any deeper on the issue in the forseeable future.
For some reason I had forgotten to disable the libsystemd dependency on the _polkit_ package. And since E5 doesn't come with systemd, polkit could not be used. This bug has been corrected.
There were two or three smaller issues I was able to solve during the last weeks but I didn't write them down and can't really remember what they were.
The Equinox Desktop Environment on Arch:E5 (PNG)
Quite a few packages have been updated to newer versions. Most of them are from the _skel_ or _default_ repository but a few other ones were updated as well.
Here are some of the most important ones:
However the main news is clearly that the new repositories "x11", "fltk" and "gtk" are available now. As their names suggest, they hold packages which provide graphical programs which run on pure X11 or depend on the FLTK or GTK+ toolkits.
To install a very light-weight desktop, simply install the package "ede":
pacman -S ede
Or if you want a full-blown, yet traditional desktop, the "mate" (and probably "mate-extra") group(s) may fit your taste:
pacman -S mate
I had also intended to package a game for demonstration and since the new widelands beta was released not too long ago, I tried to prepare that. Arch:E5 has all the packages needed to build it and widelands compiles fine, too. Unfortunately it segfaults upon execution... And since I don’t have the time needed to look into that, it's unfortunately no widelands for now. 🙁
The new MATE 1.8 on Arch:E5 (PNG)
I think that Arch:E5 has already grown quite large for the quick project that it is. Right now it consists of 700+ packages which are roughly 1GB in size!
While it has been an interesting project, I'm not really sure what to do with it now. Most of what I was aiming for has been accomplished and the next step would now be bug hunting and adding even more packages. In other worlds: Nothing spectacular. In general I'm up to the challenge to maintain a linux distro for a longer time. However there's of course no reason to maintain anything that isn't of any use to anybody.
For that reason I'll just let Arch:E5 live for a while doing the occasional update now and then and see if it is at least remotely interesting for somebody.
There are a lot of things which I'd like to do next. However I haven't really decided, yet. So it'll have to be a surprise!
