ArchWiki:Requests

Is the wiki missing documentation for a popular software package or coverage of an important topic? Or, is existing content in need of correction, updating, or expansion? Write your requests below and share your ideas...

See ArchWiki:Reports to report questionable contributions. Please sign your edits and feel free to comment on others' requests.

General requests

Inaccurate content

Pages flagged with Template:Accuracy.

Outdated content

Pages flagged with Template:Out of date.

Irrelevant or unhelpful content

Pages flagged with Template:Deletion.

Incomplete content

Pages flagged with Template:Expansion.

Poorly-written content

Pages flagged with Template:Poor writing.

Duplicate effort or overlapping scope

Pages flagged with Template:Merge.

Misleading names

Pages flagged with Template:Moveto.

Poor translations

Pages flagged with Template:Bad translation.

Incomplete translations

Pages flagged with Template:Translateme. See also ArchWiki Translation Team.

Incomplete content

Pages flagged with Template:Stub.

Dead or broken links

Pages flagged with Template:Linkrot. Should be repaired or replaced.

Templates with an undefined parameter

Pages automatically flagged with Template:META Error

Unexplained presence of an article status template

Pages automatically flagged with Template:META Unexplained Status Template.

Pages with misspelled or deprecated templates

Need to fix template or change to new template.

Full links

Should be turned into internal links.

Problem redirects

Note: Redirects should not point to other sites and ones that do sometimes erroneously show up on these pages.

• Special:BrokenRedirects
• Special:DoubleRedirects

Creation requests

Here, list requests for topics that you think should be covered on ArchWiki. If not obvious, explain why ArchWiki coverage is justified (rather than existing Wikipedia articles or other documentation). Furthermore, please consider researching and creating the initial article yourself (see Help:Editing for content creation help).

HOWTO: SAMBA PDC + LDAP

How to configure SAMBA PDC + LDAP in Arch Linux? (Moved from another page. Hokstein 19:57, 16 September 2007 (EDT))

Tripwire

Finding information on the install of this program already requires a bit of searching around the net, and then a variety of modifications to get it running correctly. It would be nice to have a good HowTo about the install and setup of Tripwire on Arch. The package is availabe in community.

It has since been removed from [community], it's in the AUR now. -- Karol 21:52, 29 August 2011 (EDT)

Left-Handed Adjustments for Desktop Environments

I was thinking it would be helpful for lefties if there were a list of configuration options for each desktop environment that facilitate left-handed use of mice and touchpads. I'm not sure if this is related enough to Arch to include in this wiki, but I haven't had a lot of luck finding information for my own DE (KDE) let alone for others. I will start writing down information, and if no one else thinks there should be a separate page for this, I'll just add the information I find to each individual DE's page. —ajrl 2013-08-11T15:09−06:00

I think a separate page is better. -- Fengchao (talk) 11:58, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Bugzilla

It would be nice if there was a page documenting Bugzilla installation. The package is in [community], but I'm about to install it and wishing I knew potential caveats.

Input methods

Currently there is no page on ArchWiki properly describing various input methods generally. There is only Internationalization#Input_methods_in_Xorg, but it has several problems:

• missing descriptions
• X compose key does not fit in
• GTK has a default "simple" input method featuring the Ctrl+Shift+u shortcut for entering a unicode character (this was added recently into a wrong article: [1]) - again, no description
• no description of XIM - outdated, but sometimes used as fallback?

So this is quite enough material to start a new great article ;)

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 18:23, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

DRI

An article, or even stub that links to resources, explaining what DRI is, why it's important, differences between DRI 1, 2, 3, how DRI1 is no longer supported as of xorg-server 1.13, simple xorg.conf code explaining the DRI section, enabling the composite and render extensions there, these and more. Just my thoughts.

Modification requests

Here, list requests for correction or other modification of existing articles. Only systemic modifications that affect multiple articles should be included here. If a specific page needs modification, use that page's discussion or talk page instead and one of the #General requests templates.

As a rolling release, Arch is constantly receiving updates and improvements. Because of this the Arch wiki must be updated quickly to reflect these changes.

wireless_tools -> iw

In addition to the net-tools deprecated, commands like iwconfig and iwlist are deprecated too. These should be updated to the appropriate iw commands. The one problem with this is that iw output is sometimes much more verbose.

• iwconfig -> iw
  • iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc --> iw wlan0 set type ibss
• iwlist wlan0 scan -> iw dev wlan0 scan

thestinger (talk) 07:06, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Before doing this, I want some one familiar with recent wireless development to confirm if those command can be directly replaced. I did remember that years ago many wireless do not support iw command. -- Fengchao (talk) 14:12, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

I've created a table of equivalent commands in Wireless Setup#Manual setup, so far only commands for connecting to WEP encrypted network don't have an iw equivalent - according to iw --help, it should be iw wlan0 connect your_essid key 0:your_key for an ASCII key and iw wlan0 connect your_essid key d:1:your_key for a hexadecimal key, but I can't test it. Also many other commands could be added to the table. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 00:00, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

As I said before on the talkpage, I think you have done an awesome rework on the whole page the last days! I have done slight changes to above wep commands. Please see the page for details. --Indigo (talk) 13:48, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I see two "0:your_key" in the table. Typo? -- Fengchao (talk) 13:35, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

No, hex/ascii is alike. That '0' is the keyslot. Explained briefly later: [2] --Indigo (talk) 17:54, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

DeveloperWiki

Many pages are out of date and I can't even flag them out of date. Should users be warned that pages in this "category" may be really old and abandoned? -- Karol 09:19, 8 October 2011 (EDT)

Perhaps we can create a special template to be included at the top of every article in that category? -- Kynikos 13:41, 8 October 2011 (EDT)

MediaWiki Visual Editor

References to the Visual editor sandbox should me made on the Wiki and BBS, especially where new users will easily come across it. ~ Filam 16:12, 16 December 2011 (EST)

Move/Merge articles to external wikis

Although Finnish and Serbian have their own wikis, we're still hosting some articles in those languages:

• Finnish articles
• Serbian articles: Српски, Srpski

Some users of those wikis should probably be contacted in order to complete the move/merge, replacing those articles with interlanguage links at least on the respective English pages.

-- Kynikos (talk) 16:34, 10 May 2012 (UTC) (Last edit: 03:04, 22 September 2013 (UTC))

New dependencies for pacman

Some parts of the wiki may need updating, e.g. [3] (the last one in the FAQ). -- Karol 08:39, 20 January 2012 (EST)

There are actually quite a few dependencies that aren't mentioned, since a broken dependency of pacman would also break pacman (can see them all with pactree -l pacman | sort -u | cut -f 1 -d ' '). The packages that would need to be downloaded and extracted would vary depending on which partial upgrade was done. thestinger 15:19, 21 February 2012 (EST)

vmlinuz26

Instead of flagging all articles still using the old kernel image naming out of date, can we do some mass-renaming? -- Karol 20:55, 20 October 2011 (EDT)

Last week, I found at one article that was using vmlinuz26 in an example for users of non-recent kernel versions. I'm not sure if we would want to keep such an example around, but we may want to decide that before doing a mass rename. And for what it's worth, I don't think it is necessary to keep such antiquated examples around. -- Jstjohn (talk) 20:53, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Of course I don't know what article you're referring to, but doing a mass-renaming with a bot sounds a bit dangerous, because as you've pointed out there may be exceptions where the old kernel names are still ok. I'm moving this discussion out of Bot requests. -- Kynikos (talk) 14:57, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

The rename is done very long time ago. I am stating to do the following except few places as mentined above.

• vmlinuz26 to vmlinuz-linux
• kernel26.img to initramfs-linux.img
• kernel26-fallback.img to initramfs-linux-fallback.img Done

-- Fengchao (talk) 05:40, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Switch initscripts to systemd on all pages

TODO:

• D-Bus: Remove or redirect to Systemd. All link to it should be check and cleaned up.

Now that initscripts no longer are supported, we should change stuff that have information with initscripts to systemd --Toringe (talk) 22:49, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Agree, all initscripts should be converted to systemd. Many old stuff could be removed safely now. -- Fengchao (talk) 01:25, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

D-Bus has nothing to do with initscripts deprecation, closing. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 21:04, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Unclosing.

What should we do with articles that mention rc.conf etc? If I'm not going to fix them, is it OK to mark them as out of date like Very_Secure_FTP_Daemon#Using_xinetd and then consider the wiki switch to systemd as complete? -- Karol (talk) 12:05, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes please, go the Out-of-date template way, it will be more effective than this discussion. -- Kynikos (talk) 03:49, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

ConsoleKit and D-Bus

polkit rebuild

ConsoleKit support has now been fully dropped from all packages in the repositories. There is no need for ck-launch-session and friends after this moves.

Please use link to General Troubleshooting#Session permissions to replace anything mentioning ck-launch-session, dbus-launch, problems with consolekit/logind, etc.

-- thestinger (talk) 04:40, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

ck-launch-session dbus-launch and friends

We can remove every single mention of ck-launch-session on the wiki - consolekit support has been dropped upstream and Arch is going to drop it from all the other packages too. This was also never actually needed, since a session is already started with pam, and you simply needed to keep the session on the same tty. Using dbus-launch is usually not needed at all, and should be removed almost everywhere too. -- thestinger (talk) 18:56, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

I decided just to get this right once and for all in xinitrc with the xinitrc.d snippet to start dbus, and preserving the session by keeping X on the same tty (which works with both logind and ck). It also avoids all the things that can go wrong with ck-launch-session (dbus being started first, for one). thestinger (talk) 22:24, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

TODO:

• remove ck-launch-session
• remove dbus-launch
• clean up pages mention consolekit.

--Fengchao (talk) 01:23, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Status update: all pages inappropriately using ck-launch-session are marked as out of date, the only English page falling into this category is Joy2key. The number of localized pages in that list is quite high though, this issue should get some more attention. Pages also currently mention "consolekit" (the third link) only regarding its deprecation. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 11:46, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

virtualbox-iso-additions & Co. package name changes

I guess virtualbox-iso-additions is now called virtualbox-guest-iso. There are other changes (virtualbox-modules -> virtualbox-host-modules, virtualbox-source -> virtualbox-host-source) but the old names are not used in English articles. There may be some other changes (new names, changes to how things work), I only edited that one thing because I know nothing about virtualbox. If no more edits are needed, feel free to close this request. -- Karol (talk) 08:58, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Inconsistent block size value for dd command

There are many examples of the dd command on the ArchWiki and they use various values for the block size option. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what value to use. This is exemplified by the Using DD for disk cloning question on Server Fault. I have also collected a few examples from the ArchWiki (see: User:Filam/Block size#Disparate examples). In order to make these examples more consistent I would like to either write Block size or Dd. Then any examples could be replaced by references like the Package management style rules. What do you think of that plan?
-- Filam (talk) 19:45, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Can you give a more explicit example? For instance, how would you change this extract from User-mode_Linux#Build_rootfs_image:

1.) First you have to create a single, big file into which you will install Arch Linux. This command creates a single 1 GB file, only containing zeros - should be enough for a basic Arch Linux installation.

dd if=/dev/zero of=rootfs bs=1MB count=1000

-- Kynikos (talk) 12:36, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Move openjdk6 to jdk7-openjdk

Developer annourcement: OpenJDK6 packages will be removed by the end of this month.

All users should move to OpenJDK7 based packages jre7-openjdk/jre7-openjdk-headless/jdk7-openjdk (or the Oracle based JRE/JDK from AUR) very soon.

The next OpenJDK7 update will replace openjdk6 on the system.

There are many openjdk6 exist in Arch wiki. All of them should be removed or changed to openjdk7.

compiz and emerald got dropped to AUR

https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-May/024956.html

sysvinit also got removed.

I've done some updating (just the English articles), so this is more of a heads-up for anyone taking care of non-English articles or people who would like to double check if I missed something / messed something up. I don't know if e.g. this or this is the right way to approach a situation where 'foo' package is neither in the AUR nor in the repos, but there may be 'foo-git' or 'foo-no-gnome' in the AUR. It seems to clash with ArchWiki:Requests#Use_AUR_templates. I've noticed that if there's a 'foo-git' package in the AUR, when 'foo' gets dropped from the repos, no dev / TU uploads 'foo' package to the AUR - makes sense, but makes updating the wiki harder ;P

I didn't fix Emerald because I don't know which package in the AUR - if any - represents the 'standard Emerald themes'. The link to emerald needs to be updated the sentence rephrased, as it's not in the repos anymore.

Apart from that one edit, I didn't touch compiz, as it needs more extensive editing and I know nothing about it compiz. Sure, I can just remove the parts that are outdated (e.g. referring to the removed package groups) but maybe someone can do a nicer rewrite.

List of recently removed packages / package groups:

ccsm
compiz-bcop
compiz-core
compiz-decorator-gtk
compiz-decorator-kde
compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
compiz-fusion-plugins-main
compiz-manager
compizconfig-backend-gconf
compizconfig-python
emerald
emerald-themes
fusion-icon
libcompizconfig
mingetty
proftpd
slmodem
sysvinit
bmp
epiphany-extensions
mkbootcd
python-m2crypto

-- Karol (talk) 22:53, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

libgl and libgl-dri are no more

Quite a few articles mention these packages. I think that instead of libgl they should point to mesa-libgl or nvidia-libgl. libgl-dri is not provided by any package. -- Karol (talk) 12:47, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

libgl is a virtual package that is provided by multiple other packages:

- mesa-libgl, nvidia-libgl, nvidia-304xx-utils from extra

- catalyst-utils, catalyst-utils-pxp from the catalyst repos

- mesa-libgl-git and probably many more from AUR

You can even do pacman -S libgl, and it will ask which one you want to install (of course it will only list the ones from repos that you have added to /etc/pacman.conf). Thus using "libgl" as a package/dependency name is in fact correct, and should be preferred in places where we don't care about which specific graphics driver is used.

--Sas (talk) 18:28, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Automatic loading of kernel modules

There are notes like "Since kernel 3.4 all necessary modules are loaded automatically" and "Newer versions of udev load the module automatically", which are usually followed by rather long section "If that does not work, do modprobe foo" and "To make it permanent after reboot, add the following to /etc/modules-load.d/module.conf".

Examples: Kernel_modules#Configuration, CPU_Frequency_Scaling, CPU_Frequency_Scaling#CPU_frequency_driver, Network_Configuration#Check_the_driver_status, Wireless_Setup#Device_driver.

There are several problems with this, so quick list of tasks:

• Verify kernel and udev version, because this also depends on the resolution of ArchWiki_talk:Reports#Minimum_supported_kernel_version.
• Perhaps the notes should be unified (though autoloading on hotplug and when some command is executed are different). Also note that some notes mentioning udev might be inaccurate and need to be changed to mention kernel (and vice versa).
• Replace verbose modprobe fallback commands with link to Kernel modules#Loading - see Help:Style#Kernel module operations.
• There's small problem with similar instructions to use some kernel module option - I don't consider it to be basic operation according to Help:Style#Kernel module operations, but this to be too verbose. I think some clear note (can't think of any right now) and link to Kernel modules#Setting module options should be provided.

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 19:09, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

As the minimum supported kernel version is apparently 3.10 at the moment, we should get rid of those modprobe commands and just link to Kernel_modules#Configuration. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 21:02, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Help me rewrite the eCryptfs article

Not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but I'd like to let the admins/maintainers and other interested Arch wiki editors know of my plans for the eCryptfs article, which I have laid out at Talk:ECryptfs#Major_restructuring/rewrite. If there are any objections, or suggestions for how to do it better, it would be nice to hear them early on.
Also, since it's a relatively big task, it will take a long time to complete if I remain on my own. So feel free to join me! :)

Bot requests

Here, list requests for repetitive, systemic modifications to a series of existing articles to be performed by a wiki bot.