For those of you who want to install Arch Linux, there’s a new official ISO snapshot available for download powered by Linux kernel 6.8 and featuring an improved installation experience.
That’s right, the Arch Linux devs were forced to release the ISO snapshot for April 2024 a bit early due to the XZ Utils package being backdoored, which affected the Arch Linux 2024.03.01 ISO image (as well as the virtual machine images and container images) that was available for download on the distribution’s website.
In Arch Linux, the backdoor was present in XZ package versions 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1. The Arch Linux devs were quick to patch the issue and released XZ version 5.6.1-2, which is also included in the new ISO image, Arch Linux 2024.03.29. More details about that are available here.
Apart from the patched XZ package, the Arch Linux 2024.03.29 ISO image is also the first to ship with the latest and greatest Linux 6.8 kernel series, which, of course, brings better hardware support in case you want to deploy Arch Linux on some newer hardware. The ISO includes Linux kernel 6.8.2 by default.
In addition, Arch Linux’s April 2024 ISO release includes an updated archinstall menu-based installer, versioned 2.7.2, which improves support for unified kernel images (UKI) by restricting UKI to supported options and fixing the UKI default value.
The archinstall 2.7.2 release also adds the --skip-ntp parameter to the documentation, replaces the plasma-wayland-session with plasma-workspace when installing Arch Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, adds support for Lithuanian translation, and updates the Italian locale.
Arch Linux 2024.03.29 is available for download from the official website. Of course, this is only for new deployments as existing Arch Linux users need only to keep their installation up to date by running the sudo pacman -Syu command in their favorite terminal emulator.
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