The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) article provides answers to questions often asked by users who moved to Hyperbola GNU/Linux-Libre from Arch GNU/Linux or other GNU/Linux distros. It discusses issues caused by making the system completely free and with a different development in comparison to another Arch-based distros. For explanation on technical details of the system look at Arch GNU/Linux FAQ.

Hyperbola is a long-term support distro based on Arch GNU/Linux plus stability and security from Debian GNU/Linux. It isn't a rolling release distro like Arch because Hyperbola is using Arch snapshots for its versions and Parabola blacklist as base to keep it 100% libre. Also Hyperbola is using Debian patches, therefore all packages are being stabilized with improvements through its development. See the Packaging Guidelines and social_contract for further details.

This usually means the package is non-free or has some other freedom-related issues. Since Hyperbola GNU/Linux-Libre follows the GNU FSDG, we don't include proprietary software and you can't get it from our official repositories. To make sure the package was removed from Hyperbola GNU/Linux-Libre because of that, you can check the blacklist:

$ grep ''package_name'' /usr/share/doc/your-freedom/blacklist.txt

Packages are typically modified for reasons such as containing non-free parts, recommending non-free software or branding. Also there are another reasons such as privacy/security issues, instabilities. To find out how a specific package was modified check the blacklist:

$ grep ''package_name'' /usr/share/doc/your-freedom/blacklist.txt

If you're looking for more details, you'll have to clone our core, extra, community and multilib repositories containing PKGBUILD files used for building our packages. Grab corresponding PKGBUILD from Arch website and just run diff on both of them.

No. Hyperbola doesn't support AUR in any way. After migrating to Hyperbola you'll have to verify any installed AUR package and manually remove the non-free ones. Since AUR packages are typically built and installed by user, you can identify them by running:

$ pacman -Qm

Some AUR packages find their way into our official community repository. If you can't find the package you need there, ask a Hyperbola dev to pull it.

Some fonts got removed from our TeX Live distribution because of freedom issues and incompatible licenses. Solution to this is to use different fonts and/or different TeX engines.

unrar command is missing in Hyperbola because it's non-free software. You can use bsdtar command to do the job. It should be installed on your system by default because pacman depends on libarchive which provides it. Unfortunately, it cannot handle some extra features of RAR archives in which case you may have more luck with unar.

This may be the case if you have a recent Nvidia card. Nouveau may not support your card yet. To check if your card is supported by Nouveau, first look for a code name of your card in the output of:

$ lspci | grep VGA

Next, look at CodeNames to further decode it. Finally, you can check support for your card on FeatureMatrix.

It's common for Wi-Fi cards to require a firmware to be loaded into the card. Many cards doesn't work at all if the firmware is missing. The firmware is often proprietary, thus we don't distribute it. It's the case for almost any internal Wi-Fi card.

The usual fix to the problem is either to replace the card or use an external USB Wi-Fi dongle. You can buy one with Atheros chipset (eg. ath9k_htc for external USB dongle or ath9k for PCI and PCI-Express expansion slots) or RTL818x chipset (eg. rtl8187 for external USB dongle or rtl818x_pci for PCI and PCI-Express expansion slots) since there is a free firmware for these Wi-Fi adapters. You can also search the h-node database to find Wi-Fi adapters known to work well with free software or scripts/deblob-$ver to check Wi-Fi adapters included in the Linux-libre device blacklist.

This wiki article is based on ParabolaWiki.