A fully free, simple, and lightweight operating system

You've reached the website of Parabola GNU/Linux-libre. The Parabola project is a community-driven, "labour-of-love" effort to maintain a 100% free (as in: freedom) operating system distribution that is lean, clean, and hackable.

Based on the Arch distribution, Parabola is a complete, user-friendly operating system, suitable for general "everyday" use, while retaining Arch's "power-user" charm. Parabola adheres to the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (FSDG); which requires source code for every part of the system to be freely available, modifyable, and re-distributable. All Parabola packages are built from source, in clean chroots, and with networking disabled, in order to replace any software and artworks in the standard Arch system which fall outside the GNU guidelines. LiveISOs, installers, and packages are provided for the armv7h, i686, and x86_64 CPU architectures.

Our community is friendly and helpful. Feel free to hop on the IRC channel, join the web forum, or subscribe to the mailing lists, to get your feet wet. Once you are ready to begin your adventures through Fosstopia, the wiki will guide you well toward learning to install and use Parabola comfortably and confidently.

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Latest News

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dovecot >= 2.4 requires manual intervention

2025-11-01

From Arch:

The dovecot 2.4 release branch has made breaking changes which result in it being incompatible with any <= 2.3 configuration file.

Thus, the dovecot service will no longer be able to start until the configuration file was migrated, requiring manual intervention.

For guidance on the 2.3-to-2.4 migration, please refer to the following upstream documentation: Upgrading Dovecot CE from 2.3 to 2.4

Furthermore, the dovecot 2.4 branch no longer supports their replication feature, it was removed. For users relying on the replication feature or who are unable to perform the 2.4 migration right now, we provide alternative packages available in [extra]:

  • dovecot23
  • pigeonhole23
  • dovecot23-fts-elastic
  • dovecot23-fts-xapian

The dovecot 2.3 release branch is going to receive critical security fixes from upstream until stated otherwise.

'zabbix' users: manual intervention may be required

2025-08-04

From Arch:

Starting with 7.4.1-2, the following Zabbix system user accounts (previously shipped by their related packages) will no longer be used. Instead, all Zabbix components will now rely on a shared zabbix user account (as originally intended by upstream and done by other distributions):

  • zabbix-server
  • zabbix-proxy
  • zabbix-agent (also used by the zabbix-agent2 package)
  • zabbix-web-service

This shared zabbix user account is provided by the newly introduced zabbix-common split package, which is now a dependency for all relevant zabbix-* packages.

The switch to the new user account is handled automatically for the corresponding main configuration files and systemd service …

Manual intervention required for OpenRC

2025-07-15

OpenRC now requires services local, localmount and netmount to be added to runlevel default.

This can be done with commands:

rc-update add local default
rc-update add localmount default
rc-update add netmount default

The update brings experimental user services support. Our wiki page has been updated to include information about it.

i686 users - manual intervention required

2024-11-28

i686 users will probably be unable to upgrade, due to a problem with the latest archlinux32-keyring 20241114-1

the solution is posted on the bug tracker https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/3679

manual intervention required for local pacman repositories

2024-10-24

NOTE: pacman v7 is currently in [libre-testing]; but it will be promoted to libre soon

from arch:

With the release of [version 7.0.0] pacman has added support for downloading packages as a separate user with dropped privileges.

For users with local repos however this might imply that the download user does not have access to the files in question, which can be fixed by assigning the files and folder to the alpm group and ensuring the executable bit (+x) is set on the folders in question.

$ chown :alpm -R /path/to/local/repo

Remember to [merge the .pacnew …

Older News

2024-07-01
restart sshd immediately after upgrade
2024-05-24
pacman.conf and makepkg.conf changes
2024-03-29
[arch-announce] The xz package has been backdoored
2023-08-11
[From Arch]: budgie-desktop >= 10.7.2-6 update requires manual intervention
2023-06-19
OpenBLAS >= 0.3.23-2 update requires manual intervention
2023-02-12
[From Arch] Switch to the base-devel meta package requires manual intervention
2022-11-06
systemd encrypted boot may be broken by upgrade to openssl v3 (systemd-cryptsetup), and various libcrypto.so.1.1 errors - suggest to postpone upgrading
2022-09-25
[From Arch] Removing python2 from the repositories
2022-08-30
Grub bootloader upgrade and configuration incompatibilities
2022-07-20
elogind requires manual intervention

Recent Updates (more)

RSS Feed
yoshimi 2.3.5.2-1.0 i686
yadm 3.5.0-1.0 i686
xtrans 1.6.0-1.0 i686
virtualgl 3.1.4-1.0 i686
vim-supertab 2.1-7.0 i686
tlp 1.9.0-3.0 i686
tinyssh 20250201-1.0 i686
thunar-shares-plugin 1:0.5.0-1.0 i686
tgt 1.0.97-1.0 i686
tea 0.11.1-1.0 i686
strip-nondeterminism 1.15.0-2.0 i686
soundtouch 2.4.0-1.0 i686
soft-serve armv7h/i686
soapyplutosdr 0.2.2-1.0 i686
simde 0.8.2-1.0 i686

Friends of Freedom

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