As many of you have noticed, we have been adding repository mirrors daily around here gearing up for our release candidate phase of Unity Linux.  Since internationalization is a HUGE priority for us, we’ve been adding mirrors to as many places as we can find in the various parts of the world.  However, since we’ve been adding mirrors, we’ve realized that keeping tabs on them is rather difficult.  After all, what happens when you normally use the German mirror but it’s down?  Then where do you go? What happens if the mirror is out of synch?  How do you know?

Enter Arch Linux and the fantastic community members they have.

Some of our devs love running Arch Linux as a secondary OS on their machines. They love the simplicity of it. They love the smallness of it. It’s Arch that has inspired many of our developers to shoot for that minimalistic OS wrapped around the LiveCD utilities. It’s Arch that we looked to as an example of a successful project.  Those devs keep eyes peeled on developments within the Arch community…and those devs knew as mirrors increased, they wanted to track mirrors like Arch does.

So, we asked about it. Arch was kind enough to share how they make their mirror status pages. We’d like to thank them for being so helpful and inspirational to us here at Unity. We’d also like to thank gri6507 and devnet for doing the work to incorporate what Arch had done into Unity Linux into our website.

I give you the Unity Linux Mirror Status Page!

As mirrors are added, they will be reflected here and their status will be reflected.  This includes whether they are down or latent and divides things up into regional areas of interest.  We hope this serves the community well.  We have set it to update about every hour.  Hopefully, this is frequent enough.  We’ve also updated our navigation at the top of the page to reflect our latest resource addition.  Please let us know in the comments section what else is important to you as far as mirrors and their status goes…we’ll continue to improve as we go along toward the Release Candidate phase of Unity!  Thanks!

The development team at Unity Linux has implemented a new tool for checking dependency errors of their packages. This tool can be run both manually and automatically as part of our synchronization with the main repo . Once analysis is complete, the generated reports are automatically emailed to our Quality Assurance team which can then address the issues. The public nature of these reports puts a spot light on any packaging problems that may exist which guarantees quick resolution of any problems. What does all of this mean to our end users? Simply put, this ensures a clean environment where every package is installable!

Two new USA mirrors have been added:

University of Idaho

• http://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/pub/unity
• ftp://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/unity
• rsync://mirror.its.uidaho.edu::unity

Virginia Tech

• http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/unity/

This brings our list of mirrors to thirteen.  Thank you so much!

You can view our complete list of servers on our wiki: http://wiki.unity-linux.org/mirrors

A number of other institutions have been contacted, and we’re awaiting their reply.  If you know of any others who may be interested, please let us know on our mailing list (ul-developers at googlegroups.com), via a comment to this blog or by any other means.