Release Notes for siduction 2015.1 Dev-Release

We present to you today a dev-release at the last possible point in time for this year and inform you of some changes in our release model. siduction is a distribution based on Debian’s unstable branch. With a heavy heart we dedicate this release to the memory of the founder of Debian, Ian Murdock, who passed away on Dec. 28 2015, aged 42. We will try to keep his vision alive.

For 2015 we can just release this dev-release, even though we would have liked to do more. Due to the course that Debian Unstable and some desktop environments took over the course of the year, we had no chance to get a release ready with all flavours, following our release model. So we need to make a change here and release flavours when they are ready to release and not wait for the other flavours. Following the old release model, we now sit on final images released one year ago, where the first upgrade is bigger than the image itself. That is a far from ideal situation, hence the change.

Today we present dev-releases of noX, Xorg, LXDE, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce. Plasma 5, GNOME and LXQt will follow on the weekend or shortly after, given there is no blockers.

Even though these release notes do not go into depth, there is one change I need to communicate. After long discussions that go back as far as two years, we have finaly made the decision to ship with contrib and nonfree enabled and nonfree-firmware preinstalled to enable the user to use his wifi chip or graphics card right from the start without the need to aquire software without being able to have an internet connection on the device you are installing on.

The following nonfree packages are installed as default:

amd64-microcode Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs

firmware-amd-graphics Binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips

firmware-atheros Binary firmware for Atheros wireless cards

firmware-bnx2 Binary firmware for Broadcom NetXtremeII

firmware-bnx2x Binary firmware for Broadcom NetXtreme II 10Gb

firmware-brcm80211 Binary firmware for Broadcom 802.11 wireless card

firmware-crystalhd Crystal HD Video Decoder (firmware)

firmware-intelwimax Binary firmware for Intel WiMAX Connection

firmware-iwlwifi Binary firmware for Intel Wireless cards

firmware-libertas Binary firmware for Marvell Libertas 8xxx wireless car

firmware-linux-nonfree Binary firmware for various drivers in the Linux kernel

firmware-misc-nonfree Binary firmware for various drivers in the Linux kernel

firmware-myricom Binary firmware for Myri-10G Ethernet adapters

firmware-netxen Binary firmware for QLogic Intelligent Ethernet (3000)

firmware-qlogic Binary firmware for QLogic HBAs

firmware-realtek Binary firmware for Realtek wired/wifi/BT adapters

firmware-ti-connectivity Binary firmware for TI Connectivity wireless network

firmware-zd1211 binary firmware for the zd1211rw wireless driver

intel-microcode Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs

Contrib packages installed on siduction

b43-fwcutter utility for extracting Broadcom 43xx firmware

firmware-b43-installer firmware installer for the b43 driver

firmware-b43legacy-installer firmware installer for the b43legacy driver

iucode-tool Intel processor microcode tool

Disclaimer

You need to be aware that this new behaviour is not in accordance with the Debian Free Software Guide (DFSG). We offer an opt-out from this to go back to a DFSG-compliant installation. For the dev-release, apt purge $(vrms -s) -s shows you the installed packages. Running the command without the -s will remove them all. For the final release we will ship a more comfortable solution.

The released images are a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of Sid, from 2015-12-31. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 4.3, accompanied by X-Server 1.17.3. and systemd 228.2

Besides the desktop environments we also ship noX, which is an environment without X and Xorg which features the minimal window manager Fluxbox on top of X.

A brief look at the flavours

Xfce is the reliable work horse it always was, shipping in Version 4.12.2. The same goes for LXDE, a lightweight desktop, that just works. Xorg and noX need no further words, they are special purpose releases for people who like custom installs. MATE is following the tracks of GNOME 2. We ship version 1.10.2.1, which is stable enough to work with Cinmnamon, which follows GTK 3 rather than 2, ships with version 2.6.13.1.

Our Resources

siduction Forum

siduction Blog

Git Archive



Distro News

Bug-Tracker

siduction-Map

Support can be obtained on our forum as well as on IRC. The relevant channels on

OFTC-Network are #siduction for english support or #siduction-core, if

you like to join in and participate. On your desktop you also find an icon that takes

you to the right channel for support, depending on the chosen language.

To be able to act as a testbed for Debian, we are making us of our own bug-tracker.

Let me explain how you can help us and Debian by submitting bugreports for broken

packages. Weathered users will know how to file bugs directly with the Debian BTS

(Bug Tracking System). For users not so comfortable with the system we have

reportbug-ng preinstalled.

If you think, you found a bug in a Debian package,

please start reportbug-ng and put the name of the package in the adressline on

top. The app will now search through the already filed bugs for that package and show

those. Now it’s up to you to determine, if “your” bug has already been reported. If

it is, ask yourself if you have anything relevant to add to this report or maybe even a

patch. If not, you are done for this time. If the bug has not been reported yet

and you are not familiar with the BTS yet, you may report the bug in our



Bug-Tracker.

That obviously goes for siduction packages as well. We will sort the bugs for you

and file them in the appropriate place, if it’s reproducible. Please look out for

a forum post with more detailed info on the bug-tracker soon. If all this seems

to complicated for now, feel free to use the bugs-thread on the forum for now,

it will keep working until final release.

As we are always looking for contributors, here is what to do: Come to IRC to

channel #siduction-core and talk to us about what you would like to do within

the project, or where you think you could help. As you will notice if you scroll down, we have no art-team at the moment. If you are willing and capable, talk to us.

Hardware Tips

If you should own a ATI Radeon graphics accelerator, please use the failsafe option, when booting the Live-ISO. This option will add the cheatcodes radeon.modeset=0 xmodule=vesa to the Kernel bootline, so that you can boot to X.

Last but not least a hint for users of the kernel based virtual machine KVM. The developement of a frontend for the kernelbased virtual machine (kvm) has begun as a fork of qemu with the name qemu-kvm or short “kvm”. Since qemu version 1.4 all patches of the kvm fork have been integrated back into the qemu source. Also there has been much progress in the field of virtualization. So there is a lot of outdated documentation around. We have a current worksheet for Qemu in our wiki.



Credits for siduction 2015.1

Core Team:

Alf Gaida (agaida)



Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd)



Axel Beu (ab)



Ferdinand Thommes (devil)



Tom Wroblewski (GoingEasy 9)



Torsten Wohlfarth (towo)



J. Theede (musca)



Maintainers of the siduction Desktop Environments:

GNOME: Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd)

KDE: Ferdinand Thommes (devil)

LXDE: Alf Gaida (agaida)

LXQt: Alf Gaida (agaida)

XFCE: Torsten Wolfahrt (towo)

Cinnamon: J. Theede (musca)

noX: Alf Gaida (agaida)

MATE: J. Theede (musca), Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd)

We need contributors for siduction release art!



Code, ideas and support:

ayla

bluelupo

der_bud

J. Hamatoma (hama)

Markus Schimpf (arno911)

musca

Thank you!

Also thank you very much to all testers and all the people giving us support

in any possible way. This is also your achievement.

We also want to thank Debian, as we are using their base.

And now enjoy!

On behalf of the siduction team:

Ferdinand Thommes



