We are very happy to present to you the first release candidate of siduction 2013.2 RC1 – December. Siduction is a distribution based on Debian’s unstable branch and we try to release a few new snapshots over the course of the year.

Siduction 2013.2 RC1 – December is shipped with 5 Desktop-Environments: KDE SC, XFCE, LXDE, Razor-Qt and GNOME, all in 32- and 64-bit variants. From the shipped DEs this time around only LXDE fits on a CD with 700 MegaByte. But as CDs become more irrelevant with every day, we are not too worried about this and recommend to use USB-Sticks for installation.

New in this release cycle is the use of Systemd. While debian is still discussing, what init system to use in the future, siduction has decided to go with Systemd. It brings the most advantages for us, besides that, even if Debian should decide to go with Upstart, we will not follow them there. Until we have a section on Systemd in our manual, we will help you out with some of the most used commands further down this note.

The released images are a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of Sid, from 2013-12-22. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 3.12-6, accompanied by X-Server 1.14.5-1.

Please do not forget that this is an RC. We turned many a stone during the past months. On top of that we ship systemd, which will for sure create problems in some configurations. So please, bear with us and report your bugs preferably to our bugtracker or take them to the forum or our IRC channel #siduction. The username and password for the live session is: user:siducer, pw:live. Should you leave it sitting for a while, that helps to get back into your session.

What is new

As mentioned above we have taken a step into the possible future of Debian and implemented Systemd into siduction as our new init system. Here is a cheat sheet with some of the commands that are new for booting, handling services and logging:

Handling Services

systemctl list-units – List all units (where unit is the term for a job/service)

systemctl start [NAME…] – Start (activate) one or more units

systemctl stop [NAME…] – Stop (deactivate) one or more units

systemctl disable [NAME…] – Disable one or more unit files

Check man systemctl for more information. For your comfort we also ship systemd-gui

Changing Runlevels, Reboot and Shutdown

Changing runlevels is also different from Syvinit. What was known as runlevel 3 is now multi-user.target, init 5 changes to graphical.target

systemctl isolate graphical.target – Will take you to what you know as init 5

systemctl isolate multi-user.target – Will take you to what you know as init 3

systemctl reboot – Shut down and reboot the system

systemctl poweroff – Shut down and power off the system

Logging with Systemd Journal

Journal is a great win over the aged syslog. Logging starts earlier, which for sure was one of the backsides of syslog. Also there is commands that give you tailored information at your fingertips: journalctl –all – Gives you the full journal of the system and all users

journalctl -f – Gives you a live view of the journal as it grows (used to be tail -f /var/log/messages)

journalctl -b – Shows the log of the last boot

journalctl -b -p err – Shows the log of last boot, limited to the priority ERROR

journalctl –since=yesterday – Since Linux people normaly do not reboot much, this is limiting it more than -b

That is only the tip of the iceberg, more is to be found on Lennart Poetterings blog

Gnome

As Gnome is still pretty new in our release cycle, here is a few hints on how to run it:

There are two ways to start your gnome-session:

* gnome-fallback, which implements the GNOME2 look

* GNOME, which implements the GNOME3 look and desktop-effects

To be able to start gnome as a gnome3-session, your videocard must be accelerated. Users of ATI graphic cards must have firmware-linux-nonfree installed to be able to launch GNOME3. By default in live mode gnome-fallback is started. After installation, GNOME3 mode is enabled. That means, users of ATI cards must install firmware-linux-nonfree before starting the installer.

Boot cheatcode “gnome”

If you want to force a GNOME3-session even in live mode, you can use the cheatcode gnome to the kernel-bootline. This does not work for users with ATI cards other than with a persistent overlay on a USB device.

Shutdown and Logout of a gnome3-session

Depending on your hardware, your Power Off-menu may be visible or not. To be able to shutdown a gnome3-session with an invisible Power Off-menu, you must press the left alt-key on your keyboard and click on User in the upper right corner of your screen and then the Power Off-menu. If you do not press alt, you will be offered Suspend instead of Power Off.

And besides that?

We ship, for the second time, noX as an official release, which was introduced first in October 2012 as development release. As there is no graphical environment, you need to use cli-installer as root to run the installation.

XFCE is being shipped in version 4.10.1 and is as reliable as ever. Contrary to Gnome, XFCE stays away from shipping systemd code for now.

For our KDE SC users we packaged the latest available version KDE SC 4.11.4. The rewrite of siduction-settings-kde is basicaly done, a few adjustments to colours and other small changes will be made before the final release.

Razor-Qt is still on a slightly modified version 0.5.2, which has better plugins and overall functionality. This will be improved even more with the upcoming version 0.6, which already is in our razorqt/next repository for the brave at heart. We will release this sometime and then switch over to lxde-qt, which will be the product of Razor-qt and LXDE joining forces with Qt as base. Other than that all Qt versions od apps have been updated.

This is probably the last release of LXDE as we know it in siduction. As mentioned above. LXDE goes together with Razor-Qt to form a new DE based on Qt. This release of LXDE is ahead of Debian due to us working with LXDE upstream. That means that pcmanfm, lxappearance and lxappearance-obconf are freshly packaged upstream versions. Also our version of Midori is slightly ahead of Debian.

A lot of time consuming changes again went into adapting the codebase we forked to our needs. This time the former bluewater-manual base was completely changed. We went from PHP5 to Django and adjusted the appearance to the siduction look and make it match our new website that we just launched a couple weeks ago. Work on the sidu-manual, as it is called now, is ongoing to make it a lot easier to add new content than before.

All in all we closed about 150 bugs since the last final release.

The installer still offers btrfs as an experimental filesystem. Please be careful if you use it and always backup your data.

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 introducing 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 addressline 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.

Should you have wondered, where the codename ‘December’ comes from, let me tell you that we name our releases after rocksongs. Collective Soul had a hit with December in 2005 and it perfectly fits release time.

Speaking of release and our planned release cycle. There is nothing we can tell you other than that we strive for 4 releases per year.

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. Before installing, on the Live-ISO, please install firmware-linux-nonfree. To do so, please open your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list with your favorite editor as root and append contrib non-free to the end of the first line. Save the edit and do:

apt-get update && apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

If you install the operating system now, the package will be installed also, preventing you from a garbled screen when first rebooting. Mind that if you reboot before installing the system, the changes you made will be lost.

If your system has wireless network, this will probably not work out of the box with free drivers, so you better start with wired network connected. You might want to use the script fw-detect to get information on wireless drivers. The installer will prompt you for any missing firmware and guide you through the process of installing it.

Credits for siduction 2013.2

Core Team:

Alf Gaida (agaida)

Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd)

Axel Beu (ab)

Ferdinand Thommes (devil)

Hendrik Lehmbruch (hendrikl)

Markus Meyer (coruja)

Tom Wroblewski (GoingEasy 9)

Torsten Wohlfarth (towo)

Maintainers of the siduction Desktop Environments:

GNOME: Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd)

KDE: Ferdinand Thommes (devil), José Manuel Santamaría Lema (santa)

LXDE: Markus Meyer (coruja)

noX: Alf Gaida (agaida)

Razor-qt: Alf Gaida (agaida)

XFCE: Torsten Wolfahrt (towo)

Art Team:

Code, ideas and support:

ayla

bluelupo

J. Hamatoma (hama)

Markus Schimpf (arno911)

Ulrich Beckmann (Bequimão)

Joogi

On behalf of the siduction team:

Ferdinand Thommes