Installer Sprint with elementary OS

We have a fantastic update to share with you this week regarding the installer work we’ve been doing! Following conversations with the elementary team, we found their goals aligned with ours on how an installer should look and behave. As a result, we’ve invited elementary OS team members to come to System76 HQ the last week of August to work on a new and improved OS installer.

Sprints are an amazing part of open source culture when done in-person great contributors from all over the world can come together to produce something amazing. This work will, of course, all be done in the open and available for all who would like to take and use it in their own projects. When projects come together, finding common ground, and solve shared problems that work becomes a rising tide that lifts all ships.

We look forward to collaborating with elementary OS on an installer and consider this the beginning of a healthy collaboration between the Pop!_OS and elementary OS teams.

All Hands on Deck for Automated Firmware Flashing

As we covered last week, the System76 engineers have been working to enable automatic firmware flashing on our laptops. This week has been all hands on deck to finish that work. The feature is nearing a phase where it will be tested internally for a bit before it is rolled out widely to customers. Part of that internal testing involves using it to update machines on the production line to the newest firmware before they are sent out.

Another part of developing firmware distribution means subjecting it to rigorous security testing. The team will be creating documentation about the process and seeking reviews of it before it goes live in the wild. This is important as security reviewers have referred to one vendor’s firmware update process as “code execution as a service”. We want to be the opposite of that.

Finally, our engineers are working on taking advantage of the GNOME desktops notifications feature in order to inform users that an update is available. In other desktop environments, a window prompt will appear informing the user that there is an update. However, given that the code will be open source, other desktops’ notifications systems could ultimately be supported if those contributions are made to the project.

You’ll need to have the System76 Driver installed in order to take advantage of this feature when it is released, so if you’ve reinstalled the OS on your System76 computer make sure to add the System76 Driver PPA, instructions here: http://support.system76.com/articles/restore/

Bite-sized Bugs

Looking to contribute to Pop!_OS? Itching to tear into some code? Great! We have tagged some “bite-sized bugs” in the Pop!_OS issue tracker on GitHub:

https://github.com/system76/pop-distro

We’ve also created some documentation to walk you through how to contribute, with an example of a bite-sized bug getting solved, check it out here: http://pop.system76.com/docs/bite-sized-bugs/

Community Chat Now Active

Whilst you look at tackling a bite-sized bug, if you have any questions or would like to provide feedback - we now have real-time community chat available. A Mattermost instance (think open source Slack), has been spun up at https://chat.pop-os.org. Anyone can go there and create an account.

The real-time chat will allow us to work with you, the community, more closely. As we collectively take on the challenge of creating the best Linux desktop on the planet, communication is key. We look forward to talking with and getting to know all of you who want to get engaged!