New Year, New Builders

SAN FRANCISCO (December 31, 2021) — After a difficult year, there is plenty to look forward to: packages are being built again! The Adélie Linux team is still working hard to bring you RC3, our third release candidate. We’re on track to begin offering test repositories and images to anyone interested. We will announce this in IRC in the coming weeks.

But first, there are a few interesting bits within our ecosystem to share with you.

We’d like to extend a huge shoutout to Action Retro for their surprise feature showing that Adélie is indeed a viable desktop distribution for 32-bit PowerPC Macintosh hardware.

Not to worry, we hear you loud and clear — we’re making improvements to our graphical installer, Horizon, in time for RC3. This will make it easier to get up and running with Adélie.

Void Linux is dropping big-endian 32- and 64- bit POWER support for musl in 2022.

Next, Ubuntu has announced that it is dropping POWER8 support for its ppc64le port. For reference, POWER8 is the first chip to fully support big- and little- endian byte ordering.

There’s plenty of POWER8 hardware out there, particularly at an enterprise level, and IBM hasn’t announced end-of-life (EOL) yet so this may be an opportunity for us.

Adélie does not currently have a little-endian port, but we are open to it (help wanted!).

We target the 64-bit PowerPC 970 (G5) and tune for POWER9. Our 32-bit PowerPC port will likewise continue to support the G3 (7xx-series CPUs). We’re Adélie penguins, but even we don’t want to be left out in the cold like that.

In line with our earlier messaging, our infrastructure is slowly coming back together. We have hardware online right now building and testing packages for all six of our supported architectures: ARM, POWER, and x86 in both 32- and 64- bit address models.

This means we’re finally back to bumping, building, and testing. RC3 or 1.0 will include the latest musl and Linux 5.15! If you’re curious about what we’re up to, we’ve also launched a lightweight cgit frontend to complement our GitLab server.

New management infrastructure is being developed to automate the deployment of builders, the promotion and/or publishing of packages to the public, and help with issue creation by way of regression testing. By reducing our maintenance burden we can focus on delivering 1.0 with confidence, which is our commitment to you.

In terms of reaching a broader community, we know that containers are a popular method of building and distributing software, so we’re anticipating offering official OCI-compliant images with our next release. Have an idea or suggestion? Stop by and let us know!

For 2022, you can expect to see the following: community outreach to grow our user base, new packages, new contributors, significantly expanded documentation, possible beta ports to SPARC and RISC-V, and even more high-quality software coming your way.

We’ve been so busy I’m sure I’ve missed a thing or two. Thank you team! See you next year!

Independent by design.

Adélie is an independent Linux distribution committed to integrity, privacy, and user freedom. Your donation might be tax-deductible.