Hello all!

We are excited to announce that we are in the testing phase of the 1.0-BETA4 release. Currently, we have verified correct operation on two of our Tier 1 architectures: ppc, and pmmx. We hope to finish testing on the other Tier 1 architectures today, and then 1.0-BETA4 will be ready for release!

We are also the first Linux distribution to ship Thunderbird 68, and the first OS of any kind to ship Thunderbird 68 for 64-bit PowerPC.

Packaging

A. Wilcox (awilfox@):

• Updated 220 packages to their latest versions, including Firefox, KDE Applications to 19.08.0, Node.js, the Thunderbird email client, and various XFCE applications.
• Amended the configuration of easy-kernel to support all available wireless LAN chipsets. Additionally, enabled more AGP options for pmmx.
• Fixed the final issue preventing some 64-bit PowerPCs from booting when using the GRUB 2 bootloader.
• Split xfsprogs into xfsprogs-base, which contains most utilities, and xfsprogs, which contains the xfs_scrub command. This resulted in a reduction in almost 30 MiB for the size of the Live CDs, because xfs_scrub was the only Live CD command present that used the ICU Unicode library.
• Added support for the AMD K6/Athlon and Pentium MMX/2/3 CPUs to Qt 5 QML. This allows KDE Plasma 5 to run on non-Pentium 4 pmmx machines.

Luis Ressel (aranea@):

• Fixed an issue in skalibs that could cause incorrect configuration in the s6-linux-init early-boot environment.

Max Rees (sroracle@):

• Fixed security issues in the Apache Web server and the PostgreSQL database system.
• Updated Netsurf, Vala, VIM, XRandR, and XTerm to their latest versions.
• Fixed a regression in XTerm that caused display issues with tmux.

Samuel Holland (smaeul@):

• Updated the ripgrep utility to its latest version.