The Adélie Linux Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA4 for the 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and PowerPC platforms. Learn more about Adélie Linux on our Web site.

An important milestone for this release is the official support of the 32-bit x86 CPU. Our current release is optimised for the Pentium M and requires a Pentium MMX or later CPU. Builds that are optimised for the Pentium 4, and generic builds for 486 and 586 level CPUs, will be released later. Note that currently only a limited subset of packages are available for the 32-bit x86. More packages will be built as time permits.

Another very important milestone for this release is support for run-from-RAM on the live CD. You can install and modify packages in the live environment by using a RAM disk, without writing to your hard disk. Any changes made to the run-from-RAM environment will be erased on the next boot, while changes made to the hard disk will persist. This provides a degree of freedom with what you can do with the Adélie boot media and we are very excited to have this capability.

Finally, this release is also the first known public distribution release that supports LXQt on big-endian processors. The LXQt desktop on the 64-bit PowerPC CPU is officially supported. We are very proud to make this announcement, and it would not be possible without the great communities involved in this effort: LXQt, KDE, Qt, Alpine, musl, and of course our own.

Please note: This is an early test release of Adélie Linux. While every care has been taken to ensure the stability of the system, features and packages may be missing or may not function correctly. You should always back up your computer’s data before you install a new Linux distribution. This release is being actively tested on multiple platforms. It is highly recommended that you use a dedicated computer or virtual machine to learn the environment until you are comfortable with using the Adélie Linux system and its package manager, apk.