TULSA, OKLAHOMA (18 December 2018) — The Adélie Linux Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Adélie Linux 1.0-BETA2 for the 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit and 64-bit x86, and 64-bit ARM platforms. Learn more about Adélie Linux on our Web site.

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).

Release Notes

Documentation

• The Administrator’s Handbook has completed its first draft cycle.

All architectures

• The kernel has been upgraded to 4.14.88.
• Btrfs tools have been added as the btrfs-progs package, allowing the usage of Btrfs storage in Adélie.
• The Calligra Suite, along with the rest of the KDE Office family, is now available on all architectures.
• GNU bc has been replaced with a more POSIX-conformant implementation.
• The games TORCS and X-Moto are now available on all architectures.
• The i3wm and awesomewm window managers are now available on all architectures.
• KDE Applications have been upgraded to 18.08.3 and KDE Frameworks have been upgraded to 5.52.0. This release brings more KDE Games to KDE Plasma 5. Additionally, KDE Plasma 5 has been upgraded to 5.12.7.
• LLVM has been upgraded to 6.0.1.
• An issue that caused the first-run of LXQt to appear with a black screen has been resolved.
• Nextcloud is now available on all architectures.
• OProfile is now available on all architectures.
• The Prosody chat server is now available on all architectures.
• Qt has been upgraded to 5.9.7.
• Qt Creator is now available on all 64-bit architectures.
• The Rust programming language is now available on all architectures except 64-bit ARM.
• The Strongswan VPN package is now available on all architectures.
• Valgrind has received stability and correctness fixes.
• The XFCE 4 desktop environment has received reliability and correctness fixes.
• …and almost a thousand other enhancements, upgrades, and fixes!

Also new in this release are Root FS tarballs for all Tier 1 architectures, which can be unpacked to a variety of different storage media for booting. Mini Root FS tarballs are also provided, which can be extracted to a directory on your existing computer for a simple chroot-based installation. Combining this with qemu-user can provide you with a limited environment for testing Adélie for other CPU architectures.

Caution: If you are upgrading from an alpha release of Adélie Linux to 1.0-BETA2, please merge the new user and group entries from /etc/passwd.apk-new into /etc/passwd, /etc/group.apk-new into /etc/group, and /etc/shadow.apk-new into /etc/shadow. This is only necessary to perform one time during the upgrade, before you restart your computer. For more information, feel free to contact us on IRC.

ARMv7

Support for ARMv7 is offered on a limited testing basis only, and ARMv7 remains a Tier 2 architecture. Currently, no binary packages are available for 32-bit ARM in 1.0-BETA2.

64-bit ARM (AArch64)

No architecture-specific release notes.

PowerPC (32-bit)

No architecture-specific release notes.

PowerPC (64-bit)

• An unsupported flavour of easy-kernel that uses 64K pages instead of 4K pages is now available as the easy-kernel-power8-64k package. Note that the only supported configuration of Adélie remains 4K pages; this package is provided for user convenience only.
• Bridging and other network functionality has been enabled, to bring the 64-bit PowerPC kernel in line with the other architecture kernel configurations.
• PCRE now has fully functional JIT support, for faster execution of regular expressions in many applications.
• Valgrind now functions properly on 64-bit PowerPC.
• POWER9 users: Qemu 3.0.0 no longer allows KVM HV guests to be created in Radix MMU mode. You will need to boot your system with disable_radix on your kernel command line to use KVM HV guests in Adélie 1.0-BETA2.

Intel x86 (all)

• The syslinux bootloader has been removed in favour of the GRUB 2 bootloader.
• All live CDs should now support EFI boot. If you encounter any issues with EFI booting on the live CD, please file an issue.

Statistics

Adélie Packages

There were 808 commits to packages.git between 1.0-BETA1 and 1.0-BETA2, by ten developers:

• A. Wilcox (514)
• Kiyoshi Aman (117)
• Dan Theisen (92)
• Max Rees (61)
• zlg (12)
• Samuel Holland (6)
• Horst G. Burkhardt (2)
• Lee Starnes (2)
• Brandon Bergren (1)
• multiplexd (1)

Team

• We welcome zlg and multiplexd as package contributors.
• We welcome msiism as a copyeditor for our documentation.