Release Notes for a first preview of siduction 2011.1 — One Step Beyond

Where it comes from

We are excited to present to you the first release candidate of siduction, a new distribution based on our great mother Debian’s Unstable branch and forked from aptosid. As the logo suggests, this is a community approach. Filled with life, that means for the community as well as with and from the community.

When we set out in July of 2011 to fork aptosid, we were not quite aware, how much work lay ahead of us. The first part of the way was setting up a new infrastructure, before we could actualy start working on the packages. Most of us had to learn many new things to pull this through, and here we are.

Where we are

This 1st release candidate (and the actual release) ship 3 Desktop Environments, KDE SC, XFCE and LXDE, all 3 in 32- and 64-bit versions. The first 2 flavours do not fit on a CD anymore, so it made no sense to go for lite and full versions. LXDE is meant to be lightweight anyways

The released images represent a snapshot of Debian Sid from 2011-12-21, enriched with a few useful packages and scripts, an installer and our own, patched version of kernel 3.1-5 and xserver 1.11.2.902-1.

We have included KDE SC 4.7.2 from the QT-KDE repository, which, over the years, proved to be no more unreliable than Sid itself. There is 2 ways to handle upgrades: Looking at /etc/apt/sources.list.d, you will see a qt-kde.list.

The safest way is to stay with the installed KDE SC 4.7.2 until Sid catches up and updates KDE to 4.7.4. This should happen within the next weeks. To do so, open qt-kde.list with your favourite editor as root and put a # in front of the top line, save our edit and exit.
if you do not comment the first line in qt-kde.list, a dist-upgrade will pull any updated packages from above repository. As things look at the moment, that is unlikely to happen, as KDE SC 4.7.4 was uploaded to Debians experimental repository yesterday and will move to unstable from there sometime soon.

Where are we going to?

We like to look at this first preview and the resulting final release as a bread & butter release, giving users a first version of our Operating System and putting our infrastructure to the test. Our idea of siduction is a system that may be used on productive systems, if the user is aware of the true nature of Sid and how to deal with it. On that presupposition we will strive to integrate new techniques and innovation into our releases, as long as they have reached a stability that matches our standards.

Our Resources

siduction Forum
siduction Blog
Git Archive
Distro News
Bug-Tracker
Support can be obtained on our forum as well as on IRC. The relevant channels on OFTC-Network are #siduction for english support or #siduction-core, if you like to join in and participate. On your desktop you also find an icon that takes you to the right channel for support, depending on the chosen language.

A few words on the resources: We are looking forward to moving the siduction forum to a new site and a new CMS (hopefuly) with the final release.
To be able to act as a testbed for Debian, we are introducing our own bug-tracker. Let me explain how you can help us and Debian by submitting bugreports for broken packages. Weathered users will know how to file bugs directly with the Debian BTS (Bug Tracking System). For users not so comfortable with the system we have reportbug-ng preinstalled.

If you think, you found a bug in a Debian package, please start reportbug-ng and put the name of the package in the adressline on top. The app will now search through the already filed bugs for that package and show those. Now its up to you to determine, if “your” bug has already been reported. If it is, ask yourself if you have anything relevant to add to this report or maybe even a patch. If not, you are done for this time. If the bug has not been reported yet and you are not familiar with the BTS yet, you may report the bug in our Bug-Tracker That obviously goes for siduction packages as well. We will sort the bugs for you and file them in the appropriate place, if its reproducable. Please look out for a forum post with more detailed info on the bug-tracker soon. If all this seems to complicated for now, feel free to use the bugs-thread on the forum for now, it will keep working until final release.

Should you have wondered, where the codename ‘One Step Beyond’ comes from, let me tell you that we name our releases after famous rocksongs. ‘One Step Beyond’ seemed appropriate for a start, as we try to take the undisputed technical excellence of aptosid a step further by putting it in the hands of a community that will hopefuly fuel further development with fresh ideas.

Speaking of release and our planned release cycle. There is nothing we can tell you other than that we strive for 4 releases per year.

As we are always looking for contributors, here is what to do: Come to IRC to channel #siduction-core and talk to us about what you would like to do within the project, or where you think you could help.

Credits for siduction 2011.1

Core Team

Alf Gaida (agaida)
Axel Beu (ab)
Dinko Sabo (vibora)
Ferdinand Thommes (devil)
Holger Wagemann (holgerw)
Markus Meyer (coruja)
Nikolas Poniros (edhunter)
Stefan Tell (cryptosteve)
Torsten Wohlfarth (towo)

Art Team

Alexander Weber (xweber)
Hendrik Lehmbruch (hendrikl)
Sven Strohmeier (se7en)
(kuchenfreund_in)

We want to thank very much those, who helped us with code, kept our spirits high or said: You’ll never make it 🙂

Code, Ideas, good Spirits

J. Hamatoma (hama)
Markus Schimpf (arno911)
Tom Wroblewski(GoinEasy9)
soundscout
zappo
hsp
tartie
Tine
otto from brazil community
bequimao
ralul
bluelupo
ayla

Also thank you very much to all the testers and all the people that gave us support in any possible way. This is also your achievement.

We also want to thank Debian and sidux/apotosid for paving the road we travel on.

So, now please give this preview a good test and let us know all bugs and other shortcomings. And now enjoy!

On behalf of the siduction team:
Ferdinand Thommes

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *