Release Notes for the 1st Release-Candidate of siduction
2012.1.rc – Desperado

We are pleased to present our first release of siduction in 2012. siduction is released ~4 times per year and is based on the Debian Unstable repository

siduction 2012.1 RC1 – Desperado is shipped with 3 Desktop-Environments: KDE SC 4.8.3, XFCE 4.8 and LXDE, all in 32- and 64-bit variants. LXDE still fits a CD, KDE SC and XFCE fail to do so. Moving them to a USB-device with dd or cat to install from seems appropriate if your hardware supports booting from USB. (please refer to our manual)

The released images are a snapshot of Debian Unstable, that also goes by the name of sid, from 2012-05-13. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 3.3.6, accompanied by XServer 1.12.1-2.

We ship KDE SC in version 4.8.3. Please mind that only a base-set of KDE SC 4.8.3 packages is yet packaged and uploaded. We expect more packages to appear until our final release of siduction 2012.1. Further upgrades will happen per dist-upgrade from our kde-next repository. As user of the KDE Desktop Environment, make sure to have that enabled.

So, what’s new?

Besides the updated packages and new artwork we have been busy on other things as well.

  • The installer offers the choice of btrfs as filesystem. Please mind the warnings you will see! The implementation of btrfs is to be seen as experimental and should not be used on production machines. Regular back-ups are a must! There is also a limitation to regular MBR, btrfs does not work with GPT for now.
  • Another new siduction package is sidu-disk-center. It implements the opportunity to set up and maintain the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) prior to installation. sidu-disk-center is independent from the installer, but can be called from it.
  • At LinuxTag Convention in Berlin we will release a new flavour of siduction with the relatively young, but heavily developed, desktop environment Razor-Qt. This will take place during a release party at our booth on May 25th at 18:00. If developement keeps up with what it is now, Razor-Qt will be adapted to our regular release cycle with our next release 2012.2.
  • The Bluewater-Manual is, next to English and German, also available in Pt-Br, Polish and Italian now. Translators/revisors for other languages are very welcome if they show up in IRC channel #siduction-doc.
  • In the background we have hardened and refined our infrastructure, which is quite solid by now.

Our resources

Forum
Blog
Git Archive
Repositories
Distro News
Bug-Tracker
siduction-Map

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 there is also an icon that takes you to the right channel for support, depending on the chosen language.

To be able to act as a testbed for Debian, we are introducing our own bug-tracker. 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. Let me explain how you can help us and Debian by submitting bugreports for broken packages.
If you think you found a bug in a Debian package, please start reportbug-ng and put the name of the package in the adress-line on top. The app will now search through the already filed bugs for that package and show those. Now it’s 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 also goes for siduction packages as well. We will sort the bugs for you and file them in the appropriate place, if it’s reproducible. Please look out for a forum post with more detailed info on the bug-tracker soon. If all this seems too complicated for now, feel free to use the bugs-thread on the forum; it will keep working until final release.

Release-Names

If you should ask yourself, where the codename ‘Desperado’ comes from, we name our releases after famous songs from rock-music history. Desperado, a song from the 2nd album by the same name by the Eagles from 1973 was chosen, among many others and won the election.

We will try to finalize this RC with your help within a week, please file respective bugs on our forum.

As we always look for further developers and contributors, we would like to welcome you on IRC in #siduction-core and tell us what ou want to do for us.

Please note

Our new website is still not finished yet. Setting it up from scratch with our own template is a bit bigger job than we thought it would be. Lack of time does not really help here. We will keep you posted.

Hardware Hints

If you should own an ATI Radeon graphics accelerator, please use the failsafe option, when booting the Live-ISO. This option will add the cheatcodes radeon.modeset=0 xmodule=vesa to the Kernel bootline, so that you can boot to X. Before installing, on the Live-ISO, please install firmware-linux-nonfree. To do so, please open your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list with your favourite editor as root and append contrib non-free to the end of the first line. Save the edit and do:

apt-get update && apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

If you install the operating system now, the package will be installed also, preventing you from a garbled screen when first rebooting. Mind that if you reboot before installing the system, the changes you made will be lost.
If your system has wireless network, this will probably not work out of the box with free drivers, so you better start with wired network connected. You might want to use the script fw-detect to get information on wireless drivers. The installer will prompt you for any missing firmware and guide you through the process of installing it.

Credits für siduction 2012.1

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

Hendrik Lehmbruch (hendrikl)
Sven Strohmeier (se7en)

Code, Ideas and good Spirits

Axel Beu (ab_)
ayla
Giorgio Cittadini (pappi)
Hollie Lackershire (tartie)
Lars Lünnemann (Spike_DE)
J. Hamatoma (hama)
Manuel Beckmann (bequimao) Marco Schmidt (anitainer)
Markus Schimpf (arno911)
Michael Singer (bluelupo)
Otto S.(otto)
Paulo P. (prp5627)
Peter Ziegler (harley-peter)
Robert Ulatowski (quidam77)
Roland Lang (vindeliker)
Tom Wroblewski (GoinEasy9)
zeppo

Thank you!

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

We also want to specially express our thanks to Debian and sidux/aptosid for paving the road we travel.

And now enjoy!

On behalf of the siduction team:
Ferdinand Thommes

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