Release Notes for siduction
2013.1 – Firestarter

We are very happy to present to you the final release of siduction 2013.1 – Firestarter. Siduction is a distribution based on Debian’s unstable branch and we try to release snapshots quarterly.

Siduction 2013.1 is shipped with 5 Desktop-Environments: KDE SC, XFCE, LXDE, GNOME, and Razor-qt, all in 32- and 64-bit variants. From the shipped DEs only LXDE and Razor-Qt fit on a CD with 700 MegaByte. But as CDs become more irrelevant with every day, we are not too worried about this and recommend to use USB-Sticks for installation.

New in this release cycle is GNOME 3, that we are happy to officially present. Also officially shipped for the first time is noX, a variant without a X-Server, meant for users that prefer to work without an X environment completely or wish to build their own environment pretty much from scratch.

The released images are a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of Sid, from 2013-05-20. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 3.9.3, accompanied by X-Server 1.12.4-6.

Since Debian has released Wheezy just recently, we use the opportunity to release a current snapshot of the archive, after the opened floodgates after the end of the freeze have flushed a plethora of fresh packages into Sid.

What is new

  • GNOME, first introduced to siduction with 2012.2 as developement-release, is shipped officially now with 2013.1 and added to our official release cycle with version 3.4+7.
    There are two ways to start your gnome-session:

    • gnome-fallback, which implements the GNOME2 look
  • GNOME, which implements the GNOME3 look and desktop-effects
    To be able to start gnome as a gnome3-session, your videocard must be accelerated. Users of ATI graphic cards must have firmware-linux-nonfree installed to be able to launch GNOME3. By default in live mode gnome-fallback is started. After installation, GNOME3 mode is enabled. That means, users of ATI cards must install firmware-linux-nonfree before starting the installer.

Boot cheatcode “gnome”

If you want to force a GNOME3-session even in live mode, you can use the cheatcode gnome to the kernel-bootline. This does not work for users with ATI cards other than with a persistent overlay on a USB device.

Shutdown and Logout of a gnome3-session

Depending on your hardware, your Power Off-menu may be visible or not. To be able to shutdown a gnome3-session with an invisible Power Off-menu, you must press the left alt-key on your keyboard and click on User in the upper right corner of your screen and then the Power Off-menu. If you do not press alt, you will be offered Suspend instead of Power Off.

And besides that?

  • We ship, for the first time, noX as an official release, which was introduced first in October 2012 as development release. As there is no graphical environment, you need to use cli-installer as root to run the installation.
  • XFCE in Debian unstable, due to the freeze for the wheezy release, still is on version 4.8. We have packaged and shipped XFCE 4.10 as we had for 2012.2.
  • For our KDE users we shiped the latest available version KDE SC 4.10.3. Besides that we are still working on a rewrite of siduction-settings-kde. We also changed the akonadi-backend from sqlite to MySQL to be prepared for Kmail2. This only has effect on new installations.
  • Razor-Qt has seen quite some love. We ship version 0.5.2, which has better plugins and overall functionality. This will be improved even more with the upcoming version 0.6. Other than that we have synced Debian’s packaging of Razor-Qt with ours.

A lot of time consuming changes again went into adapting the codebase we forked to our needs. We found the way how artwork was integrated into the different flavours for each release very cumbersome and have reshaped the process. The same thing is happening to the bluewater manual at the moment. The process of adding new pages needs an overhaul to simplify the process. All in all we closed 114 bugs since the last final release, most of them being code rewrites and issues in KDE SC or Razor-Qt.

The installer still offers btrfs as an experimental filesystem. Please be careful if you use it and always backup your data.

Last but not least we want to welcome santa aboard, who provides us with latest KDE packaging and more.

Our Resources

siduction Forum
siduction Blog
Git Archive
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 you also find 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. 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 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 obviously 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 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 ‘Firestarter’ comes from, let me tell you that we name our releases after famous rocksongs. Firestarter is a smash hit for the english big-beat band The Prodigy from 1996 from the album The Fat of the Land.

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.

Hardware Tips

If you should own a 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 for siduction 2013.1

Core Team

Alf Gaida (agaida)
Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd)
Axel Beu (ab)
Ferdinand Thommes (devil)
Hendrik Lehmbruch (hendrikl)
Holger Wagemann (holgerw)
Markus Meyer (coruja)
Tom Wroblewski (GoingEasy 9)
Torsten Wohlfarth (towo)

Maintainers of the siduction Desktop Environments

GNOME: Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd)
KDE: Ferdinand Thommes (devil)
LXDE: Markus Meyer (coruja)
noX: Roland Hofbauer ()rolandx1)
Razor-qt: Alf Gaida (agaida)
XFCE: Torsten Wolfahrt (towo)

Art Team

Hendrik Lehmbruch (hendrikl)
Sven Strohmeier (se7en)

Code, ideas and support

ayla
bluelupo
J. Hamatoma (hama)
José Manuel Santamaría Lema (santa)
Markus Schimpf (arno911)
Ulrich Beckmann (Bequimão)

Thank you!

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

We also want to thank Debian, as we are using their base.

And now enjoy!

On behalf of the siduction team:
Ferdinand Thommes

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