News

…and we have a little present for you guys. No one believed it would still come, but here it is: a Gnome3 release for the holidays to play with. The release notes are on our website as are the downloads. There  is also a torrent available.

Whoever is not interested in installing Gnome will find a X-mas art theme with apt-get update && apt-cache search siduction-art | grep xmas.

Happy holidays to all our users and everyone else on the planet, your families and loved ones

Last night we released the first (and probably only) release candidate for siduction 2012.2.0. Our website has the release notes and the download section for you. As promised, there is an extra folder for torrents, which might take some hours to propagate to the mirrors, as it was just now set up. Please test this RC and report any bugs either to the forum or our dev-platform. Have fun.

Last night the developers of the Razor-qt desktop environment released version 0.5. Since the release of 0.4 almost 10 month passed by, in which, besides beautitication and bugfixing, a handful of new components were crafted. These are:

• razor-lightdm-greeter for lightdm greeter on razorqt/qt4 based desktop
• razor-notificationd. A tool to handle notifications over razor desktop
• razor-openssh-askpass helper (deactivated by default)
• razor-confupdate to update older config files
• razor-appeareance gui to support config theming
• razor-globalkeyshortcuts for keyboard shortcut configuration

Also a bunch of new panel plugins were crafted:

• cpu monitor applet
• lm sensor applet
• volume control applet that supports alsa or pulseaudio
• color picker
• network monitor

Most of the big distributions have packages for Razor-qt ready for their users. As Debian is not on the list yet, we at siduction put out a developenment release in the summer, based on Razor-qt 0.4. We will add Razor-qt to our regular release schedule and hopefully see a release at the end of October or early in November. Some other distros also have Live-CDs based on 0.4 for evaluation.

Siduction users will not have to wait that long for updated packages in our repositories. Expect those sometime during the next few days.

Last night we had one of our fortnightly Core-Team meetings. Topics and log are, as usual, online. Basicaly, the topics were noX, new webserver and state of new web portal.

NoX seems to be good to go as a developement release, given that tests this coming week run smooth. We will try to add some graphics to the tty, but I doubt this will happen for the upcoming release.

Our new webserver is about good to go, most everything is migrated (thanks to agaida for that). Nginx is serving instead of Apache2. Work on new website has been picked up again, using SMF and TinyPortal. We are getting along good so far, multi-language capability has been implemented already, which is always a bit of a tedious job.

Our wiki had a hard time in the past on the host it was on, because effective spam-fighting was hard to do. Now we are setup and good to go on the new server and spammers will have a hard time. Now the database needs to be cleaned out from more than 2000 spammers, then checked for depricated content. This is a community job and everyone can participate and give back. So please, anyone interested in a helpful and uptodate wiki, come and help. As soon as the german version is cleaned out, we would like to translate the content to english. Good job for long winter nights.

Facing 3-4 release dates until the end of the year, we are moving to weekly Core-Team meetings again from now on. For anyone interested, they take place every sunday night at 21:00 UTC -2.

And on a complete different subject, this news item from Kenya made my day. M$ starts bullying Africa by spreading the usual FUD. This guy takes it so far as to allege that open source software is not copyrighted. 

Our fortnightly Core-Team Meeting last night was again dedicated solely to the planned structural changes to improve our workflow and make it easier for our users to participate.

As mentioned in my last blogpost, we wanted to simplify the package lists in our buildsystem pyfll. It took a few weeks of discussion to settle on a compromise. People interested in this or the ones who use our buildsystem privately might follow the changes ahead in the log starting at [21:08:57]. The 2nd topic last night was on repository structure and new repository names. This is interesting for all users, because it’s in regard of their sources.list.d/siduction.list. First of all: don’t panic. We made some changes already to test if old and new denotations work at the same time. They do, so now we can set up links from old to new. You as user need not do any changes now, things will just work. But of course you can if you want to be safe for the future. New installs will of course use the new notation.

Here is the revised structure:

• base was formerly called siduction. It holds all official siduction packages.
• community iis gone, it was never used (please remove it from your list if you have it in there)
• extra is new and holds all packages not in base or users. (packages we build for enhancement of siduction, packages which are not in debian (yet) and aren’t essential part of siduction)
• user is for packages from experienced users / team members who want to distribute their packages (like towo’s inkscape and gimp packages)
• fixes temporarily holds packages that are broken in Debian, if we have a quick fix for them. The future goal is to send those patches upstream.
• razorqt will dissolve into base as soon as we add Razor-Qt to our official release cycle
• experimental is quite self explanatory
• experimental-snapshots is just a proxy for team needs. (users should not have this in their list)

The repository website has the right lines for you to add or change.

The next topic was also about repositories, trying to define where to keep the package sources in a most meaningfull way. For the base and extra repositories this is clearly our own infrastructure (chili/git). The sources from the user repository should be separated from our infrastructure. The reasoning behind that is that anyone should be able to fork these in a simple fashion, package and distribute them in other projects. Github seems to be the way to go here. It’s layed out to be forked, Any changes to forked packages are just a merge away from being backported to the original source.

The last topic for last night was Jenkins. It needs more time and testing. We all agree it is not urgent and has to be the last in line of our improvements. If we have it set up in a useful way and fully understand how it works, it can save us a lot of time by automating a lot of the processes we do manualy now.

On a different topic, time has come to think about a name for our next release, because the art-team needs time to develop a release-art for it. The process we have in place for choosing a name (users submitting their favourites, team choosing the winner by vote) is not really flawless or satisfactory as far as I am concerned.. If anyone has a better idea for this reoccuring routine, we’d be happy to hear it. Other than that, if nothing great comes up, we will use the old method once more. So be prepared for a wiki page to be announced soon on behalf of this.