In the background we are re-writing a lot of things around the build-system, the manual and so on, but these things are not really noteworthy on their own. I will blog about them, once all that is done. What makes me write this today is the fact, that we have siduction packages of KDE SC 4.10.1 for you. I would like to thank santa very much  for providing those packages for us and welcome him under our roof.

If you want to update to KDE SC 4.10.1, you need the line

deb http://packages.siduction.org/kdenext unstable main

in your sources.list. Then run

apt-gt update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Please make sure you run the dist-upgrade outside of X. Former entries to your sources.list pointing to qt-kde repository can be removed, as they are not needed anymore in the future.

Besides KDE SC 4.10.1 we also have a fresh Razor-Qt 5.2 in our repo. For that you need

deb http://packages.siduction.org/razorqt unstable main

in your sources.list.

Kernel Panic on bricked Samsung Notebook

Samsung had to take a solid beating this week for obviously not having tested their notebooks under Linux, booting with UEFI. Quite a few people had to brick their notebooks before the story finaly came up. Patches by Matt Fleming (scroll down to M, like Matt) from Intel, that will prevent  ”samsung-laptop” from being started, where hastily included into kernel 3.8 -rc6 before Linus took of for a week of well deserved diving. In his usual charming way he lets us know:  ”I have a CleverPlan(tm) to make *sure* that rc7 will be better and much smaller. That plan largely depends on me being unreachable for the next week due to the fact that there is no internet under water.”

As of today, our kernel 3.7.5 has these patches included to prevent our users from bricking their devices. Happy computing.

Kernel-Developer for more than 20 years, Cox has implemented a new network stack all by himself in the early 90s and from thereon rose to become number two in the ranks of the kernel-devs. Hardly anyone else has such a solid knowledge of the complexity of the kernel as he does. Linus Torvalds, that he does not always agree with on technical questions, joked about him once, saying:

“Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he’s actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well. ”

Up to the release of Kernel 2.6 Cox was the operative number two as well. Since then, he only takes care of parts of the Kernel like the serial drivers that he was responsible for until now. His most important achievements were, besides his care for Kernels 2.2. and 2.4, the implementation of SMP in Kernel 2.0. In his professional life during the last years, Red Hat and Intel payed him to work on the Linux Kernel full time.

In his announcement he left it open, that he might be back if the situation allows him to do so. He will not only be severely missed by his colleagues on the kernel team but also by the community for his often sarcastic, witty analysis and comments, where he was never far from the truth.

But wait, not everything is frozen. KDE 4.9.5 was semi-officialy released by one of the busy bees in IRC channel #debian-qt-kde. He goes by the handle of Santa and was helped by drdanz. Thanks a lot, guys, Kudos to you.

We have, for our user’s convenience (so no need to deal with pinning) synched all available packages to our kde-next repository. If you do not have it in your sources yet, the following line will set it up.

# cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
# echo deb http://packages.siduction.org/kdenext unstable main > kde-next.list

After that, a simple

# apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

will do the trick.

Have fun.

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

So we prepared a little endtime art. We uploaded this as an art package, so if you like to install it, do apt-get update && apt-cache search siduction-art | grep eow .

Let’s hope, the Mayans knew nothing about calendars.

So long and thanks for all the fish. 

Happy computing, everyone.

The things we fixed include:

• The bluewater manual is now available in romanian language, closes #998
• fw-detect works again as expected for installing non-free firmware
• Creation of sources.list during building the images got an overhaul, closes #997
• new upstrem for wbar, wbar-config added, closes #978
• added correct firmware-link for AR7010+AR9287 devices to fw-detect
• switched to kickoff menu for KDE
• fixed VG default size of 4 GB for LVM, closes #974
• added ntfs-config for easier configuration of ntfs file system

The full release notes are available on the website as are the images for direct download or as torrent.

We are happy to let our XFCE users update their installations now (thanks to agaida and towo). All you need to do is, as root:

echo deb http://ftp.spline.de/pub/siduction/xfcenext unstable main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xfcenext.list

That will put a file called xfcenext.list into your sources.list.d folder and write the appropriate line to it. Then you can install or update an existing XFCE with:

apt-get update && apt-get install xfce4

The repository itself can be  found on our repository listing for amd64 or i386

Have fun with your shiny new XFCE.