Next release plans

We are planning™ to release a full set of siduction images with all flavours before going to CLT (Chemnitzer Linux-Tage) next month. There are at least three reasons for that:

  • We can boast about it at the conference
  • We will have a new installer for you to try
  • We promised to do so

And here are the gory details: Six years ago we thought it would be a cool idea to have our installer running in a browser with the help of a tiny http server. Today for some reasons we do not think it is quite that cool. One of the reasons for that being the fact, that the guy who initialy wrote the installer is not available anymore.

Then, about three years ago someone by the name of Teo Mrnjavac had a marvelous idea, that will, similar to systemd, unify linux in a in my humble opinion positive way. I am talking about the Calamares Installer Framework. As you can see at the bottom of their webpage, your favorite distro is listed there already. It is used more and more by distributions and every one of them makes the code better. Sharing one installer eases a lot of problems for smaller distributions. The partitioning is done by KDE’s partition manager. What it does not do yet is LVM and RAID, but those are in the pipeline. Also, Calamares will make it’s way into Debian soon.

So for the past weeks that is what we have been working on. Calamares is C++, Qt 5 for the user interface and python modules to pick what you need and configure to your liking. Then apply a branding and you are done. Of course this was the fast-forward-mode, but we managed to get it up and running in less than two weeks. We are doing more testing to make sure it lives up to it’s reputation with siduction as well.

It also works fine with BIOS and UEFI, which kills another problem for us: The integration of UEFI in the old installer was far from perfect and included manual setup work before starting the installer. Given that we do not run into any blockers with the installer, we are confident that the freeze for Debian GNU/Linux 9 »Stretch« will allow us a release of all flavours without too many problems.

We also plan to make this next release our first release with 64-bit only. Yep, we think the time is right to drop the 32-bit plattform without making too many users unhappy. Should you be one of those not happy with our plan, please let us know your reasons on our forum. If you have a good reason to still run 32-bit, you might even be able to talk us into a custom build. But overall, dropping this architecture saves us a lot of time that can be better spent elsewhere.

2 thoughts on “Next release plans

  1. When will Siduction Cinnamon and LXQT versions start supporting Rezen 3 2200G CPU’s? I have a custom build but it doesn’t boot after install without being booted with another distro. It appears that siduction as well as Debian are both behind the times. Rezen CPU has been out for at least 2 years. Other distro’s support it. I have several other distro’s and they all work and install with no problems. Why can’t Siduction do the same?

  2. Well, first thing is that siduction is 99,9 percent Debian Sid, so as long as Debian does not have support for Ryzen, Siduction cannot have it out of the box.
    Then, siduction devs try their best to be ahead of debian and listen to their users, but they are only a hand full of people doing things voluntary in their spare time. If they don’t have the hardware for some reasons, how could they support it? If they accidently have the hardware but that specific piece is running well for them, they cannot triage bugs they personally don’t have. That’s how I understood it 😉

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