Release Notes for siduction 2012.2 — Riders on the Storm

We are very happy to present to you the final release of siduction 2012.2 – Riders on the Storm. Siduction is a full live-distribution with an integrated installer, based on Debian’s unstable branch, and we try to release snapshots quarterly.

Siduction 2012.2 is shipped with 4 Desktop-Environments: KDE SC, XFCE, LXDE and Razor-qt, all in 32- and 64-bit variants. Razor-Qt is the latest flavour that joins our regular release cycle after seeing a dev-release in the summer.

The released images are a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of sid, from 2012-12-09. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 3.6-9, accompanied by XServer 1.12.4-4.

As the freeze for Debian 7 aka Wheezy will still last some months, we take the opportunity to update and consolidate our package-base with this new release.

What is new

Other than updated packages and fresh artwork we ship some more novelties, some in the open, others hidden. We have fixed a number of bugs that turned up in RC1 and RC2. Thank you for submitting them

Bugs from RC1

  • 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 upstream 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

Bugs from RC2

  • added romanian language-support and translation in the appropriate places like grub/gfxboot, installer and language switcher (qxkb)
  • removing a lock from Chromium after install
  • fixed some regressions introduced with fixes from RC1
  • Razor-qt, first released in a dev-release in the summer, will now move as a new flavour to our regular release cycle. The Razor-qt team has recently released Razor-qt 0.5.1, which we integrate in our release. Razor-qt Desktop-Environment is not finished yet, but the 0.5 release was a big step to more completion.
  • XFCE in Debian unstable, due to the freeze for the wheezy release, still is on version 4.8. We have, for this release, packaged and shipped XFCE 4.10 for our users.
  • LXDE has 2 new packages: lxpolkit, which is LXDE’s own polkit package, and lxappearance-obconf, which is a openbox configuration plugin for lxappearance.
  • The debian-qt-kde team has backported the changes in versions 4.8.4 to 4.8.5 into 4.8.4-5. So the shipped version 4.8.4-5 is basicaly 4.8.5.

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 118 bugs since the last final release, most of them being code rewrites.

Besides that we have received a much needed webserver from a member of the core-team as a donation and have set it up accordingly. Many thanks for that. The installer still offers btrfs as an experimental filesystem. Please be careful if you use it and always backup your data.

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 ‘Riders on the Storm’ comes from, let me tell you that we name our releases after famous rocksongs. ‘Riders on the Storm’ is a song from LA Woman by The Doors.

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 2012.2

Core Team

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

Maintainers of siduction Desktop Environments

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

Art Team

Hendrik Lehmbruch (hendrikl)
Sven Strohmeier (se7en)

Code, Ideas, good Spirits

ayla
bluelupo
J. Hamatoma (hama)
Markus Schimpf (arno911)
Ulrich Beckmann (Bequimão)
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 thank Debian and sidux/aptosid for paving the road we travel on.

And now enjoy!

On behalf of the siduction team:
Ferdinand Thommes

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