Release Notes for the first development release of siduction-Gnome 2012.2.5

We are very happy to ship a Christmas present to you today that took a couple of years to be delivered. The wish for a Gnome release grew, while sidux was still around. Back in the day, Gnome2 would easily break on upgrades to Debian unstable, so no one ever wanted to maintain that. Things got better over time and for the last three years one person was perpetually nagging us to do this release, and here it is. Angelescu Ovidiu (convbsd) is the man, and he will also maintain it.

The released images are a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of sid, from 2012-12-23. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 3.7-1, accompanied by Xorg 7.7+1 with core 1.12.4-4. The release is available for download in 32-bit and and 64-bit versions

What is special about this release?

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 agnome3-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

To be able to shutdown a gnome3-session, 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.

What packages are we shipping

Besides Gnome 3.4.2 and the usual siduction package set there is the complete libre office suite, rhythmbox music player, brasero CD/DVD burner, totem movie player and gnome-games for some leisure time.

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 2012.2.5

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)
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 for paving the road we travel on.

And now enjoy!

On behalf of the siduction team:
Ferdinand Thommes

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