Announcing 1.0 Release Candidate 1

Joshua Strobl (Comms & DevOps)

October 29, 2015

The Solus Project is happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the Solus operating system.

We would like to thank all of our community members for helping make this release possible. Together we have discovered and resolved a plethora of bugs, improved software, and ensured that the user experience under Solus is better than it has ever been before.

Budgie

Budgie has been updated to improve stability and is a stability and maintenance update prior to the landing of the new Budgie rewrite and Raven (our notification center), landing in a future update.

DoFlicky

DoFlicky, the new driver management tool of Solus, is now available for testing as of this release candidate. DoFlicky will be accompanied by installable drivers for:

broadcom-sta
NVIDIA 304, 340xx, 352

This Release Candidate will enable us to receive feedback, thoroughly test the driver installation and help provide a better driver experience for end users. With our driver management software landing, we will integrate 32-bit / multilib support after ensuring there are no further issues with DoFlicky.

Due to the quality of the proprietary AMD drivers (fglrx), we will not be providing them at this moment in time. We will provide them as an update after RC1.

Firefox Theming

The default theme for Firefox has been changed to Arc Firefox Darker theme to provide a consistent user experience and design throughout Solus. This is a stunning theme that compliments the usage of the default GTK theme, [Arc Darker](https://github.com/horst3180/Arc-theme. The other Arc Firefox theme variants are available from the Appearance section of Firefox.

Download

Obtaining Release Candidate 1

You may download the ISO by going here.

Note on Virtualization

Please note that whilst visualization solutions such as VirtualBox or Qemu can indeed be useful for preliminary testing of Solus, they will suffer greatly degraded performance in comparison to a hardware install. This is because Solus is optimized for real hardware usage, and doesn’t cut corners or accommodate for virtual scenarios. As such the desktop itself requires 3D acceleration, which has been commonplace for a long time. Whilst running Solus in a virtual environment it will rely on software (CPU) rendering, as such you will see high CPU usage and degraded performance. This is in no way an indicator of performance on real hardware.

Note on UEFI installation

As the partition management didn’t land in this particular installer revision, there are certain steps you should be aware of to install Solus on a UEFI machine. Solus requires an EFI System Partition to be either present or created during install, and will only recognize an FAT or FAT32 partition on a GPT disk, with the ‘boot’ flag set, as a valid EFI System Partition.

This can be achieved via the gparted tool, by creating a new FAT32 partition of size 512MB, and using the ‘Manage flags’ right click option to enable the ‘boot’ flag. After adding your system user in the installer you will be prompted for a location to install the gummiboot boot loader. You will only have the option to select an EFI System Partition here, and it is highly recommended you choose to install the bootloader.

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