This Week in Solus -- Install #12

Joshua Strobl (Comms & DevOps)

November 29, 2015

Welcome to This Week in Solus, Installation #12.

You know how I’ve said before “I think this is the biggest TWIS I’ve done”? Well, just consider that restated, again.

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Budgie Next

There has been a lot of user experience work done on Budgie Next this week. Thanks to the fantastic work (as you can see below) done by Horst3180, we have a user experience design for Raven that enables us to:

Separate out Applets and Notifications.
Enable Budgie, Theming, and Raven customization

As you can see from the recent video by Ikey, implementation of the design is coming along and work on its functionality will begin soon.

Goofiboot

The Solus Project has forked gummiboot, which is now considered dead upstream, to ensure we (as in the entire Linux community, not just the Solus community) have a separate and independent bootloader that provides the necessary features and distribution support that should be expected from a responsible upstream. Goofiboot, as the fork is named, is already being used in production on our new daily image (as also stated in the New Daily section below) and according to Ikey:

One of the nasty problems we hit in the past with gummiboot was actually case sensitivity. The EFI System Partition is FAT32, which is case insensitive, but sadly, preserves case. We’ve encountered multiple instances now whereby various standardised directories used the wrong case, which caused installation to fail.

This issue is now resolved.

Hardware Support

We have resolved syslinux issues that have affected the Acer C720 (Chromebook), “whereby SeaBIOS reserves the lower 16MB of memory, causing syslinux to enter into an infinite reboot loop”. If you have a Chromebook, we’re open to you testing out the latest daily image or installation and seeing where we can continue to improve our support. We know that there’s work to be done yet on gestures and mulittouch, but we’ll get there!

Installer

Work has been progressing on the new installer from Michael Rutherford. He does not anticipate the installer being done before 1.0, however this is a complete rewrite and massive improvement over the existing one, and here are some of the improvements he has made to it since last week:

Added password comparison functionality
Dark theme is enabled as the default theme.
Added some more icons by Alexandros.
Reorganized the project file structure.
User setup info is now saved. Ex. user name, password, full name, etc.
Added a full disk partitioning mode and an advanced partitioning mode with accompanying tabs.
Added a debug mode for developers <3
Cleaned up and reformatted the code and added re-implemented popup windows in a more pragmatic way.
Fixed all run-time GTK errors

He also posted a poll regarding availability of encryption options. If you haven’t voted yet, you [here](https://plus.google.com/+MichaelRutherford97/posts/E5Kj8hHfEgJ"should! You can check out the installer here.

New Daily

We’re happy to announce a new Daily image, 0.201548.7.0, which is available for download here.

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This new daily features a lot of changes and improvements since Release Candidate 1 and we’d like to highlight some of them below (full changelog at bottom of article):

Firefox

We have resolved freetype issues, updated to the latest Firefox, and have enabled HTML5 1080p video by enabling MediaSource and WebM-specific MediaSource support.

Goofiboot

We have switched from using gummiboot to Goofiboot to help resolved UEFI-specific booting issues.

I/O Throughput

We have tripled our I/O throughput in a recent update. According to Ikey:

This was tracked down last night to using the CONFIG_SCSI_MQ_DEFAULT option, which was inadvertently enabled in a make oldconfig at some point.

Linux Kernel 4.1.13

We are using the Linux Kernel 4.1.13, as 4.3 is in our view not yet ready for production, namely for older Nvidia hardware. We are currently tracking relevant bugs and keeping an eye out for issue resolutions.