Welcome to the 14th installation of This Week in Solus.

Budgie Next

Work has progressed well on the rewrite of Budgie.

• The rewrite is now integrated into GNOME Session and uses its phase initialization system, so Budgie starts in the panel initialization phase and the window manager in the WindowManager phase.
• Information such as whether dark theme is enabled, your widget theme, and icon theme are now integrated into Raven.

Also, work on the panel editor has now begun. A screenshot is available below.

Multilib

As you may (or may not, in which case you should really tune in more) know multilib has been a large item on our path to 1.0. Ikey has been working extensively this week on the multi-stage process for landing 32-bit libraries, and we are happy to report that 32-bit enabled GCC is now landing in the repositories.

Before I get into what that means, let’s go over the process of getting there:

• Stage 1: In the first stage, we cross-compiled a new temporary toolchain to solve the chicken and egg problem: You must have a multilib toolchain to build a multilib toolchain. By cross-compiling a *static- GCC we defer full GCC (using the system’s glibc and headers) to stage 2.
• Stage 2: In the second stage, we rebuilt to gain a fully featured toolchain that is used to populate a minimal chroot filesystem to allow barebones functionality in terms of being able to compile simple packages
• Stage 3: In the third and final stage, we produced *native- gcc, glibc, and binutils.

I know, I had to get Ikey to explain it to me too. In fact I ended up just opting to copy and paste what he said.

The basics: We cross-compiled a temporary toolchain to compile stuff, to rebuild stuff to use in a minimal chroot filesystem, then produced some native multilib gcc, glibc, and binutils.

These multilib (32-bit enabled) utilities and libraries are going to be the basic for enabling a wider set of applications and another major item that has been a 1.0 requirement, Steam.

Package Updates

Here are some highlights of package updates:

• atom has been updated to 1.3.1
• flash-player-nonfree has been updated to 11.2.202.554
• geany has been updated to 1.26
• gnome-disk-utilities 3.18.3 has been added to the repo
• git has been updated to 2.6.4
• lollypop has been updated to 0.9.75
• kernel has been updated to 4.1.14
• php has been updated to 7.0.0
• r has been updated to 3.2.3
• rhythmbox has been updated to enable mtp and vala support
• rust has been updated to 1.5.0
• supertuxkart 0.9.1 has been added to the repo
• qbittorrent has been updated to 3.3.1
• youtube-dl has been updated to 2015.12.09

Thanks for tuning in this week!