Welcome to the 29th installation of This Week in Solus.
Hackfest 1.2
On the 21st and 22nd of this month, Ikey and myself had the first Solus hackfest, “Hackfest 1.2”. The main goals of the Hackfest were:
- Successfully running Steam with our own runtime.
- Refining the messaging on the site, including implementing consistent branding and updating content such as the Support page and information on Solus.
The Hackfest went on for roughly 11 hours across both days, with the recordings below! Note: Not intended for younger audiences. Certainly PG13 at times.
I’m happy to say that Ikey’s goal for a native Steam runtime were accomplished, which let’s be honest, that was the major thing we were all hoping for in the Hackfest, right?
The implications of a native Steam runtime are pretty serious too. Rather than having non-optimized Ubuntu libraries from Steam’s runtime, we are able to provide optimized libraries for a more performant gaming experience than any other “tier one” operating system. There is still work to be done on the optimization front, but we’re confident in this first step.
In addition to the native Steam runtime, some bug squashing happened as well:
- Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab) no longer handles the inode/directory mime type. Basically this means you’ll no longer be opening up Disk Usage Analyzer when you really meant to open Nautilus. This could happen across a wide range of software, such as Google Chrome, Veracrypt, Transmission, etc. Bug #734
- Steam Controller support now exists. Bug #729
- A multitude of contribute patches have landed:
- Bug #502 – [PATCH] lsof
- Bug #518 – [Patch] python-virtualenvwrapper – Landed as virtualenvwrapper
- Bug #645 – New package: ninja-build – Landed as ninja
- Bug #658 – [PATCH] lshw
- Bug #659 – [Patch] SDL_ttf – Landed as sdl-ttf
- Bug #661 – [Patch] sdl2_gfx – Landed as sdl2-gfx
- Bug #662 – [Patch] xvidcore – Landed as xvidcore
- ffmpeg now is enabled with xvid
- Bug #669 – [Patch] sdl2-net
- Bug #670 – [Patch] mcomix
- Bug #674 – [Patch] grisbi
- Bug #716 – New package : paper-icon-theme
- Bug #717 – New package : paper-gtk-theme
- Bug #739 – [Patch] quazip
- Bug #754 – [pip] update to 8.1.1 and convert to ypkg2 – Was actually updated to 8.1.2
- Bug #786 – [patch] ghostwriter
- Bug #801 – [Patch] fping3
- Bug #819 – [Request] HomeBank
Package Updates
To say there was a lot of package updates this week would frankly be an understatement. Here are some highlights (not including all the multilib enablement):
New:
- fping 3.13
- ghostwriter 1.3.1
- grisbi 1.0.0
- homebank 5.0.7
- lsof 4.89
- mcomix 1.2.1
- ninja 1.7.1
- quazip 0.7.2
- sdl-gfx 2.0.25
- sdl-ttf 2.0.11
- sdl2-gfx 1.0.1
- sdl2-net 2.0.1
- virtualenvwrapper 4.7.1
- xvidcore 1.3.4
Updated: