Blog
This Week in Solus - Install #43
Welcome to the 43rd installation of This Week in Solus. Post Snapshot We’ve been hard at work after last week’s snapshot on various items. We got some early reports of hardware incompatibilities with Wayland as well as issues on the GNOME edition of Wayland breaking important functionality like the ability to re-login after a logout. After some investigation, we have decided to temporarily disable Wayland in both gnome-session as well as GDM.
April 24, 2017
Solus Releases ISO Snapshot 2017.04.18.0
We’re proud to announce our second ISO snapshot, 2017.04.18.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions, as well as our new GNOME edition! This snapshot is the culmination of months of work across nearly every aspect of our operating system, ranging from multiple under the hood upgrades and changes to improvements to our desktop experiences. Core Improvements This snapshot features a multitude of new improvements and upgrades to almost every package that ships on any of our ISO snapshots.
April 18, 2017
clr-boot-manager now available in Solus
We’re happy to announce the rollout of clr-boot-manager in our stable repository. clr-boot-manager, from the Clear Linux Project For Intel Architecture , enables a more bulletproof update experience by handling the maintenance and garbage collection of kernels, as well as configuration of the bootloader itself (i.e. GRUB2 for Legacy Boot, goofiboot for UEFI boot on Solus). Furthermore, it enables us to retain older, known-working kernels, so in the event a kernel upgrade results in the inability to boot, you’ll still be able to roll back to the last good kernel.
March 26, 2017
This Week in Solus - Install #42
Welcome to the 42nd installation of This Week in Solus. Upgrades Several significant upgrades happened this week (all of which are shipped in the stable repo at the time of publication), starting with Peter spending time upgrading our KDE Frameworks to 5.32.0 and upgrading our Kdenlive to the latest release. We updated our kernel to the latest longterm release, 4.9.16. Justin and Ikey landed MATE 1.18 today, which features our upstreamed patch for action icons in mate-notification-daemon (shown below) and the many fantastic improvements from the MATE Desktop Team.
March 19, 2017
This Week in Solus - Install #41
Welcome to This Week in Solus, install #41. Linux Driver Management Ikey has spent considerable amount of time this week dedicated to shaping up our Linux Driver Management tool, which will be responsible for our switchable graphics solution. The initial version of LDM will enable always-on Optimus, as that is the highest priority item, before moving on to switchable graphics itself. We’re able to detect multiple system configurations, across:
March 5, 2017
Adopting Flatpak to Reassemble Third Party Applications
Solus, like most other Linux based systems, distributes the bulk of its software through binary repositories. To ignore most of the technical details, this is effectively a set of packages, with an address book to look them up (the repository index). In certain cases, however, we cannot ship some applications. This is invariably due to some kind of licensing restriction, which forbids the redistribution of a package. For a long time, we’ve made do with the Solus Third Party system . To alleviate the issue of distribution, the system fetches the application directly from the vendor source, and turns it into a native .eopkg locally. This allows you to install the application and manage it through the native package management system.
January 18, 2017
Early 2017 Infrastructure Upgrades!
In the 38th installation of This Week in Solus, I discussed plans for improving our web infrastructure, and I’m happy to announce that the first big upgrade for 2017 is now complete. This is part of a larger goal to scale out our infrastructure, speed up our platform, and tackle some long-standing issues with email. Prior to this infrastructure upgrade, we were running our git and web properties (Phabricator, forum, and website) on a server with:
January 5, 2017
This Year in Solus (2016 Edition)
2016 was an incredible year for Solus. We went from having our first release in December of 2015, to completely switching to a rolling release model. We had multiple Solus releases, multiple Budgie releases, several rewrites of different components of Solus, ranging from the Installer to the Software Center. We introduced our native Steam runtime and improved both our state of statelessness as well as optimizations. When I first started talking about Solus at the beginning of 2016, I used the analogy that what we were building was the engine for our vehicle, one to deliver us to our goals for Solus. While we’re still building that engine, we’re in a drastically better shape than we were in 2016, and we’re more confident, and bolder, than ever.
January 3, 2017
Solus Releases ISO Snapshot 2017.01.01.0
We’re happy to be kicking off the new year with the release of our first ISO snapshot, 2017.01.01.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions. General Improvements To The Out-Of-The-Box Experience The out-of-the-box experience for shipped applications in Solus has improved, as we’ve worked towards enabling a larger set of features for them. A larger set of devices are now supported for MTP mounting, thanks to an upgraded libmtp. Evince can now handle PS and XPS files. Our package manager, eopkg, has received performance improvements as well as a fix to statelessness that’d cause the Software Center to hang. Instances where a corrupted cursor would appear while using Firefox have been resolved. VLC can now play content from SMB shares and SFTP locations. We’ve also done work on enabling subtitles for certain content played via MKV files. Alongside those targeted improvements, Solus ships with Firefox 50.1.0 and Thunderbird 45.6.0. Firefox 50.1.0 brings security fixes on top of the various improvements to the Firefox 50 series, such as built-in emojis (those are all the rage these days, right? 🎉) and Thunderbird 45.6.0 delivers various bug and security fixes.
January 1, 2017
Solus Announces First Release of Brisk Menu
We are happy to announce the first release of Brisk Menu, our implementation of a clean, efficient, and modern menu for the MATE Desktop. Brisk Menu 0.1.0 enables quick launching of applications, as well as access to session controls (such as logout, suspend, hibernate) and the system’s Control Center. Brisk Menu is in its early days and we have a lot of plans for it going forward. Firstly, we will be working to enable launching Brisk Menu with the Super key. After that, we’ll be working on making Brisk Menu translatable, as well as introducing the following customization options:
December 30, 2016