TrueOS is becoming a Core Operating System

Bringing an end to the curiosity spread in TrueOS communities for a while, Mr Josh Smith on behalf of TrueOS project has announced their plan to make TrueOS as a Core operating system. This means, going forward, TrueOS will be developed as desktop agnostic operating system with the aim of providing a solid base for other distributions to evolve on.

The ultimate aim of TrueOS would be to provide a modular, functional and stable core based on FreeBSD and OpenZFS. It will be evolved as downstream fork with latest technologies like OpenRC & LibreSSL. The TrueOS is planning to be an ideal choice for advanced users and do-it-yourself people.

While the TrueOS is evolving as a Core operating system, the desktop BSD idea will be taken forward by Project Trident. It will provide a simple desktop BSD with Lumina Desktop.

The TrueOS Project has some big plans in the works, and we want to take a minute and share them with you. Many have come to know TrueOS as the “graphical FreeBSD” that makes things easy for newcomers to the BSDs. Today we’re announcing that TrueOS is shifting our focus a bit to become a cutting-edge operating system that keeps all of the stability that you know and love from ZFS (OpenZFS) and FreeBSD, and adds additional features to create a fresh, innovative operating system. Our goal is to create a core operating system that is modular, functional, and perfect for do-it-yourselfers and advanced users alike.

TrueOS will become a downstream fork that will build on FreeBSD by integrating new software technologies like OpenRC and LibreSSL. Work has already begun which allows TrueOS to be used as a base platform for other projects, including JSON-based manifests, integrated Poudriere / pkg tools and much more. We’re planning on a six month release cycle to keep development moving and fresh, allowing us to bring you hot new features to ZFS, bhyve and related tools in a timely manner. This makes TrueOS the perfect fit to serve as the basis for building other distributions.

For more information on TrueOS evolution, see original announcement published in TrueOS blog. You can also read about TrueOS in our gallery page.

Linux Mint 19 BETA is scheduled to release on 4th June, final release will arrive on June end

In latest news letter (May 2018), Linux Mint team has shared plan for upcoming Linux Mint 19 release. The Linux Mint 19 BETA is scheduled to release on 4th June and after the beta testing, the final release will be shipped by the end of June.

All 3 editions of Linux Mint 19 (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce) are currently in QA. The various bugs which were found were fixed and we’re expecting them to pass QA tomorrow. We’re planning the BETA release for Monday the 4th.

We hope you’ll enjoy testing these BETAs and we look forward to receiving your feedback.

The BETA phase for Mint 19 will be longer than usual, with a stable release planned for the end of June. A lot of code was ported to python3, gksu was removed and replaced with pkexec, MATE now supports HiDPI automatically, we’re using a brand new package base, the theme engine in GTK 3.22 is very different than in GTK 3.18 and might cause a few issues in Mint-X, and we’ve switched to Mint-Y and its new set of icons so we’re expecting many little bugs and paper cuts.

You can read the official news letter in Linux Mint blog. You can also read about Linux Mint in our gallery.

Fedora 26 approaches it's end of life

Following the release of Fedora 28, it's second predecessor, Fedora 26 is approaching it's end of life. Fedora 26 will officially complete it's life cycle on 1st June 2018 after serving 325 days. Within this time period Fedora 26 has received around 10,000 updates from Fedora community.

Fedora 26 Preview

The Fedora Magazine has published a blog post announcing the end of period of Fedora 26 and it also includes some statistics on Fedora 26 release.

As readers may be aware, Fedora 28 recently released to great acclaim. That means Fedora 26 hits its End of Life (EOL) status on June 1, 2018. Read more here about what this means, and what steps you can take with your older Fedora systems.

After June 1, packages in the Fedora 26 repositories no longer receive any security, bugfix, or enhancement updates. Furthermore, at that point the community adds no new packages to the F26 collection.

The Fedora Project highly recommends you upgrade all systems to Fedora 28 or Fedora 27 before the EOL date. Upgrades are an easy way to keep your system setup while you move to the latest technology.

Fedora 26 was released in July 2017. During its lifetime, the Fedora community published nearly 10,000 updates to the F26 repositories. Fedora 26 Workstation featured version 3.24 of GNOME. The release also carried numerous improvements and highlights like A new partitioning tool in Anaconda for expert setup, DNF 2.5 with new software management capabilities and The Python Classroom Lab which helps educators introduce students to the latest technology

You can refer original blog post to know more on Fedora 26 and Fedora life cycle. You may also read our gallery page for Fedora, to know more about Fedora.

Budgie Desktop getting remerged with Solus Project

A while after keeping Budgie Desktop as in independent project, it is getting merged with Solus Project, the original developers. This decision was made by the team considering the lack of contribution from other projects using Budgie Desktop.

The Solus project has observed that keeping Budgie as a separate project does not help in its growth and other projects using budgie is adding their own vendor-specific values. Overall, it is diminishing the brand value of Budgie Desktop. Considering this point, the budgie-desktop repository is merged with solus-project repository and the further development activities will mainly focus the goals of Solus operating system.

Budgie Desktop on Solus 3

As of May 20th, 2018, the Budgie Desktop project has been merged back into the Solus Project umbrella, making it a distinct Solus project once more. Contributions from all distributions, projects and individuals are welcome provided they add value and are of sufficient quality. We're happy to discuss test pull requests, which should be appropriately labeled as being Request For Comment [RFC].

Please note that we will NOT accept pull requests to add Pythonic applets. Any applets should be written in either C or Vala. Pull requests modifying any C source code should ensure to stick with code compliance. Run ./update_format.sh to ensure coding standards are respected. (Requires clang-format and misspell)

This decision has been made after a long time having Budgie Desktop being a separate project, which to this date has only repeatedly harmed the Budgie Desktop project due to other projects specifically looking to add vendor specific value-add and ensuring it is never upstream within this project. As such the project is now officially back under the stewardship of Solus (original authors) and will be developed with our goals in mind, as it once was. It should also be observed that Budgie has been an incredibly quiet project for almost the entire duration of the project being split out from Solus. This will now be remedied as we merge back into Solus, and all previous decisions will now be re-evaluated (Qt? Wayland? gtk4? etc).

You can read original announcement in Budgie Desktop README page.

Ubuntu 18.10 will be named as Cosmic Cuttlefish

After the successful release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Canonical is switching their focus to next long term supported release, Ubuntu 20.04. As a foot step to this, Mr Mark Shuttleworth has announced the code name for upcoming Ubuntu 18.10. This release will be known by the code name Cosmic Cuttlefish. Security and privacy will be a main consideration in upcoming releases without compromising diversity and unified use experience, Mark added.

Cosmic Cuttlefish - courtesy (redbubble.com)

With our castor Castor now out for all to enjoy, and the Twitterverse delighted with the new minimal desktop and smooth snap integration, it’s time to turn our attention to the road ahead to 20.04 LTS, and I’m delighted to say that we’ll kick off that journey with the Cosmic Cuttlefish, soon to be known as Ubuntu 18.10.

Each of us has our own ideas of how the free stack will evolve in the next two years. And the great thing about Ubuntu is that it doesn’t reflect just one set of priorities, it’s an aggregation of all the things our community cares about. Nevertheless I thought I’d take the opportunity early in this LTS cycle to talk a little about the thing I’m starting to care more about than any one feature, and that’s security.

If I had one big thing that I could feel great about doing, systematically, for everyone who uses Ubuntu, it would be improving their confidence in the security of their systems and their data. It’s one of the very few truly unifying themes that crosses every use case.

Read complete announcement in Mark Shuttleworths blog.

Korora team is taking a break, the future of the project is uncertain

After spending a few years with open source community, Korora developers are taking a break from the Korora project development activities. The Korora project was able to provide a decent user experience on top of Fedora with, out of the box multimedia experience and a range of desktop environments. All these activities were carried out by a small team consisting of one developer and two community managers.

Since the very beginning, Korora was a comparatively smaller project and it was not able to produce any significant income to be self-sustainable. Also, the Korora team is not a situation to put a major share of their time on project's day to day requirements. Hence, they decided to take a break and may come back in future if the time and circumstances permit.

We would first like to thank each and every one of you that ever took the time to download our little project, install it and provide some feedback, positive or otherwise. It's people like you that genuinely make the project worthwhile. To build something and have others use it is one of the most rewarding endeavours we've ever felt. We're not one for many words and so we'll get straight to the point: Korora for the forseeable future is not going to be able to march in cadence with the Fedora releases. In addition to that, for the immediate future there will be no updates to the Korora distribution. Our team is infinitesimal (currently 1 developer and 2 community managers) compared to many other distributions, we don't have the luxury of being able to dedicate the amount of time we would like to spend on the project and still satisfy our real life obligations. So we are taking a little sabbatical to avoid complete burn out and rejuvenate ourselves and our passion for Korora/Fedora and wider open source efforts.

Read the original announcement, in Korora website. You can also read about Korora in our gallery page.