PrawnOS Shiba v1.1 "The Quarantine Release"
This is a big release, with >300 commits since the last release in March.
Packaging
PrawnOS now has packages! Some programs that cannot be found in the upstream debian repos, or are too old of version are now built and packaged automatically as part of the image build.
This also means that you can update the system easily without copying files or reinstalling PrawnOS. You can either build new version of packages yourself, copy them to your system, and then dpkg them or you can get them from the new PrawnOS apt repo, deb.prawnos.com. See the README for more information.
Not every portion of PrawnOS is packaged yet, but the goal is to be able to update all portions of PrawnOS using packages.
Bullseye
With the full release of Debian 11 Bullseye likely coming in the next 6 months, bullseye is reaching maturity and is very stable. Because of that, the aging software available on Buster, and two items we'll discuss below (panfrost, arm64) it became an easy decision to make the jump.
Panfrost
Thanks to the move to Bullseye and the addition of the packaging infrastructure we can now easily package the most recent stable release of mesa with panfrost support. This means we now have hardware graphics acceleration! Gnome and XFCE run great on the armhf machines using panfrost, and future support of a wayland based DE will make this even more noticeable.
Thanks @alyssarosenzweig and the rest of the panfrost and mesa teams for all of your hard work.
Arm64 Support
Possibly the most exciting change is the added support for two new Arm64 based machines:
- Samsung Chromebook Plus V1 (aka gru-kevin)
- Asus C101p (aka gru-bob)
gru-kevin is running quite well, but there are still some rough edges so this is a Beta release.
grub-bob has gotten less attention, so this is only an alpha release. Many things don't work properly yet.
Other additions
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gnome support in the installation process. Thanks @gdallasdye !
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including the mosys and flashmap packages means we can now toggle usb boot and verified boot from PrawnOS using
crossystemprovided by vboot-utils package. SeeCrossystem / mosysin the README -
@gdallasdye has included some great instructions for using
gbb_utilitywhich allows for making the developer boot mode default on coreboot and making the developer boot screen less obnoxious. See DOCUMENTATION.md for details. -
@austin987 added initial support for using github CI for testing commits, cleaned up the bash scripts using shellcheck and added an option for setting up a user even when not installing a desktop environment.
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@alexisgrey bumped the armhf kernel to 5.4.57 when the previous one went EOL
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@rk-zero added support for building the kernel headers into the image and provided better keyboard layout management using xkb
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more things, and people to thank than I can recall. Thanks everyone!
Housekeeping
The uploaded release files are now gzipped, this makes downloading them easier and was a requirement to even upload them! Seems github now limits release file size to 2GB.
On that note, these images when decompressed are a little larger, 2.5GB. I don't plan for this to be a permanent change, but didn't want to hold off on a release just because I hadn't trimmed down the image size yet.
Roadmap
Things to expect in the a future release (I promise it won't be another 7 months and 300+ commits hahaha)
- improved arm64 support
- wayland based DE
- c100 (veyron minnie) screen rotation support
- more parts of PrawnOS packaged
Thanks for reading. If you got this far, you might enjoy the conversation at #PrawnOS on freenode IRC
-SolidHal