Solus News

SolusOS 2 Poll Results.. Early

Unfortunately I am forced to stop the poll for the Public Consultation regarding PiSi usage in SolusOS 2.
Firstly, I want to thank everyone who participated in the Public Consultation. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Secondly, a rather sore point. An individual, or perhaps a group of individuals, found the means to begin a vote-rig.  This became rather obvious when I witnessed in real time (via Google Docs) the same comments (in the optional field) and “NO” vote being done many times in quick succession. This is a rather unfortunate turn of events as it mean some people do not like to play fairly.

Prior to rigging, the vote stood at 78%/22%, after my stopping of the rig it rested at 72%/28% in favour of PiSi. If we were to throw out some bad entries and go with the pattern shown throughout the days the poll was live, we can see that essentially 75% of SolusOS users are happy with the move to PiSi, leaving 25% not.

Regarding those who are not happy, a recurring theme has been a worry that a move to the PiSi package manager would result in a loss for the project. I shall now answer some of those points.

Debian Wheezy in its entirety will be converted into the base for SolusOS 2, in PiSi package format. The only packages we will not migrate will be dpkg/apt/aptitude and packages explicitly dependant on them. DKMS will be reworked for SolusOS 2, so you can rest assured that priorietary drivers will still work

An automatic conversion tool will be available. This will work in a similar fashion to “alien” but rather more advanced, also allowing source package conversion. This will be developed from our own repo-conversion tool. Given we will be initiating with a repackaged Wheezy base we are ensuring binary compatibility with Debian Wheezy. This means that any package built for Wheezy will (after use of the automated tools) will work in SolusOS 2.

Using our own package manager and repositories we can ensure that upstream breakages do not affect SolusOS 2. Once Wheezy becomes stable we will mirror and rebuild security and update repositories on a daily basis, which will be redirected to testing repos. Once verified these updates will appear in SolusOS 2 as delta packages. You will only need to download the difference between two packages, not the entire new package. This will save many users a lot of time and bandwidth, and reduce many headaches, allowing SolusOS 2 to be truly stable.

Using the PiSi package format will make the project maintance many times easier, and allow more members of the community to get involved in packaging their favourite apps, with minimal learning curve. Using the new package format (which we intend to extend on) we can ensure any inter-package relationships work correctly,  and that the experience offered to the end user is always the one we designed and set out to give.

Without any further ado, as they say, I would like to officially announce that SolusOS 2 will be PiSi based. Not only this, but to make sure that everyone knows exactly what is going into the repository, it will be built live for the world to see. A special subdomain, http://pisi./ has been setup exactly for this purpose. When the time is right, you will be able to witness the conversion of the entire Debian Wheezy repository into the PiSi package format, and rebuilt for the SolusOS 2 base as binary packages. It will be a truly enormous feat, and we hope you enjoy the show

Mid-Rig votes snapshot

Take a tour of SolusOS Eveline!

For people wanting a quick lighthearted tour of SolusOS Eveline, please check this little
video.

SolusOS 2: Public Consultation

As everyone is aware, we want SolusOS 2 to use the PiSi package manager.

This has been covered in previous posts and pretty much everywhere The time has now come to ensure everyone is happy with this decision. Have your say!
In 7 days we will publish the results of this poll. (December 9th)

Official Theme for SolusOS Eveline 1.3

Many folks have asked me when SolusOS 1.3 is due for release, all I can say is soon

There is an extensive developing process going on behind the scenes, to ensure that Eveline 1.3 is the best release it can possibly be.

However, as I have already chosen parts of the official artwork, you can imagine its very close..

The GTK theme featured in the below screenshots will be the default in SolusOS Eveline 1.3. It is crisper, cleaner and lighter on the system than previous Eveline theme revisions, and is based on the hugely popular Equinox themes

You can install it from the repos now, it’s called “eveline-theme“. The official theme name is Eveline Dawn, in respect for its parent theme, Equinox Dawn

To achieve the look in the screenshots, use “gnome-icon-theme-solus” and “libreoffice-icon-theme-solusos” (which replaces Crystal currently)