July 2024 has been a month of remarkable progress for eweOS, with notable advancements across image updates, package updating, infrastructure enhancements, and community growth.

Image Updates

• Default VT is now moved to 7 to avoid conflicts of inputs.
• LiveCD iso9660 root is now mounted at boot.
• Filesystem generation is upgraded to a overlay layered scheme.
• Subprofiles based on layered overlay filesystem is now introduced.
• Old profiles like minimal are now useless and got removed.
• A new subprofile is added to provide better terminal experience with yaft.
• liveimage-desktop images now have 3 subprofiles (cli / cli-fb / desktop) and can be selected from boot menu.
• Limine menu generation is improved and now can be updated with subprofile items.

Package Highlights

319 PRs merged in total during July 2024. See a full list here.

Kernel

• linux 6.9.9
• linux-lts 6.6.40
• more usbserial drivers are added
• netfilter modules are added
• Kernel config is now available from /proc/config.gz
• iso 9660 driver is now enabled to provide livecd root mounting.

Toolchain / Programming Languages

• ghc 9.4.8 has been bootstrapped on eweOS, together with Cabal 3.8.1.0
• llvm 18.1.8, cross-compilation has been verified
• rust 1.80.0
• nodejs 22.5.0
• python 3.12.4, with 20+ new python packages
• perl 5.40.0
• go 1.22.5
• verilator 5.026 (new)
• systemc 3.0.0 (new)

Utils

• valgrind 3.23.0 (new)
• pacman 6.1.0
• asciidoc 10.2.0 (new)
• dosfstools 4.2
• btrfs-progs 6.9.2 (new)
• pinentry 1.3.1 with qt backend
• jade (new, testing) is forked from Jade of Crystal Linux to provide installer support, currently available in testing repo with initial support for eweOS.
• jade-gui (new, testing) is forked from Jade GUI of Crystal Linux to provide GUI installer support, currently available in testing repo with initial support for eweOS.
• tty2socket 0.2.0 with fixes for utmps

Libraries

• mesa 24.1.4 with ORCJIT support backported, Yukari Chiba took a great part on it.
• nss 3.102, also available on aarch64
• protobuf 27.2
• fmt 11.0.1

Bootloaders

• limine 7.12.0

Desktop Applications

• firefox 128.0, also available on aarch64
• weston 13.0.3
• telegram-desktop 5.2.3, fixed crash on high-resolution devices
• pipewire 1.2.1
• mutt 2.2.13 (new)
• fcitx5-anthy 5.1.4 (new)
• wayfire 0.8.1 with fix to avoid clang over-optimization

Server Applications

• qemu 9.0.2

Misc

• More docs are enabled
• man-pages 6.9.1(new)
• yaft 0.2.9 with builtin customized style
• ca-certificates 20240618 (new) now replaces ca-certs from curl and uses ca-certificates-mozilla from nss as source of trust

More

• ...and more!

Infra

• A workflow to bump pkgver automatically is introduced.
• rollmeow has been used as our new update checker. Config files are rewritten. List of package versions in repositories is now updated every 3 hours.
• All workflows are now running at QEMU 8.1.5, fixing issues with pacman 6.1.0.
• An experimental checker for symbols is added into PR workflow.
• A telegram chatbot powered by Cloudflare Worker is added to the developer group to support convenient actions to repositories.
• Images generated by GitHub workflow are now uploaded to Oracle and Cloudflare object storage.
• The dispatcher of GitHub workflow and build system is now merged into telegram bot code.

Website

• Resolved a problem with the performance of switching tabs at Packages page.
• The mirror list of Download page is rewritten. Community mirrors are now splitted and placed at first.
• Adapt package update page to rollmeow. Now the performance is improved.
• Added a search bar for package update page.
• Added markdown style for blog

Repository

Current size of repositories:
12G     ./eweos
2.7G    ./eweos-images

Current size of snapshot repositories:
16G     ./eweos-snapshots
2.2G    ./eweos-images-snapshots

• Snapshots of repositories are served at official mirror at Luxembourg, providing daily and monthly-rotated snapshots of packages and images.
• Syncing logic for images is now improved. Image repository of master/backup official mirrors is now periodically fetched from object storage.

Community

• Several of our developers and community participants attended AOSCC 2024, where @YukariChiba and @ziyao233 gave presentations related to package maintenance for eweOS.
• Our first semi-monthly community developers meeting is held online, and community will be deciding on a semi-monthly basis in the future whether or not to hold a regular meeting among developers to discuss some issues and vote on them, in order to quickly resolve some issues in developing.

Regular Meeting