Adélie Linux 1.0-BETA6 Released – The Adélie Chronicle

TULSA (December 15, 2024) — The Adélie Linux distribution’s sixth beta release, 1.0-BETA6, is now available for download¹ for 32- and 64- bit ARM, POWER, and x86. Compatible systems include smartphones, game consoles, ’90s-era PCs, and supercomputers².

To celebrate this special occasion, Zach and Anna are gathered again in the same room at the coffee table where Adélie was born in 2015. There was plenty of hacking at AdélieCon:

Pentium 4, 1.2 GB memory, ATI Radeon HD 3450 AGP. Dual monitor. Firefox 128. GitLab.

We are thrilled to announce this release together and hope to see you at the third annual AdélieCon next year! Tickets are on sale³ now, and the call for presenters is open!

Be sure to check out our 2022 and 2023 status updates more project background. We will publish our 2024 status update before the end of the year.

As a beta release, there are a few rough edges. To file bug reports or feature requests, please use one of these links for issues involving the:

We’ve set up a community suggestion box to collect and organize general feedback.

Release Notes

New packages:

Over 35 new packages, including:

• apaste (command-line pastebin utility)
• arcticfox (Firefox fork with 32-bit PowerPC support)
• glpk (linear programming library)
• glslang (graphics shader compiler)
• ifupdown-ng (improved network interface configuration utility)
• inotify-tools
• iotop-c
• jq
• json (JSON in C++)
• llvm18
• open-vm-tools (guest additions for VMware hypervisors)
• sway
• tipidee (lightweight httpd)
• wayfire (Wayland compositor)
• xwayland (Wayland X11 server)

Updated packages:

BETA5 was a step in the right direction. BETA6 is a significant step forward:

• GCC 13 has landed with full sanitizer support (including ASan, UBSan, LSan, TSan, and platform-specific sanitizers). This finally removes our dependency on GCC 8 (from 6).
• binutils 2.42
• LLVM has been updated to version 18 ahead of schedule
• Rust has been updated to 1.80. New tooling will simplify future LLVM and Rust updates.
• The kernel has been updated to the 6.6 LTS branch. This brings new classes of mitigation against security issues, bug fixes, and plenty of new hardware support.
• Many Perl and Python packages have been updated to their latest versions.
• ICU has been updated to its latest release, and an issue has been corrected in this update that causes improper date calculations for systems using Islamic calendars.
• Spack 0.23 improves musl support and is a step towards 1.0, estimated to be released mid-2025
• Firefox 128 on all targets except 32-bit PowerPC (Arctic Fox is provided instead)
• GRUB 2.12 (many fixes)

Bugs fixed:

Plenty!

• An issue has been corrected that caused NVIDIA graphics to fail on 32-bit x86 systems without SSE2 support.
• An issue has been corrected that caused VLC to run improperly on some PowerPC systems.

Improvements:

• Improved GRUB support for UEFI systems and for PowerPC systems.

Should you need assistance, we are here to support you. Though we have worked hard to ensure the Adélie platform is robust, some bugs may still be present.

Our team is standing by to help. You’re in good hands.

Highlights

We have added initial support for Wayland compositors, including Sway and Wayfire.

While we are eager to provide you with the ability to run Wayland native, please be aware that this is a work in progress and not yet fully supported. We invite you to test and report your findings as we continue to move forward.

Our build systems have been improved to support more types of service managers.

We are excited to continue working towards one of our founding goals, which is to make a system that is truly init-system-agnostic. Over the coming beta releases, we expect to offer our users multiple choices regarding service manager, with full support for changing between them on an installed system.

Horizon user experience was one of our priorities during this release cycle.

Among many other fixes: keyboard layouts now have their full language name instead of an acronym; account names are validated before installation begins; and support for Apple Partition Map disks has been re-validated.

Known Issues

Some issues have been reported that we have not yet had the resources to solve before this release. The known issues for 1.0-BETA6 include:

1. Intel GPUs newer than Broadwell use LLVMpipe instead of hardware acceleration.
2. mesa-amber causes the X server to segfault (a fix is being worked on).

We are perpetually in need of hardware donations (for testing) and volunteer testers, so if you encounter any issues please report them! We can only fix issues we know about.

Upgrading

Upgrading to BETA6 from any previous release is easy. Edit /etc/apk/repositories to have:

https://distfiles.adelielinux.org/adelie/1.0-beta6/system
https://distfiles.adelielinux.org/adelie/1.0-beta6/user

then run apk update && apk upgrade -as to review the changes. Drop the -s to upgrade.

Statistics

There were over 700 commits by 12 authors to our packages repository:

• A. Wilcox (276)
• Ermine (151)
• Síle Ekaterin Liszka (141)
• Zach van Rijn (73)
• Laurent Bercot (47)
• Leigh Arber (6)
• Lee Starnes (4)
• Yuriy Chumak (1)
• Horst G. Burkhardt (1)
• Glenn Strauss (1)
• Dan Theisen (1)
• Alice (1)

and so many other contributions such as reporting issues, improving documentation, fixing installer bugs, and creating tooling for our developers. I’d like to extend a warm, personal welcome to our first-time contributors. Thank you for helping make this release a reality.

Getting Involved

The Adélie platform is an all-volunteer project. We fixed over 200 reported issues — and countless others — since our last release, and have been working tirelessly to deliver what we believe is a Linux platform done right. You can help us out by volunteering or donating.

One critical area where we need help is with documentation, whether for end users, system administrators, or developers. Please get in touch if you would like to get involved.

Other areas include security (vulnerabilities and hardening), performance (profiling and optimization), user experience (all areas), multimedia, kernel, and compilers/toolchains.

We are in need of productivity suite maintainers!

Closing Thoughts

While a full year between releases is a long time, the work and testing that went into BETA6 was important and lays the groundwork for more frequent releases. We are aiming for a 6 month official release schedule with regular unannounced incremental updates.

I want to give a special shout-out to Sheila, Ermine, and Anna for your amazing work.

Thank you for all that you do.

Finally, a huge thanks to our sponsors and individual donors who have helped unblock key aspects of what we’re releasing today. We would not be where we’re at today without you.

Footnotes

¹We have download mirrors in multiple countries; please use one that is convenient to you.

²Adélie is working to bring musl to scientific and HPC environments.

³Serious offer/invitation at no charge. AdélieCon occurs shortly after Thanksgiving in Tulsa. Venue TBD (hotel?) based on interest/attendance. You’d pay for transportation/lodging.