Leaderboard

Funtoo Newsletter, June-August (Summer) 2023 Welcome to the current installment of the Funtoo Newsletter. This newsletter combines multiple months -- June through all of August -- so, essentially our summer newsletter, for those of you in the northern hemisphere. We're going to hit all the key technical changes in this newsletter: Funtoo Linux 1.4 Deprecation (re-announce) The End of Genkernel -- Welcome "Funtoo Ramdisk" Massive updates from Summer Harvest (harvester/2023-08) I'm planning a follow-up newsletter for community and development news, since this newsletter got too long. This follow-up newsletter will cover: The Forums -- Back from the Dead? Maybe! Dev Corner: All the Epics! (What's going on with bug tracker) Let's cover the important technical stuff now. Funtoo Linux 1.4 Deprecation Announced in our previous newsletter, but worth repeating here -- Funtoo Linux 1.4 will be "retired" by the end of 2023. See the previous newsletter for more details -- but for now, just know that you should upgrade to "next-release" if you are not running it already. The best way to upgrade is by performing a new install of Funtoo Linux some time before the new year. It is technically possible to upgrade from 1.4 to next, especially on server systems with minimal packages, but we don't recommend it. The End of Genkernel -- Welcome "Funtoo Ramdisk" For the longest time -- almost since the beginning of the project -- Funtoo has had a forked version of Gentoo's genkernel which we used to build our official kernel and initramfs. For an equally long time, I have wanted to completely rewrite genkernel from the ground up. There was always some distraction that prevented me from doing this, and we were able to keep genkernel hobbling along for around a decade -- but it was time to do something about it. What were some problems with genkernel? Several. Many people haven't really liked it because it built your kernel and your initramfs -- this made it cumbersome to use. There has been a long-held desire to separate this functionality. It has also amassed a ton of features and become very complex and its code base is difficult to refactor and improve. So we needed a better foundation going forward. After September 11, 2023, when harvester/2023-08 updated are merged into Funtoo Linux, Funtoo Linux will have a new initramfs building tool called ramdisk, which will be utilized by the new debian-sources 6.4.13_p1 ebuild to build your initramfs. genkernel is no longer used. As a quick introduction to ramdisk, I will include an excerpt of the README from its official funtoo-ramdisk pypi page (https://pypi.org/project/funtoo-ramdisk/😞 As you can see, ramdisk is an exciting and innovative project which will continue to deliver new goodness related to booting. I hope you enjoy it! 🙂 Summer Harvest With the close of summer comes the merging of our development work from the harvester/2023-08 branch. This is a branch where we can make possibly breaking changes and work out kinks before things hit end users. Thanks to all who contributed to the summer harvest this round. Here is a brief and incomplete summary of changes in harvester, plus any hotfixes added to the master branch during this time: gcc-12 added, along with updated binutils. Introduction of funtoo-ramdisk (see previous section) Linux 6.4: debian-sources-6.4.13_p1 Reworking of libreoffice-bin to remove unnecessary deps. Updated NVIDIA drivers. FL-11523: forward-port rtl89 Wi-Fi to address flakiness issue docker, docker-cli, docker-compose, docker-buildx, containerd, runc updates/fixes (thanks siris) ZFS 2.2.0_rc4 with Linux 6.4 compatibility, with 2.2.0 final soon to follow. zathura document viewer autogen (thanks to cuantar) pgplot update (thanks to cuantar) gocryptfs, jq, meilesearch, nix, lowdown, mdbook autogens (thanks to invakid404) libxcb, libcpuid hotfixes (thanks to invakid404) go-1.21.1 (thanks siris) Inkscape 1.3 and updates to boost to allow this. typeprof build failure (thanks borisp) geany reworked ebuilds (thanks grouche) firefox-117.0, thunderbird-115.1.1 (thanks borisp) Updated libbson, mongo-c-driver, cri-tools (thanks geaaru) Multiple python module fixes/maintenance (drobbins) lightdm-mini-greeter autogen (thanks izder456) ibus-skk and dependencies, remove ibus-pinyin and pyzy (thanks madman10k) Add feature to allow PEP 517 python modules autogens to be determined automatically (drobbins) Fixes of kit-fixups git pre-commit hooks. Many thanks to all who contributed. End OK, that's it for now -- stay tuned for an additional community/newsletter supplement that will cover more topics.