mintCast 172 – Lightweight Linux Desktops

2 Replies to “mintCast 172 – Lightweight Linux Desktops”

1. 

   SolusOS (@_SolusOS_)

   August 23, 2013 at 9:36 AM

   Reply

   Hi guys, Ikey here. Just had a listen, interesting podcast as always 🙂
   You’re entirely right in that an infrastructure had to be developed to make the SolusOS advances possible.
   For this we have a number of systems in place. One of them is RepoHub, at http://repo.solusos.com. This is our deployment and repository management system, taking our packages in source from our git repo, and churning them through our build server (currently a 16-core using SSD) before placing them on http://packages.solusos.com/2/
   As I said, all of our changes are managed in git. For example I pushed a commit to the repository including two CVE fixes for glibc: https://bitbucket.org/solusos/packages/commits/b50d1bc670d05b107a9147082d7ee741eb37bc96
   I’ve recently opened up our internals to the world, and we have a Phabricator installation at http://inf.solusos.com which we’re going to use for code review and post-commit audits, allowing us to accept contributions from anyone whom wishes to jump in 🙂 Our BTS is now placed there too, allowing users and developers to link their patches to a particular bug so we can track every single element of the SolusOS system.
   Regarding future security updates, I’m developing some further framework tools for SolusOS 2 (in addition to the repo-audit tools, lint extensions and packaging scripts) to hook in with various CVE reports and security databases, automating reports for internal review. Then it is a simple matter of including the patch in our repo, pushing the changes and waiting a couple of minutes for the updates to hit the repos in delta packages 🙂 We’ve also got packagekit-gnome in SolusOS 2, allowing simple GUI updates, which will inform the user of security updates from our repository (type=”security”) which in the near future will also link to the vulnerability report. We’ll also incorporate bugfix detection for packages in the gpk-update-viewer, as I now maintain the PackageKit PiSi backend on gitorious.
   Regarding packages within the repo we intend to eventually have as complete a repository as we can, and will extend RepoHub to fully support (it kinda does already, but not so well) user repositories, very similar to Ubuntu PPA’s. Users will maintain their pspec.xml, actions.py, etc, in their own git repositories, but we’ll build their binary packages and publish to per-user repos. This will be a feature targeted shortly after final release, once we gain further resources (disk space and another couple of builders)
   SolusOS 2 will follow versioned releases, and will not be a rolling release. With that said we will still keep userspace software up to date and stable, as we did with SolusOS 1. Upgrades to SolusOS 3 will also eventually be possible from within SolusOS 2, in much the same way as we’ve discussed previously on podcasts 🙂 We are strongly aiming for LTS releases rather than “new version every 4 days” 😉

   If you have any more questions, feel free to pop me an email to ikey AT solusos DOT com

2. 

   Brian36, Dorset, UK

   August 24, 2013 at 4:38 PM

   Reply

   Thanks for the podcast. NOW I know why I like Linux Mint. I’m in the right age group !
   Seriously though, I too like LXDE and looked at LXLE. LXLE seems to be a version with the extras bolted. I shall be trying it on my old Dell 1150. I agree about Puppy. I would have to be desperate to use it in anger. For me, one of the first tests of a distro is to see how easy it is to use a WiFi internet connection. Puppy doesn’t fit the bill. Of course there’s no problems with WiFi on Mint or PCLOS (another favourite of mine).
   Incidentally, I have a tip: Today, my backup hard drive refused access. In desperation I tried the ‘check and fix’ option on GParted. SUCCESS! Well pleased :-))