A second Release Candidate is out for public testing

May 5, 2017 14:10 GMT  ·  By

The final release of the Devuan GNU/Linux 1.0.0 "Jessie" operating system is almost here, and a second Release Candidate (RC) milestone just hit the streets today with a great number of improvements and bug fixes.

The Devuan GNU/Linux 1.0.0 "Jessie" RC2 release is here only two weeks after the first Release Candidate to solve various issues with signing keys, as well as to add non-free and free firmware packages in both minimal-live and desktop-live ISO images, along with a script that lets users remove all non-free firmware packages.

As Devuan project's vision is to ship a systemd-free version of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, this second Release Candidate also adds a systemd-free version of NetworkManager, and includes a bunch of extra libsystemd0-free packages in the jessie-proposed repository.

New versions of the xfce4-panel, desktop-base and reportbug packages were added as well, and the KDE, GNOME, and Cinnamon entries have been removed from tasksel as they aren't compatible with operating systems that lack support for the systemd init systems. However, users can still try to deploy them after installation.

"As soon as Devuan Jessie stable is released, we will turn our attention to Devuan Ascii, the current development branch," reads the mailing list announcement. "We wish to thank all of you for the incredible support given to this development effort, and for engaging in the process of making Devuan a useful and reliable base distro."

Devuan GNU/Linux 1.0.0 to offer support for 29 ARM boards

It also looks like this second Release Candidate of Devuan GNU/Linux 1.0.0 "Jessie" improves support for various ARM boards. A total of 29 ARM-based devices are currently supported, including Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi, Odroid XU, Acer Chromebook, Veyron/Rockchip Chromebook, and Nokia N900.

The Orange Pi, Orange Pi 2, Orange Pi Lite, Orange Pi Plus, Orange Pi Zero, Orange Pi Mini, Lamobo R1, Cubieboard, Cubieboard 2, Cubieboard 4, Cubietruck, Cubietruck Plus, CHIP, CHIP Pro, Banana Pi, Banana Pi Pro, A10-OLinuXino-LIME, A20-OLinuXIno-LIME2, and A10S-OLinuXino-MICRO SBCs are also supported.

Thanks to support for u-boot, the Allwinner A33 chipset used in some tablet devices appears to be supported as well, and you can send requests for Devuan to support any other Allwinner board to the #devuan-arm IRC channel. You can download Devuan GNU/Linux 1.0.0 "Jessie" RC2 right now if you want to test drive this development release.