Solus Installer will support LUKS and full-disk encryption

Jun 23, 2016 23:50 GMT  ·  By

Today, June 23, 2016, Solus' Josh Strobl has shared some of the features coming to the first point release of the just-debuted Solus 1.2 "Shannon" Linux kernel-based operating system.

According to the developer, Solus 1.2.1 "Shannon" is coming in mid-July, only three weeks from the moment of writing this article, and it looks like it will bring a lot of goodies to those who have adopted this independent and unique OS for their personal computers.

"There are always a few things we would’ve liked to have added in, but just didn’t make the cut," said Joshua Strobl. "We hinted at some of the upcoming improvements in our release announcement, and we’d like to go more in-depth about them now. So let’s take a peek at Solus 1.2.1, a point release we will have in mid-July."

Here's what's coming to Solus 1.2.1

First and foremost, the Solus Installer will be once again improved, and Solus Project leader Ikey Doherty has promised us that he'll implement the long-anticipated full-disk encryption support trough LUKS. It also looks like advanced storage configuration support is coming, allowing users to create RAID and LVM volumes.

Another exciting feature will be Vulkan support for Intel graphics cards, along with OpenGL 4.3 or later support across a broad range of hardware. This will be possible thanks to the implementation of the latest Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0. Improvements to Skylake CPUs and support for additional Intel Bluetooth devices will also be present in Solus 1.2.1.

Furthermore, the developers have updated their linux-firmware to add support for AMD Polaris UVD firmware and other exotic hardware components, and there's complete IBUS support for improving the internationalization and use of multiple languages, especially Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese ones.

Ultimately, the Software Center will get a couple of very useful features. The first one is a background service that allows for automatic checking of software updates when the app is not open, notifying users if an update is available through the Raven notification center. The second one is support for installing third-party apps.

To makes things a little more exciting for Solus users, we've asked Ikey Doherty to tell us a few words about the development of Solus, and we have been as surprised as you are right now to find out that "Development on Solus 2 has now officially begun. TL;DR Starting at the bottom first and tons of legacy will be dropped from Solus 2, even at the filesystem level."

He has also added, "1.2.1 will see us take extensive strides in terms of hardware support; we've already enabled full Skylake support, and we're already looking to improve hardware acceleration with both old and new devices. Going forward we'll begin to backport AMDGPU changes to our LTS kernels to enable an enhanced gaming and media experience for Solus AMD users. As of today we also feature preliminary Vulkan support for Intel, having validated this with Dota 2 and the Vulkan DLC."