14 DAY TRIAL // It's been more than a week since Solus Project launched the new Solus ISO snapshot, along with the first release of the Solus GNOME Edition, and Joshua Strobl is back with another installation of the This Week In Solus (TWiS) newsletter.
This Week In Solus Install 43 delivers both good and bad news to Solus users. We'll start with the good news, as the distribution is now powered by the Linux 4.9.24 LTS kernel, and the ypkg build tool was updated to version 21, a maintenance release that adds a few improvements. The solbuild build system has been updated as well, and it's now compatible with the latest libgit2 library.
The upower abstraction layer for power management on Linux-based operating systems has been synced with the latest Git version to resolve some "critical actions," and lots of packages received new versions. As for the bad news, it looks like the Wayland session was temporarily disabled in GDM and gnome-session of the new Solus GNOME Edition due to some hardware incompatibilities.
"We got some early reports of hardware incompatibilities with Wayland as well as issues on the GNOME edition of Wayland breaking important functionality like the ability to re-login after a logout. After some investigation, we have decided to temporarily disable Wayland in both gnome-session as well as GDM," explains Joshua Strobl, Solus Project Communications Manager.
Third Solus ISO snapshot to ship with FFMpeg 3.3, new systemd
In some more good news, the Solus developers have announced that they are working hard on developing a new tool for syncing both the stable and unstable repositories of the operating system, replacing the old Binman utility, which is currently incapable of handling huge amounts of package updates. The new tool is called ferryd and should provide for simple, quick and effective repo management.
The team also works on developing a command-line interface (CLI) for the Cuppa upstream tracking assistant, which will support both BitBucket and Crates.io, and they started the redesign of the official Solus website. In the meantime, Solus Project prepares the third ISO snapshot of the distribution, which should land in the coming months with FFmpeg 3.3 and an up-to-date systemd init system.