These new images bring only minor updates, dev team says

Mar 29, 2020 10:36 GMT  ·  By

The developing team working on Sparky Linux has just announced that new ISO images for version 2020.03.1 of the (semi-)rolling line are now available for download.

And of course, there are no breaking changes in this release, but only a minor update for the live and install media for Sparky Linux.

There are technically three important improvements that are part of this new release, as it follows.

First and foremost, all packages are now updated from the Debian testing repos dated March 27, 2020, so you’re also getting tons of fixes as part of this release.

Then, the update fixes an issue that blocked booting Sparky 2020.03 that was previously copied on an USB flash drive. This was a particularly inconvenient bug affecting those who used USB media to boot Sparky Linux, so after updating to this version, everything should be working just as expected.

Renamed repos

And last but not least, the dev team says they renamed the Sparky repository to “potolo”, with “testing” working just like before for everyone. This is a change that was originally announced earlier this week, with oldstable also becoming “tyche” and stable rename to “nibiru”.

“Developing and providing packages to Sparky based on Debian testing only was quite easy, it was just one branch, developed as a rolling release. No changes in repos required then. Everything changed after releasing Sparky on Debian stable and keeping the oldstable line as well,” the Sparky Linux team said.

“Every big upgrade, means from testing to a new stable, and stable to a new oldstable required manual changes in the repo lists.To avoid that, the named repos will let you smoothly upgrade your Sparky installation without any manual change. It will be done via a regular upgrade using the package manager/upgrade tool only.”

There’s no need to reinstall the operating system if you’re already running Sparky, as a full system upgrade takes care of everything without any other changes being required.