14 DAY TRIAL // The Polish developers of the Debian-based SparkyLinux operating system are ending the month of April by informing the community about everything good or bad that happened to their open-source project during the last few weeks.
First things first, the distribution is now powered by the latest stable kernel, Linux 4.10.13, so you are urged to update your SparkyLinux installation as soon as possible, and remember to reboot the machine after installing the new kernel. Enlightenment's EFL libraries were also updated, to version 1.19.0.
The team also managed to rebuild the Calamares installed to disable LUKS encryption in the autopartitioning option, as well as to sync SparkyLinux's repositories with the ones from the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system, and Calamares is used for the live system.
Talking about repositories, the latest "sparky-apt" package is included to provide configuration support for SparkyLinux's repos via the secure HTTPS protocol. Additionally, the "sparky-aptus" package was updated to version 0.3.9 to provide a small fix for the Portuguese (pt-pt) and Brazilian Portuguese (pt-br) locales, thanks to Daniel Campos Ramos.
"Access to all Sparky services will be permanently set via HTTPS soon, so upgrade the 'sparky-apt' via the APT package manager or manually: https://sparkylinux.org/wiki/doku.php/repository," said the devs, who noted the fact that this method is used for both the upcoming SparkyLinux 4.x stable releases and existing testing editions.
Budgie Desktop removed from the repositories, Trojita added
Among other noteworthy changes in the SparkyLinux world, we can mention that the Budgie desktop environment was removed from the repositories, but users can install it from Debian's now, a workaround is available for GTK theming with Qt 5.7.0, and the Trojita Qt-based IMAP email client was added to the repos.
Last but not least, they managed to replace the Sparky Web Directory application with a new one that's feature-rich, more flexible, and a lot more useful than before, not to mention that's translated in both English and Polish languages. It allows users to promote their website or blog and support SparkyLinux at the same time. More details in the newsletter.