Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA4: Now available on four architectures

The Adélie Linux Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA4 for the 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and PowerPC platforms. Learn more about Adélie Linux on our Web site.

An important milestone for this release is the official support of the 32-bit x86 CPU. Our current release is optimised for the Pentium M and requires a Pentium MMX or later CPU. Builds that are optimised for the Pentium 4, and generic builds for 486 and 586 level CPUs, will be released later. Note that currently only a limited subset of packages are available for the 32-bit x86. More packages will be built as time permits.

Another very important milestone for this release is support for run-from-RAM on the live CD. You can install and modify packages in the live environment by using a RAM disk, without writing to your hard disk. Any changes made to the run-from-RAM environment will be erased on the next boot, while changes made to the hard disk will persist. This provides a degree of freedom with what you can do with the Adélie boot media and we are very excited to have this capability.

Finally, this release is also the first known public distribution release that supports LXQt on big-endian processors. The LXQt desktop on the 64-bit PowerPC CPU is officially supported. We are very proud to make this announcement, and it would not be possible without the great communities involved in this effort: LXQt, KDE, Qt, Alpine, musl, and of course our own.

Please note: This is an early test release of Adélie Linux. While every care has been taken to ensure the stability of the system, features and packages may be missing or may not function correctly. You should always back up your computer's data before you install a new Linux distribution. This release is being actively tested on multiple platforms. It is highly recommended that you use a dedicated computer or virtual machine to learn the environment until you are comfortable with using the Adélie Linux system and its package manager, apk.

Short announcement: Self-hosting parts of our infrastructure

We are proud to announce that effective immediately, all official Adélie Linux mirrors and our Bug Tracking System (Bugzilla 5) are all being run on Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA3. We feel that the best way to ensure our distribution is reliable and ready for production loads is to run it on our own production infrastructure, and we feel that the lighttpd package is now stable enough for this level of testing. We do not expect to have any issues with the new infrastructure; however, if you experience any, please do contact us on IRC or social media.

Happy hacking!

Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA3: Now available for the 64-bit PowerPC

The Adélie Linux Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the release of Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA3 for the 64-bit PowerPC platform. Learn more about Adélie Linux on our Web site.

This release is our first release to fully support the 64-bit PowerPC, and we are honoured to be the first distribution to ship native 64-bit PowerPC support with the musl libc.

Important notice: We have noted that on certain releases of IBM pSeries PAPR (qemu pseries-2.5), SLOF returns an error when attempting to boot the ISO. We are still investigating this issue.

There are a lot of packages still being built for the 64-bit PowerPC platform. At the time of this writing, only the basic userland utilities (enough to install and boot the system) are available. X, KDE, LXQt, LLVM, and others are not yet available, but should be built in the coming days. Please also note that due to an upstream bug, GRUB packages installed from the mirror may not be reliable; you may need to use the 32-bit PowerPC GRUB package until this bug is fixed. Further information will be released on our wiki, and this article will be updated with a link when available.

Please note: This is an early test release of Adélie Linux. While every care has been taken to ensure the stability of the system, features and packages may be missing, or not function correctly. You should always back up your computer's data before you install a new Linux distribution. This release is being actively tested on multiple platforms. It is highly recommended that you use a dedicated computer or virtual machine to learn the environment until you are comfortable with using the Adélie Linux system and its package manager, apk.