After having released sidux 2007-01 "Χάος" last week, it is now time to review the release status and to present roadmap and plans for the short term future leading to 2007-02 "Τάρταρος."

Χάος

while we have found a smaller number of annoyances and bugs, none of those qualify as grave bugs yet or affect the upgrade path from Χάος to Τάρταρος. Furthermore most of these are more attributed to optimizing preconfigs, feature requests and hardware detection than to real bugs, nevertheless we are working hard on fixing them as they get reported and to provide fixed packages through our repositories.

The foundation for installing "tasks", or package groups, through a nice graphical user interface has been laid out through "install-meta", what is left as an exercise now is filling it with life by adding additional tasks and to build a common code definition for install-meta and the ISO creation. Especially grouping packages into tasks for install-meta is something where we would like to get further user input, additional suggestions and team maintenance for certain tasks by users who use said packages on a regular basis, examples for existing tasks can be found under /usr/share/install-meta/. In cases where extensive preconfigurations are needed to conceive decent results we will of course support your efforts by packaging the necessary configurations in form of meta packages, but in general tasks are not much more than a list of packages needed to accomplish a certain stint. Prime concern is keeping the tasks both focussed on a small job and self sustained, if there are tools targetted at novice or advanced users it is better to make two tasks than meshing both together, the same applies to primarily gtk based applications or KDE based ones – localisations can be handled as dependencies of selected packages. Leading towards Τάρταρος we'd like to provide a number of diverse tasks covering most common use cases for our users.

Localisations are also a hot topic, given the maximum ISO size of 702 MB for CD-Rs it is hard to add more than one additional language (besides the omnipresent english defaults) to the ISO itself, nevertheless we'd like to improve the situation for different locales. While the manual and its magnificent team of translators is already leading the way towards this, it is unfortunately harder to follow with the ISO itself. Server capacity, build times and upload bandwidth don't allow making dedicated releases for other languages right now, while a combined ISO (or rather an xdelta on top of the base ISO) looks like a reasonable compromise between language support and our server/ development limits at the moment. Nevertheless this would blow up the CD-R limits to about 850-900 MB, switching over to DVD ISOs as default doesn't seem to be realistic these days due to upload bandwidth and hosting/ mirror capacity limits and the fairly large number of legacy systems without DVD drives. Suggestions and discussions regarding this are appreciated.

One area that didn't get as much attention for Χάος as we would have liked is the artwork, handicapped early by unclear licenses for base elements we moved over to quick replacements that fullfilled all legal and license requirements and weren't able to evaluate further options late in the release process. Now that the license problems for a lot of graphic elements have been cleared up, we can start to assemble the artwork for Τάρταρος. We would really appreciate user contributions, provided their license status is clear and under acceptable dfsg- free licenses (GPL or "Artistic"), for dominant graphics consisting of several elements and especially text strings (like wallpapers, ksplash, kdm themes, etc.) we do also need access to layering informations ("source" images) to be able to adapt small things like version strings, element grouping and similar things any time, further information can be found here.

Special purpose versions regarding window managers/ desktop environments or certain use cases (like server- or low footprint editions) didn't make it in time for the public Χάος release, due to mirroring limitations and simply lots of work for the basic infrastructure. Custom versions can be provided on request, these would also benefit from a wider task selection for install-meta.

Τάρταρος and beyond...

Besides the topics already touched above, we would like to concentrate on a number of additional goals for the following releases.

• Second stage of the live mode rewrite, this will massively improve the hardware detection for the early boot process and boot compatibility. An appreciated side effect of this venture is to get also the live mode behaving more like an installed debian/ sidux system.
• Transition to XDG compatible menu definitions, this is more or less a precondition for supporting XFCE or gnome based releases of sidux.
• Consolidation of the Xdialog/ dialog usage in our configuration tools, target is to get rid of all gtk+ v1.2 dependencies in favour of gtk2/ kde based frontends, this will save about 50 MB on the ISO and allow better desktop integration.
• Heavy refactoring and clean up of the installer tools.
• Hopefully kernel support for d80211 based wlan drivers.

Consequences affecting Χάος and Τάρταρος

Leading towards Τάρταρος it is getting more and more difficult to support the initial migration from other distributions to sidux, a situation that will only worsen once debian etch is released and already affects our current development badly. Therefore we'll have to stop supporting the initial migration from other distributions to sidux over the next few days, already crossgraded and up to date systems will not be affected by this step and we will do our best to keep these legacy systems supported in the future (at least those udev based systems already running X.org 7.x and which are kept roughly up to date). In other words sidux users and their existing legacy systems will remain to be supported, just for the initial installation (or switch to sidux) we can only support installations from sidux ISOs.

These changes also affect the transitional repository layout, http://sidux.com/repo/ is about to be dropped (it is already empty for quite some time) and obsoleted by the ordinary package repositories under http://sidux.com/debian/, load balancing over additional push mirrors would be appreciated.
All sidux ISOs already use the following sources.list as default:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian unstable main
deb http://sidux.com/debian/ sid main fix.main

About a months ago the archive signing key was changed to 3916C431F80994F6, while FB1A399A71409CDF got revoked with Χάος' release. The package "sidux-archive-keyring" allowed an easy transition to the new package signatures, if there are any remaining issues that are not solvable by "apt-get update; apt-get install --allow-unauthenticated sidux-archive-keyring; apt-get update" please let us know.

How to get involved

Getting involved in sidux is easy, just join us here or even better on IRC (irc.oftc.net, port 6667, channel #sidux) and discuss your patches/ proposals additions. We will gladly discuss any dfsg- free patches and contributions.

Roadmap:

Please understand that the following roadmap is a rough estimate regarding our release schedule and is affected by the status of upstream debian sid, major system components like X.org, KDE, the linux kernel and our own developments and is subject to changes.

• sidux-2007-02 "Τάρταρος" — calendar week 19-20 2007
• sidux-2007-03 "Γαῖα" — calendar week 29-31 2007
• sidux-2007-04 "Ἔρως" — calendar week 41-42 2007
• sidux-2008-01 "Νύξ" — calendar week 3-4 2008
• sidux-2008-02 "Έρεβος" — calendar week 15-16 2008

On behalf of the sidux team:
   Stefan Lippers-Hollmann (slh)