While the planned release date for sidux 2007-02/ Τάρταρος is approaching, I'd like to take the liberty to present our current development status and refine our roadmap for the short term future

Χάος

It might sound strange to look at the history while preparing for the future, but after the huge advances in order for our first release, we are looking at a similar amount of changes for Τάρταρος as well. Not only has sid becoming more progressive after etch's release (kernel 2.6.21, glibc 2.5, X.org 7.2/ 7.3, KDE 3.5.6, OpenOffice.org 2.2), our own development is also progressing better as planned which allowed improving quite a number of core components. Likewise we tried to attack most reported bugs and regressions against Χάος in the mean time and hope not to have introduced too many new ones for Τάρταρος.

Τάρταρος

The Kernel

Although the kernel is probably the least visible part to the end user, it is nevertheless the defining factor for hardware support and general system stability and responsiveness. For Τάρταρος we intend to ship kernel 2.6.21, which offers besides support for a rather large number of new devices especially advantages regarding the ACPI subsystem, hardware timers and the linux clock source. The inclusion of high resolution timers and dynamic ticks improved the latencies and battery life at the same time while allowing us to bump the timer frequency to 1000 Hz without negative impacts for ordinary systems. The decision regarding a potential inclusion of the new mac80211 wireless stack and which IDE controllers are better supported by libata than classic IDE is still pending.

Early boot process on the live CD

For Τάρταρος we have especially concentrated on overhauling, or rather reinventing, the early boot process of the live CD to improve compatibility with new or "strange" boot devices. This does fix a number of issues for booting from SCSI optical disc drives and should seriously improve the situation for S-ATA, USB or PCMCIA drives. "fromiso" and "toram" have been reimplemented, initial testing has been promising, including support for USB and firewire devices. The defaults for starting sidux now activate union mounts without adding special parameters; "aufs" has replaced "unionfs 2.x" for stability reasons, advanced "unionro"/ "unionrw" cheatcodes will be reimplemented for Γαῖα.

X.org

After etch's release, debian has now adopted X.org 7.2 and is actively working towards X.org 7.3, a few drivers (namely for Intel and ATi cards <=r3xx) are already close to X.org 7.3 and allow better hardware support and configuration options. While support for non-free nVidia drivers is supposed to remain fully functional, the current non-free ATi/ fglrx drivers do not support current X.org revisions and their long announced and already wide spread upstream versioning — their free "radeon" counterparts have been seriously improved though and can mostly replace "fglrx" for cards up to r3xx (Radeon 9800/ x800).

Starting X.org and desktop environments/ window managers has been completely rewritten for Τάρταρος and is now supposed to be a lot more reliable than before.

KDE versus Gnome

Τάρταρος will of course ship the most recent stable KDE version 3.5.6, featuring mostly stability fixes and further improvements for kdepim and especially kontact with kmail and aKregator. Furthermore fluxbox will be present as lightweight alternative for older systems.

Quite a lot of work has been dedicated to supporting alternative desktop environments like XFCE or gnome, major reworks from applnk to XDG are supposed to ensure smooth cross desktop compatibility, custom versions featuring these desktop environments can be crafted on special demand. Although releasing a gnome based version has been made technically possible right now, our development team is pretty KDE centric and we would need serious input from daily gnome users to make this a reality for a release. As already explained here, actually releasing a non-KDE based ISO does require a lot more work on details and developer support than we can provide right now — at least two developers interested in working on sidux and gnome, preferably familiar with live CDs and capable to actually recognize (which corresponds to actually using gnome as preferred desktop environment), debug and fix potential issues in time would be required to allow this.

Localisation and internationalisation

Great efforts have been accomplished by the translator and manual teams, which is now available and close to complete in eight languages. Due to ISO and server/ mirror space constraints, the release versions will most likely concentrate and german and english localisations again, support for further languages can be provided on request while we are investigating methods to overcome these limitations, this might involve an addon for Τάρταρος or perhaps a delay until Γαῖα. Post Τάρταρος we intend to improve the translations for our sidux specific tools and packages.

Artwork and general appearance

The Τάρταρος Wallpaper Competition has led to a large number of high quality responses and finally to the winning entry for Τάρταρος made by Cathbard, who has generously provided us with a full icon set for our own tools as well.

Installer and Metatasks

...have seen a lot of improvements and input from our users, a number of quirks in "install-gui"/ sidux-installer have been resolved and a lot of tasks added to "install-meta". While lots of changes and a large scale refactoring are still pending for the installer backend post Τάρταρος, its general state has been significantly improved over the last months and is in good shape for the release.

Upgrades between Χάος and Τάρταρος

Users who have dist-upgraded and installed new kernels regularly over the last few months will probably already have access to most of the changes discussed above. No disruptive changes affecting upgradeability have happened so far nor are intended for the near future, while a lot of efforts have concentrated on ensuring a smooth upgrade path especially during rather rough times in sid. Keeping existing Χάος based systems current and bumping it to the same state as Τάρταρος should therefore be rather straightforward for installed systems, a lot of efforts have gone into generic hardware support and the live mode though.

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

The actual release plan for Τάρταρος is gaining shape by now, we currently intend to release the first public preview over the weekend, followed by the actual release about 2 weeks later (intermediate xdeltas/ previews as needed), barring major issues in upstream debian (#421022, #421668, #420477, #422979 and #398844).

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