Hello everyone,
the new Apertis
v2019pre.0 preview release is now available!
No major changes
are expected before the stable v2019.0 release happens next
quarter, so people
waiting for it can start experimenting with the current
preview release.
You can find the
full release notes at
Some highlights
from this release:
* Automatic
web-based online OTA updates using OSTree
In addition to the
automatic offline updates over USB Mass Storage devices, the
Apertis update agent now support polling for updates over the
network and retrieving the updated contents over HTTPS using
OSTree.
* NFS boot
The artifacts
needed to boot Apertis using TFTP/NFS are now part of the
official release artifacts, see for instance the ones for the
armhf ARM 32bit platform.
Booting over
TFTP/NFS is an invaluable development help while working on
lower level components and in particular when working on the
kernel, providing a much faster iteration cycle compared to
deploying to a bootable SD card.
* Portable
toolchain
The Apertis
toolchain is now also available as a pre-built downloadable
tarball ready to be unpacked on systems running third-party
distributions such as Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial.
Combined with the
sysroots it allows developers to reliably and efficiently
cross-build binaries for Apertis without having to boot the
Apertis SDK.
* GitLab-based
packaging workflow
A new workflow has
been set up to make contributing to Apertis much easier.
Now any package on
Apertis can be updated by submitting merge requests to its
corresponding project on GitLab. The Gitlab-based packaging
workflow guide walks developers through the steps needed,
sensibly lowering the learning curve for developers new to the
Debian-based packaging tools.
Developers now
have a coherent and reliable workflow that applies to all the
packages in the archive using the same contribution process used
for all the other Apertis projects, while maintainers have finer
grained control on the downstream changes that get applied.
Currently the
workflow is active for all the packages in the :target
repository, but support will be extended to all packages soon
after this release.
The full release
notes contain more details about all the work that has
landed in this
release:
Images are already
available for download at
Thanks to everyone
who contributed!