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 https://wiki.apertis.org/V2019pre/ReleaseNotes

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: https://wiki.apertis.org/V2019pre/ReleaseNotes

Images are already available for download at https://images.apertis.org/release/v2019pre/v2019pre.0/

Thanks to everyone who contributed!