Trisquel 6 missed another deadline. Is this project dead?

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t3g
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Just curious yo. Wondering how the people that donate to the project are feeling with their blue balls. Peace.

Bertel

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Are you lost?

Tedious
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It is what it is, I'm not concerned.

Jodiendo
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Chill dude

IT is the price that we all paid with our patience and freedom...

Anyhow, the worst case of blue balls, was lock down in the summer of 2003, inside a M1A3 tank during three weeks of crazy and fanatical fighting at mop level 3 = chemical suit== and getting hit by 2 RPG rockets that ricochet at the hull, while the rest of the 3rd Cav division was capturing Baghdad... Yet, my blue balls survived, due to our training and Superior armor protection plates and of course LOTS OF PRAYING TO CALM DOWN THE jitters of blue balls and a fiery death.

Magic Banana

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The final release is scheduled for today. The day is not over (unless you live in Asia or Oceania; you don't) and, yet, the most used ISO (regular Trisquel for amd64) already hit the server. The deadline is met.

lloydsmart

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Nice! So this is the final release? Looks like I have a reinstall on the horizon!

Congrats to everyone involved. Looks like a great release! Hope the donations helped.
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jakel
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Whoo-hoo! So does that mean I can attempt my in-place upgrade from 4.0 (the last LTS) now?

Magic Banana

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Guys, I do not want to be too affirmative. No official announcement was made. However, the final release is supposed to happen today, the package repository is ready, and, anyway, there is really nothing to fear. Many users have been running Trisquel 6.0 since its beta in November 2012. No big issue.

If you prefer to wait for the notification in the "Update Manager", you can. You can also subscribe to the Trisquel-announce mailing list and be sure you will be among the first users to know "Toutatis is officially here".

EDIT: I have just asked in the #trisquel-dev IRC channel. Jason Self kindly answered me. This ISO will not be the final one. A blocking bug has just been found.

Horgeon
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The blocker bug is a missing icon in Ubiquity. But indeed, after that is solved the final release will emerge.

Edit to add: Ruben told us a few hours ago to do a final test on the iso you pointed out. If you find a bug you should notify him on IRC.

jakel
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Oops! Sorry for the premature post to identi.ca -- good luck on resolving that blocker!

G4JC
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Since we're running behind schedule and all you need is an icon - is there anything we can do to help? It's ridiculously easy to make icons with GIMP. :)

Chris

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There were three things actually.

icarious
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Please be patient. A lot of people are already working hard to deliver the best. And its an LTS release and needs to be free from any release critical bugs for a smoother experience. This release will stay for another 4 years in many people's computers.

freeme
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Agreed. Trisquel is quality, so is worth the wait.

mYself
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Toutatis seems to be a clear improvement over Brigantia, although not quite sure about the "quality" term. From Brigantia onwards, Trisquel isn't that good anymore. That's why I'm asking you to proof-test the first "real" Release Candidate of Toutatis and share your thoughts about it on this thread.

Do you guys agree with me that from this release onwards, Ruben should focus primarily on polishing/updating the LTS release, while STS releases should be something of a side-track. I'm asking this because I have a 2yr experience with upgrading and maintaining the STS versions on across all the PCs except on my 2nd-one where I focused on a pure stability with the LTS release and now I'm decided to stick with the LTS release all the time. The STS releases are way too buggy, not to mention Brigantia which is a "real" catastrophe.

Magic Banana

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I really did not notice any catastrophe with Brigantia (although it was the first release since GNOME 3). I was personally using the GNOME Shell interface (which required 3D acceleration).

I believe the next STS (based upon Ubuntu 12.10) should be skipped. Starting its development now already is too late. Then, the pace could come back to the usual one. Focusing on LTS release would not bring them sooner. The development of Trisquel starts with the release of the related Ubuntu version. And, of course, anybody is free to to only update from LTS to LTS releases.

t3g
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It needs to be LTS to LTS release at this point. Ubuntu 13.04 comes out in April and when synching version numbers, that means Trisquel 7. Trisquel 6 isn't even out yet and it is based off an Ubuntu release nearing a year old and has had 3 ISO updates (12.04, 12.04.1, 12.04.2).

I say stick with LTS releases only and backports (custom or imported from PPAs) should be in a seperate repository. If that is "extras" or "toutatis-backports" then it should happen.

oysterboy

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Le 2013-02-23 14:45, name at domain a écrit :
> It needs to be LTS to LTS release at this point. Ubuntu 13.04 comes
> out in April and when synching version numbers, that means Trisquel
> 7. Trisquel 6 isn't even out yet and it is based off an Ubuntu
> release nearing a year old and has had 3 ISO updates (12.04,
> 12.04.1, 12.04.2).
>
> I say stick with LTS releases only and backports (custom or
> imported from PPAs) should be in a seperate repository. If that is
> "extras" or "toutatis-backports" then it should happen.

I have suggested exactly that in the past, so I can only agree with you!

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Chris

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Time wise you might be right. I think the benefit of skipping the STS release would be that there is more time to backport critical driver/software pieces during the points at which Rubén would have been working on STS releases. It wouldn't bring out the LTS releases sooner though. In fact by my thinking the LTS releases would come out much later. That would provide more time to polish the LTS release.

I think there are other benefits to basing a distribution only off the LTS releases. This said I don't see any of this happening. Rubén said he was actually personally in favor of this idea although the problem with it is that there are a lot of people who would jump ship either way. Frequent releases brings in new users and helps 'market' it. Although that said I think the 'market' part could still be accomplished simply by releasing STS releases based on the LTS release + backports and still have the same 'marketing' effect. Ubuntu is actually doing this now to some degree it appears (although sticking with normal STS releases too). They are just numbering it as a minor release based on 12.04 so... in other words 12.04.2 would include a newer kernel.

The difference between Ubuntu though and Trisquel I think would be there are additional components besides the kernel backported. Besides the kernel I think abrowser, hplip, libreoffice maybe (if the UI doesn't change significantly- or maybe just have a 2nd install option within the repository similar to apache and apache2), and a few other pieces. Trisquel would then call this 12.04.2 type release 6.5 so that user perception would be “new toy” and still want to try it out/draw attention.

As far as skipping 12.10 goes how would that even work? I don't think thats an option without forcing users to reinstall. I think that is a bad idea. A good distribution is going to have stability and breaking the upgrade system is a major major no-no. The only time I'd do that is if Ubuntu was going bye-bye and Trisquel needed to switch distribution bases or if there was a move to an LTS system. In any case I think Rubén had the same line of thought as me on this one and said it wasn't going to happen (skipping an STS release that is).

oysterboy

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Interesting article here:

http://www.iloveubuntu.net/canonicals-vice-president-engineering-rick-spencer-officially-proposes-adoption-rolling-release

In short, Ubuntu may replace all STS releases by a single rolling release. LTS releases every two years would still exist.

Keep in mind that this is only a proposal at this point. But the implications for the Trisquel project would be interesting to ponder.

mYself
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Usually, there is a common bug under all STS releases, that said, when you uncheck the "Source code" checkbox under "Software Sources" in order not to add the "deb-src" line when adding a new repository with add-apt-repository, nothing really changes and the apt is happily creating this annoying duplicate line which I doesn't require and I need to manually remove it everytime I'll add a new repository. Other than that, there were just small things like audio problems, wifi turns off randomly (on Realtek RTL8187, still happening to today), things not worth to mention.

Brigantia was and still is a totally different story. When I finally repaired my broken Dagda system on my main computer after 8-9 months of malfunction (kernel panic, broken chroot, no GRUB), I found out that Dadga was an unsupported system at the time and there were some missing kernel packages and I cannot properly update the system. So I decided to upgrade to Brigantia and then the nightmare began. The upgrade process went as usual, with no issues. At the end I restarted the computer as required, but when I logged into my account I was really shocked. All my desktop customizations was gone; no sound; a full KDE stack installed (WTF?!); multi-arch self-enabled (this caused that the installed packages was conflicted with itself); bunch of :i386 packages installed (when I purged these the system does not started anymore); system was "daaarrrnnn" slow (it is still slow compared to Gnome2 but thanks to a special script I wrote which automanages all my installed packages and suggest changes when some are missing or not required anymore, and maybe by cleaning the registers with gconf-cleaner, the system is now only slow during startup with the "Intel drivers"); screen flickering(3x), then gnome-panel disappears and the opengl rendering is broken (i bet this is a Intel GPU driver/Mesa bug on my Intel Ironlake integrated graphic chip because nVidia's proprietary graphic driver just works fine except there is no brightness control); nautilus crashing (suddenly, all my desktop files/folders and nautilus windows dissappears) or hides existing files (this happened just today when I created the screenshots for the bug report); a beautiful vertical red & blue lines on the screen appears whenthe graphic stack crashes and I switches between different video output modes; some weird file/folder shifting on the desktop (?!.) There are really way too much of them to write about here.

mYself
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And what I meant to say about the STS releases is that they should be released whenever Ruben wanted to make one, or should be abandoned at all. Every effort and energy should be focused solely to make LTS as up-to-date as possible (backport ubuntu-specific linux-packages, synchronize abrowser releases with upstream, etc.). In my oppinion, it's impossible for one person to do so much work in his spare time and my experience say that it's useless anyway.

Chris

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Even Ubuntu doesn't seem very bug free to me. However that said are you sure that these problems aren't down to something you did?

The flickering might be due to an older kernel with the Intel graphics.

The RTL8187 might be a card going bad.

Coincidences are more common than you'd think.

And the other stuff sounds more like something is broken.. due to third party stuff going on.

I'll assume you haven't installed the proprietary NVIDIA drivers here either like I was thinking at first. I don't think you'd do that. My gut is also saying you know what your talking about-but I'm horrible with names.

mYself
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> Even Ubuntu doesn't seem very bug free to me. However that said are you sure that these problems aren't down to something you did?

Chris, I don't say that's Ruben's fault or something. Actually, it's always the upstream which causes trouble. It's because the switch from Gnome2 to Gnome3 which required a heavy amount of core rework. That and the immature state of G3 is the cause of my problems. If I'd wanted to categorize the system's stability like Debian categorizes its packages, I'll say that Brigantia is a "pre-alpha/experimental" release, while Toutatis is in "Beta" now.

> The flickering might be due to an older kernel with the Intel graphics.

You may be right. I read somewhere (on Debian wiki as far as I remember) that my Ironlake chip requires Linux 3.2 or later. Its interesting that on Dagda it worked perfectly well. Maybe this can be fixed by enabling the xorg-edgers launchpad repository + installing newer Linux-libre (official Linux-libre packages are not integrating well with Trisquel) but I'll rather stay away from that.

> The RTL8187 might be a card going bad.

I actually think this could be a system bug. I'll see if it persist after the upgrade.

> And the other stuff sounds more like something is broken.. due to third party stuff going on.

Can be, I don't know. Actually, problems with the excessive amount of installed packages are now solved once-and-for-all with the script I wrote which suggest me when some packages are missing or not required anymore (its a LOT better than sudo apt-get autoremove which by its design removes only packages that is apt-marked as automatically installed and the package which depended on it/them is/are no longer installed).

> I'll assume you haven't installed the proprietary NVIDIA drivers here either like I was thinking at first. I don't think you'd do that. My gut is also saying you know what your talking about-but I'm horrible with names.

I actually did have installed the proprietary driver. My computer uses a Sony-developed proprietary technology called "Dynamic Hybrid Graphic System" similar to nVidia Optimus, but this has a special 3-way button to switch between different usage scenarios: Speed (nVidia), Stamina (Intel) & Auto (Both, automanaged by the driver). DHGP is not supported by the Linux-kernel and I managed it to work with using a Linux acpi_osi= boot command and some custom scripting that actually uses update-alternatives to link to the right driver (this requires a restart through). I'm currently "switched" to the "Stamina" mode which uses the Intel/Mesa driver. When I switch to "Speed" mode which uses the proprietary nVidia driver, I does not have any graphic issues anymore and the startup is as fast as it was under Gnome2. That's why I'm confident that it's a Intel/Mesa/Linux bug.

Chris

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I didn't mean to imply you were blaming Ruben. I meant to suggest that there are valid criticisms although the ones presented sounded like they were more down to bad choices or the lack of understanding on how things work. People get use to doing things a particular way and end up having trouble because they don't know the “right” way to work with something when they switch systems. Then when problems occur they attribute it to the wrong places/people/etc.

But humorously there are a lot of real bugs. I'm just doubtful of at least some of the ones you mentioned because I know from experience whats solved some (maybe all?) of them for customers I've dealt with. Of course each system / person is different so I can't say for sure. You would have to try some of the suggestions to verify my educated (?) guesses.

oysterboy

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Le 2013-02-23 14:27, name at domain a écrit :
> Toutatis seems to be a clear improvement over Brigantia, although
> not quite sure about the "quality" term. From Brigantia onwards,
> Trisquel isn't that good anymore. That's why I'm asking you to
> proof-test the first "real" Release Candidate of Toutatis and
> share your thoughts about it on this thread.
>
> Do you guys agree with me that from this release onwards, Ruben
> should focus primarily on polishing/updating the LTS release,
> while STS releases should be something of a side-track. I'm asking
> this because I have a 2yr experience with upgrading and maintaining
> the STS versions on across all the PCs except on my 2nd-one where
> I focused on a pure stability with the LTS release and now I'm
> decided to stick with the LTS release all the time. The STS
> releases are way too buggy, not to mention Brigantia which is a
> "real" catastrophe.

I agree that the LTS release should be the main focus. However, I
don't understand how Brigantia, a fine release, can be labelled a
"catastrophe". I use it on three different computers (a home server,
my main box, and a netbook), and it really works perfectly fine as far
as I am concerned. What are your issues with it?

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freeme
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mYself said:

"That's why I'm asking you to proof-test the first "real" Release Candidate of Toutatis and share your thoughts about it on this thread."

I probably don't qualify for this proof-test. I use the net-install image, then aptitude purge a few things from that, including ubuntu-minimal, trisquel-minimal, etc. From there, I install only the bits & pieces of xorg I need, like ati, mouse & evdev. I install icewm, the other apps I need, add the Icecat ppa to pull that in and I also have libreoffice 4.0 installed from the libreoffice website.

In other words, my installs wouldn't really be a good test of Trisquel, but I find no bugs whatsoever in my setup. I think I reinstalled Toutatis from whatever net-install image was available 2-3 weeks ago.

mYself
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You're actually doing the similar thing I do with the difference that you're using the net-install and installs only the required packages, while I'm done the opposite of that (made a full-install, then removed all the crapware that I don't wanted). Actually you do qualify, just make sure the problems you encounter does not come from the changes you've made. Alternatively, you can test the latest ISO images within' the VirtualBox environment as I do.

onpon4
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The only problem I had with 5.5 is incomplete Japanese anthy input with IBus (only hiragana, no katakana or kanji conversion), which is also a problem I'm having on Trisquel 6. I do still wonder about that. Apparently it was fine in 4, so maybe with people migrating to 6, it will finally be figured out.

autumnlover
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I am affraid that Trisquel just became another gNewSense. A pity.

Chris

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There is a big difference between gNewSense and Trisquel. Trisquel is actually easy to use, works with recent hardware, and in active development. It also has regular releases. Delays don't mean the distribution is discontinued. 6.0 is already available other than an actual announcement and few minor bugs.

Of course this has already been pointed out and your just trying to provoke a response! And there you go. You were successful. Happy now?

In fact despite the setbacks Trisquel is getting better. There have been a few meetings and the community is getting more involved.

There are few distributions which are so well supported.

mYself
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Actually, I was really afraid of that but it now finally seems that the release is on the way. The migration to Gnome3 and Ruben's real-life issues are the cause of this. BTW, I'm still using the "golden-but-olden" Taranis release on my 2nd computer which is, in my opinion still the best GNU/Linux release ever made.

Forgot to mention that gNewSense is actually active, but without new releases. As Chris said, that's the difference btw. Trisquel and gNS, and the fact that gNS is now based on Debian because of the better MIPS support (Lemote laptops :).

Chris

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:) Yea- sorry. I didn't word it quite perfectly.

I think gNewSense got some attention recently again. It was dormant. Although even while it was/is active there is less "hand holding". Trisquel is easier/better for less experienced users even though there are lots of things which need work. Most of which are not related to ease of use. The main issues are related to the non-free requirements of entities many of us would like to interact with online.

sascha
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"I'm afraid that Trisquel has become another gnewsense"
That is really nonsense. I have never managed to get Gnewsense to work - but Trisquel without any problems every time. The people who work on the distro where busy all night as I could see in the IRC chatroom where they were discussing what they were doing. You can have complete trust, that Trisquel is far from dead.

And thanks to all of you who are working on the new release. who gives a damn about deadlines - who sets them anyways other than yourselves.

Sometimes I would prefer a rolling distribution really because I'm not very familiar with Computers and changing the installation regularly is problematic for me. But I trust you know much better why this is not a rolling distro

autumnlover
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I did not mean the overall difficulty of use, I mean their lack of releases. They did not release version 3.0 during Lenny lifetime, now they claim to work on 4.0 based on Squeezy. I am aware of "unofficial" release of 3.0 but harsh reality is that the gNewSense is effectively inactive now. Their last release based on Ubuntu Hardy was released 3,5 years ago.

Watching the situation around Trisquel 6.0 I was really concerned that my favorite distro is following the similar path.

Now I downloaded that supposed "unofficial final release" and I stumbled upon the bug during installation - had to turn off the networking to be able to install on Virtualbox.

lembas
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>Now I downloaded that supposed "unofficial final release" and I stumbled upon the bug during installation - had to turn off the networking to be able to install on Virtualbox.

That's a known upstream bug. Also in Trisquel's bug tracker. And it's been there many years, do don't hold your breath waiting for it to be fixed...

andrew
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> They did not release version 3.0 during Lenny lifetime, now they claim to work on 4.0 based on Squeezy.

Actually the Squeeze-based release will be called 3.0. Metad (Lenny-based) doesn't really have a version number.

Alphas were released last year, and betas should be hopefully coming in the next few months.

Chris

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The only people I've ever interacted with who use gNewSense are using components which are likely still updated or are otherwise updating them themselves. The core packages of hardy still get security updates and I'd bet the users are compiling emacs from source.

onpon4
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Alright, it looks like the final CD images are out! It just made it, I'll be able to install Trisquel 6 on my mom's computer before I leave today! :D

t3g
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If version numbers are a concern, why not do it like CentOS? Instead of full version numbers every 6 months, why not have the full number releases be the LTS ones? Inbetween LTS releases, have like Trisquel 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, etc while 7 is based off of Ubuntu 14.04.

This way, you can give reassurance to corporations and server admins you are getting a rock solid distro like CentOS. When they update from 6 to 7 of Trisquel, they are technically using upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 code that has been tested by Canonical and the community.

Just an idea.

mYself
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> Inbetween LTS releases, have like Trisquel 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, etc while 7 is based off of Ubuntu 14.04.

No, Trisquel 7.0 will be based of Ubuntu 13.04 Quantal. Only even versions are based off the LTS releases as customary across all the GNU projects (like Gimp 2.6 -> 2.8). Trisquel 6.1 will be still an LTS release (enter lsb_release -ds in Terminal and you will see that you're actually using Trisquel 4.1). The LTS point releases are similar to Ubuntu-one's like, "12.04.2".

t3g
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Trisquel 6.5, in the way releases go in the past, will be based on 12.10.

Trisquel is sooooo far behind in its releases that it has put Ruben in a weird situation. Does he continue with the release schedule? Even if he releases something based off of 12.10, it will take him 4 months to release and will come out around the release of Ubuntu 13.04.

I. Khider
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It may be that the Trisquel project will *hopefully* gain momentum and more users will see the apparent importance of using Libre software. I am impressed with the community and enthusiasm I see now. I also see a system in place to keep the project funded, which is positive. Perhaps more will come on board and the catch up can occur. While it is frustrating that there are delays, it is also good that the developers are working to put out something functional.