Debian Installer Bullseye RC 1 release

The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the first
release candidate of the installer for Debian 11 "Bullseye".


Improvements in this release
============================

 * base-installer:
    - Re-add the removed is_ports_architecture() function - it's used by
      other packages and library.sh looks like a fair central place for it
      to be (#979193).
 * brltty:
    - Update udev rules.
    - Make sure the hardening flags are used in the udeb build.
 * choose-mirror:
    - Update Mirrors.masterlist.
 * debian-archive-keyring:
    - Add bullseye keys, remove jessie keys.
 * debian-cd:
    - Shorten "ppc64el" to "p64el" in the volume ID.
    - Include eatmydata deb for the installer to use offline (#986772).
 * debian-installer:
    - Build in libinput instead of evdev driver for the graphical
      installer. This should improve support for touchpads in particular.
    - Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.10.0-6.
    - Add wireless-regdb-udeb to all Linux arch images (#979104).
    - Correct keyword for bootloader arguments in netboot/xen/debian.cfg
      example file (#904131).
    - Update debian-internals manual to current development state.
    - Update minimum disk and memory sizes.
 * debian-installer-utils:
    - list-devices-linux: Support partitions on USB UAS devices.
 * espeakup:
    - Carry over the alsa mixer levels into the installed system.
 * grub-installer:
    - Make sure that efivarfs is loaded and the efivars pseudofs is
      mounted when needed.
 * grub2:
    - Add support for SBAT.
    - grub-install: Fix inverted test for NLS enabled when copying locales
      (#979754).
 * installation-report:
    - bugscript: do not include template in script output (#980929).
 * libdebian-installer:
    - Remove the arbitrary limitation on maximum line length in Packages
      and Sources files (#971946).
 * libinih:
    - Add libinih1-udeb for Debian Installer (#981864).
 * libinput:
    - Drop libwacom support from the udeb.
 * libmd:
    - Add a udeb package needed by libbsd.
 * libwacom:
    - Drop the udeb, libinput no longer needs it.
 * linux:
    - Add bonding driver to the nic-modules udeb.
    - Remove efivars from the efi-modules udeb.
    - arm64: Fix i2c-mv64xxx module name.
 * localechooser:
    - Disable Kabyle for the text-based installer, as switching keyboard
      fails there (#973455).
    - Correct Kabyle locale definition in languagelist to its real naming.
 * lowmem:
    - Delete graphical terminal related files when memory is low
      (#977490).
    - 5lowmem: Rename to 05lowmem so that rescue actually overrides it
      (#870574).
    - S15lowmem: Update minimum memory sizes.
 * nano:
    - Compile the udeb with --without-included-regex to make binaries
      substantially smaller.
 * netcfg:
    - Update testcases to work with current Check API (#980607).
    - Satisfy GCC pedantry for strncpy() calls.
 * os-prober:
    - Probe Microsoft OS on arm64.
 * partman-btrfs:
    - Add minimal subvolume support for / (#964818).
 * partman-efi:
    - Make sure that efivarfs is loaded and the efivars pseudofs is
      mounted when needed.
 * rootskel:
    - Use /dev/tty0 as a console even if it's not in /proc/consoles.
    - Do not remove the font when bterm is not started (#977466).
 * rootskel-gtk:
    - Switch to Homeworld theme for Debian 11 by Juliette Taka.
 * user-setup:
    - Allow underscore in username of first account (#977214).


Hardware support changes
========================

 * debian-installer:
    - arm64: Add support for puma-rk3399.
    - arm64: Update to use u-boot-install-sunxi.
    - armhf: Make hd-media and netboot sdcard images start at offset
      32768, for compatibility with rockchip platforms.
    - arm64, armhf: Update SD-card-images sizes for netboot, netboot-gtk
      and hd-media.
 * flash-kernel:
    - Add support for Orange Pi One Plus (#981328).
    - Add support for ROCK Pi 4 (A,B,C).
    - Add support for Banana Pi BPI-M2-Ultra (#982089).
    - Add support for Banana Pi BPI-M3 (#981561).
    - Fix missing ESPRESSObin variants (#969518).
    - Fix several DTB-Id entries that incorrectly referenced the
      .dts instead of .dtb file.


Localization status
===================

 * 78 languages are supported in this release.


Known bugs in this release
==========================

 * Broken rescue mode with the graphical installer (#987377).
 * amdgpu firmware required for many AMD graphic cards.

See the errata[2] for details and a full list of known issues.


Feedback for this release
=========================

We need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so
please try it. Installation images, and everything else you will need
are available at our web site[3].


Thanks
======

The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this
release.


 1. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Team
 2. https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata
 3. https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer

Games: Proton, Barotrauma, Piepacker and More

• Proton Experimental gets upgraded, Forza Horizon 4 playable and Origin Overlay works

  Valve and their partners CodeWeavers have upgraded Proton Experimental, the special testing version of Proton where the latest special updates come in with some big stuff. This is a totally separate version to the normal Proton releases, which you can select for specific games just like you would normally. Right click -> Properties -> Compatibility and select Proton Experimental from the drop-down box.

• Barotrauma gets a colossal update to improve almost every part of the game | GamingOnLinux

  Barotrauma, the sci-fi submarine sim I lovingly call a suffering simulator has just had massive Embrace the Abyss upgrade while in Early Access making it better than ever. One of the problems has been how tough it is to get into, so they've introduced a new player experience focused on easing people into it a bit more. There's now a hint system, text highlighting for mission descriptions, player-controlled characters get automatically assigned an appropriate order when the game starts to guide the player on what they should do and more tweaks.

 

• Piepacker is a new online multiplayer platform for retro gaming

  Another attempt to bring back the glory days of retro games and local multiplayer is here with Piepacker, a browser-based platform for playing the classics with your friends. Browsers nowadays are ridiculously powerful and feature-filled, so much so that now various streaming services let you play entire AAA games in a browser tab. More and more of this will come, and in some ways it's probably the eventual future (like it or not).  [...] They claim that will also work fine on Linux.

• Civilization VI has a final free update 'of the season' hinting at more | GamingOnLinux

  The final free update to Civilization VI is now live although the team appears to be hinting that more may be on the way now the New Frontier Pass is finished. With the New Frontier Pass the team at Firaxis released a bunch of DLC, with free updates in between. They initially said this update was the last but now their wording is clearly different. They've mentioned it's the "final free update of the season", with season being an interesting word to stick in there hinting that a second pass may come.

• Jackbox Games have a huge sale, pick up Quiplash FREE and Drawful 2 going international

  In the mood to party? Jackbox Games have what you need with a big Weekend Party Sale going on Steam and you can get a free game for a few days too. First up it's Free Game Friday! Head over to the Steam page for Quiplash and grab yourself a free game as it's 100% off. What is it? A quick-fire game about answering questions with ridiculous answers for 3-8 players. Another bit of good news, and something many gamers have been asking for, is that more of their games are going international! Drawful 2 will be getting a free upgrade on May 6 which will include localizations for French, Italian, German and Castilian Spanish. [...] Save big on their individual games and their party packs, all of which have full Linux support so they're worth taking a look at!

today's leftovers

• DragonFly BSD 6.0.0 6.0RC1 images available

• KDE Plasma Panel Code Explained

     

• Custom USB games controllers with Raspberry Pi Pico | HackSpace 42

           

• Have you ever racked a server?

  I am by no means an IT 'graybeard'. I have been doing this kind of work for about nine years now and have been with a few different companies/environments in that time. One thing that hit me the other day is that I haven't put my hands on hardware in any real capacity since transitioning into the civilian workforce. When I was at EMC, we had a few stacks that we used for training, but my job was 95% software-focused, so it was more about knowing where certain parts were located on the server.

• Kubernetes 1.21: Metrics Stability hits GA

  Kubernetes 1.21 marks the graduation of the metrics stability framework and along with it, the first officially supported stable metrics. Not only do stable metrics come with supportability guarantees, the metrics stability framework brings escape hatches that you can use if you encounter problematic metrics.

Free Software and Programming Leftovers

• trapped in the technologist factory

  By introducing abstraction into every problem we solve, we distance ourselves from how our work is ultimately used. We tell ourselves we’re in the business of building sharp knives; if we made them safer, they’d be useless for everything except spreading butter. We float above the the effects of what we’ve created, treating them as inexorable consequences of progress.

  It’s true we can’t encode our values into general-purpose software,¹⁰ but we’re not simply atomized technologists, and our worlds are not bounded by the interfaces we expose. We share a collective responsibility for what we create, and are capable of collectively acting on that responsibility.

  But what does a belief in collective responsibility mean, in practical terms? What actions does it entail? Honestly, I don’t know. All I know is that we can’t stay under the streetlamp forever. At some point, we’ll have to see what’s out there in the dark.

• [Older] Justice for Dr. Richard Matthew Stallman

  Stallman employed his great skills to campaign for software freedom and digital rights (especially privacy) and developed free/libre software while living a modest life, when his computer-science peers accumulated enormous wealth. He has been preaching software freedom and digital rights since the early 1970s and strictly adheres to this moral code².

  Since at least September 2019, Richard Stallman has been the object of an Internet defamatory campaign that forced him to resign from his position at MIT and even from the FSF that he founded and led—he resigned as President and as member of the board of directors3. On the second day (March 21) of LibrePlanet 2021, 18 months after his resignation, Stallman announced he was back on the FSF board of directors (not as President). This has reignited the controversy.

  The campaign is motivated by mischaracterizations, disproportionality and intolerance.

• drat 0.2.0: Now with ‘docs/’

  A new release of drat arrived on CRAN today. This is the first release in a few months (with the last release in July of last year) and it (finally) makes the leap to supporting docs/ in the main branch as we are all so tired of the gh-pages branch. We also have new vignettes, new (and very shiny) documentation and refreshed vignettes! drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. See below for a few custom reference examples.

• Top Content Management System (CMS) Based on Python

  Content management systems (CMS) provide desktop or web-based software to manage your digital content. The term “digital content” here typically refers to public or private websites, web-applications or other digital / media content served over remote or local servers. Without having a proper CMS, it may become difficult to create, manage, and organize content for your web-based projects, especially if your project is very large, you publish a lot of content, and regularly collaborate with others. In its most common form, a CMS provides graphical utilities that run in web browsers, though some command line and desktop applications exist as well. These graphical utilities may include an admin panel, page / post editors, gallery editors, tools for uploading and downloading media, tools for managing user accounts, comments, payments, forms, SEO tools, URL management tools, database management tools and interface for modifying almost every aspect of your website / web application. Many pre-made but highly extensible CMS exist that provide numerous tools to manage your digital content, e.g. WordPress (PHP based). Some enterprises develop their own private CMS from scratch meant to be used within organization only and these CMS are never made public. This article lists popular free and open source CMS software based on the Python programming language.