Greetings all,

I wanted to drop a quick line to make sure you know whats going on with the latest version of wattOS in development.

The release date is a little tardy (as it has been for 7 years ) - so we are consistent.

But the reason is that I am looking at a potential return to ubuntu as an upstream base. There are lots of reasons, mostly dealing with Debian Jessie breakage, flexibility, and general labor required to get a clean stable desktop with the widest hardware compatibility while maintaining a simple clean desktop environment with no bloat.

Some people would be happy with this development, some will not. I cannot worry about that, but only to try and continue to develop wattOS in a way that has helped many people over the years.

There has not been a final verdict as I am doing extensive testing and building to see if this pivot makes sense. I would anticipate some beta images for a few testers to review in the next 7-10 days as I already have a working LXDE 32/64 base.

wattOS was derived from Ubuntu for 6 years until the latest release. It does not mean support would not be around for either (and most any version) as I field questions from wattOS 6 onward at this point on a semi regular basis.

I will be looking at this for the next few more days before a final decision (and announcement) is made, but the forums here will of course be the first to know along with some private notifications for some beta testing of the R9 images.

tks

biff

Greetings all...I would like some feedback. I want to renovate the wattOS main page and freshen things up. Do any of you have an opinion on what you like? or examples?

I would like to simplify and make it an information page as we all know the real action happens in the forums other than downloads and information.

Thinking I will maintain a link in these forums to the old forums just because there is a lot of legacy info...

feedback please...

I have posted info on the poodle vulnerability and the various browsers it impacts. Link is on my personal blog - shots and info are from windows, but the basics are the same and do impact Linux also and you can fix firefox and chrome the same way.

Chrome you change the .desktop Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --ssl-version-min=tls1 %U

Firefox - follow the other instructions already mentioned.

http://cpufu.com/?p=37

Looks like during some cleanup a couple download links got broken. I have been alerted by a couple folks.

Thank you...I will get those cleaned up in the next day or so....

Enjoy!

Biff

Well

It appears that we have a few issues with Microwatt, so I figured I would solicit some feedback before I make a final decision to move forward. With the install of Qupzilla and the subsequent pull of some Jessie packages, it has broke a few things related to dependencies. Which is not entirely surprising, but can be labor intensive to fix manually, so I want to discuss a couple options.

My inclination at this point is to update and release two Microwatt versions very soon (Microwatt only - call it Microwatt 8.1) Those would be updated and available in the next week, and put these issues to bed.

One version Microwatt 8.1- Jessie based (Debian - testing) that has Qupzilla as the default browser and all the updated Jessie packages - considered more cutting edge.

One version Microwatt 8.1 - Wheezy (Debian Stable) that has Midori as its default browser and all stable wheezy only packages. - considered more conservative

The reality is that both likely will run well, but there is always more chance of breakage on Jessie as things get settled with it from the upstream Debian.

If you feel adventurous and are having current Microwatt dependency problems, simply add the Jessie repo to your sources and you will then be able to update the package you want (like installing printing that has been reported as a problem). That is not ideal I am aware, which is why I am considering taking the above path so you can choose what suits you best. Again you can manually work though the dependencies and fix them in your current installs as they come up on a case by case basis.

So fire away and let me know your thoughts.

If you want to test yourself now on your current Microwattt (R8 install), and try some Jessie packages, (and fix some of your dependencies).

simply edit /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo nano sources.list

Add the line at the bottom of the file

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main non-free contrib

Save the file

then

sudo apt-get update

Then install whatever packages you need that previously did not work. (like system-config-printer to fix printing)

You do not have to do a full upgrade as you can have some packages co-mingled (again yes I know not ideal) but I have tested that scenario for the last week with no problems. If you do a full upgrade, it will take a good bit of time, and you will essentially be running Jessie.

Stay tuned for an announcement on that shortly. 

Good stuff - I will announce it all at once in the next few days

biff

Still toying with the notion of making a "pi" edition of wattOS.

Would love any feedback if you think this is worth the effort. I have a couple units, so testing and building is not a problem, just a time investment.