Re: IPFire "thirteen"

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hey,

I forgot to mention that the strongswan 5 branch has also been merged to
IPFire 2.13.

Michael

On Thu, 2012-08-30 at 16:59 +0200, Michael Tremer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> this is to announce the first test release for IPFire 2.13 with codename
> "thirteen".
> 
> So what has been going on? The IPFire project is going to release
> another release of IPFire 2. This is kind of inevitable because we feel
> that the current base is getting a bit old and that we should refresh
> some of the components to make life easier in the future.
> IPFire 2 will have to live for a long time until there is a working
> release of IPFire 3.
> 
> Updates components:
> 
> The Linux kernel
> Arne has been working on updating to the latest LTS kernel, which is
> Linux 3.2. It is maintained by Ben Hutchings for a couple of years, so
> this is a good base to build our little system on.
> The mission critical drivers (networking, media and some more) have been
> picked from the Linux 3.5 release (compat-wireless 3.5.x) for better
> hardware support.
> 
> I will leave out what the benefits are. You all know.
> 
> Glibc update
> Glibc has been updated to the 2.12 branch. This is a huge step (from
> 2.3.6) which brings us a lot of advantages. New software compiles much
> better without annoying patches, software runs much master and a lot of
> security holes have been closed.
> Glibc is compiled with the most optimization as possible.
> We don't expect this to break anything, but you never know. It is the
> biggest change that has ever been done in user space since the release
> of IPFire 2.1.
> 
> GCC + binutils (aka toolchain)
> The basic toolchain components have been updated. Mainly: GCC 4.4.7,
> binutils 2.22.
> Advantages: More speed (in compiling and code execution), compiler bugs
> fixes. Enables us to use some hardening features in the kernel.
> 
> The toolchain may now be cross-compiled on x86_64 which get us rid of
> the requirement of a 32bit host system for building IPFire. Although
> IPFire remains i586.
> The same cross-compiling thing works for ARM, which is even more
> important because there are not many distributions supporting armv5tel.
> Stripping binaries has been improved.
> 
> More basic system libraries and tools have been updated:
> zlib 1.2.7, ncurses 5.9, bash 3.2 (with a bunch of patches), readline
> 6.2, iproute 3.5.1, gettext 0.18.1.1, ccache 3.1.8, less 443, file 5.11,
> texinfo 4.13a and some more which I have completely forgotten.
> 
> PCRE
> The PCRE library now comes in two flavours. The first version is a
> compat version for tools which have been compiled against the previous
> package. The new one comes with a JIT compiler, which makes processing
> regular expressions much faster. The URL filter feature may benefit from
> that the most.
> 
> rrdtool
> Has been updated and draws its graphs with help of cairo/pango/pixman.
> This is much faster and looks a bit prettier. :D
> 
> grub has got a new patchset.
> 
> Some packages which have been unused/unusable for some time have been
> removed: resier4progs, libaal, hddtemp, applejuice, iptstate, splix.
> 
> glib(2), fontconfig and freetype are not a package anymore. These are
> essential for a huge number of addons.
> 
> ----
> 
> Well, these are some things and now we need you all for testing. As you
> may have guessed, some of the changes are scary and so we need the
> evidence that everything works pretty well.
> 
> You will only find an ISO image and no update, because a) the update has
> not been built, yet and b) we don't want you to crash your production
> systems.
> 
> Please use your testing hardware of virtual machines. The first is the
> better option.
> 
> Don't forget to report any bugs and also give feedback if you are not
> experiencing any serious problems.
> 
> http://people.ipfire.org/~ms/unsupported/ipfire-2.11-thirteen/
> 
> Michael
> 
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