News

Latest 10 recent news (see index)

December 04, 2024

New images and welcoming new committers

As of 04 December 2024 new images have been published.

While there weren’t originally supposed to be any more images before reaching the beta phase, a new apk feature proved to be necessary.

Other than that, it’s an incremental refresh with software updates.

New committers

We have two new committers, Jami Kettunen (deathmist) and Isaac Freund (ifreund). Both have been a part of our community for a long time and are active contributors; congratulations :)

Unfortunately, another of our contributors, nekopsykose, has left the project recently. We thank her for being a part of the community and all of the work over the years and wish her the best.

Changes

The apk-tools package manager has been updated again, ahead of implementing a new kernel backup system. New static binaries, new OCI images, and other things have also been updated to use this new version of apk.

That means this image set is now the minimum that can be used to perform new installations, unless you update apk-tools in the live environment beforehand.

Various software has been updated. Linux kernel 6.12 is now the default, most notably.

The ISOs now have a bootable partition in the protective MBR. That means compatibility with certain x86 BIOS machines should be better.

Upcoming changes

This is likely the last update before entering the beta phase, for real this time.

October 27, 2024

New images

As of 27 October 2024 new images have been published.

These are an incremental refresh with new software, as well as new image types. They bring various minor changes.

Changes

The most notable change is a major update of apk-tools. From now on, we will start requiring changes that were made to it, so using older images to install is no longer supported.

Experimentally, KDE Plasma ISO images are now available alongside the GNOME images. The GNOME images are based on GNOME 47, while the KDE images use Plasma 6.2.

Additionally, the ISO images now use EROFS for its root file system instead of SquashFS. This brings increased compatibility and increased performance while in the live environment, in exchange for a minor increase in image size.

Last but not least, the “force console” GRUB options are now gone in the graphical ISOs, but the functionality is not. Adding nogui to kernel command line in GRUB’s editor will achieve the same.

Upcoming changes

This is likely the last update before entering the beta phase.

July 12, 2024

Welcoming a new committer

Since @triallax has been doing a bunch of excellent work in addition to being a great community member, we have decided to grow the cports committers list a bit.

Additionally, @nekopsykose is now a project owner, so it’s no longer just @q66.

Congrats to both :)

July 07, 2024

New images

As of 07 July 2024 new images have been published.

These are an incremental refresh with new software. They bring various minor changes.

Changes

The biggest visible change is that core and minimal rootfs tarballs are no longer distributed; you are expected to use either the full or bootstrap tarballs. Any regular installation is expected to use the base-full metapackage at very least (unwanted components can be removed by masking them in the apk world file).

The images are still based on GNOME 46 and kernel 6.6, but with all latest updates pulled in.

Otherwise, the images represent 3 months of software updates in cports, which are reflected here.

Upcoming changes

Before the beta release, there will be at least one more image refresh. The beta release is expected most likely during the fall this year.

April 21, 2024

New images

As of 21 April 2024 new images have been published.

These are mainly an incremental refresh. They bring a variety of package updates and minor quality of life improvements, and most importantly updated apk-tools.

Changes

The graphical images are based on GNOME 46 and Linux kernel 6.6, alongside a variety of up to date software, such as the LLVM 18 toolchain.

The apk package manager in this set fully supports the zstd compression. The distribution will start rolling out packages compressed with zstd in the coming days (no world rebuild will happen yet but newly built packages will be compressed with it).

The installer scripts had minor changes done in them, some of them user-visible. Notably, chimera-chroot will now alter the prompt to be less confusing, and it makes bind-mounted pseudo-filesystems properly unmountable.

The ISOs are newly based on GRUB 2.12. If this causes any regressions, please report them. All the ISO images were tested on their respective architectures without any issues found.

The MNT Reform images have been dropped. The packaging of the bootloader was unsatisfactory (done from binary builds) and there haven’t been any opportunities to figure out a proper source build. Additionally, the vendor now seems to be favoring newer SOMs by default. If you are interested in maintaining support for this or any other hardware, please reach out to us on one of the official channels.

Upcoming changes

There will be at least one more refresh before beta. Beta will likely come with a world rebuild, which means zstd for all packages.

January 22, 2024

2024 image refresh

The images have been refreshed yet again.

Most importantly these bring the 6.6 LTS kernel, an upgrade from the 6.1 series (except Raspberry Pi images, which have their own kernel) alongside minor user experience improvements.

Changes

We have upgraded the LTS kernel series from 6.1 to 6.6. Meanwhile, the installable “stable” kernel is now at 6.7.x.

Raspberry Pi images had their firmware updated, so wireless networking and Bluetooth should work equally well on 3, 4, and 5.

The apk package manager got a fix which likely resolves the issue when some directories were very rarely created with 000 permissions. This is not yet verified however, as the issue was not reproducible and therefore it is not possible to verify it.

Minor user experience improvements include support for fstab LABEL= and the likes for swap devices, support for timedated/localed/hostnamed D-Bus services (mainly benefits GNOME) thanks to the openrc-settingsd project from Gentoo/postmarketOS, various package updates, more atomic apk transactions thanks to deployment of sysusers.d and tmpfiles.d, chimerautils fixes (e.g. stdbuf command now works properly), the lsinitramfs and unmkinitramfs commands have been fixed, the cryptsetup initramfs scripts have their module copying fixed, Python 3.12, and a ton of other things.

Upcoming changes

We will likely introduce an installer in one of the future images, likely before beta release.

December 27, 2023

New images again

A new set of images has been released once again.

This is once again a refresh without any major functionality changes outside of new software; but it does bring important changes to apk-tools as well as out of the box support for Raspberry Pi 5. It comes with GNOME 45 and kernel 6.1.

Changes

As far as live-specific changes go, the strange GRUB message about “booting in blind mode” should now be gone. This was always harmless but was causing confusion in some users.

Additionally, the version of apk-tools available in these images comes with full support for xattr metadata. That means we will stop using post-install scripts for this in repo packages and instead migrate to this. That means you should always install from at least this version of the images from now on - older images may not work correctly for installations.

Raspberry Pi 5 is now supported in the Raspberry Pi images. The support has been present in cports since October and you could always generate your own image with chimera-live, but now there is no need to as the available images will work.

Outside of that, a lot of software has been updated, which affects the live image as well. Most notably, this means using GNOME 45 now.

Upcoming changes

This is a transitional set. The next set of images will probably come in relatively near future; this will bring some more major changes, for instance the Linux 6.6 kernel (which will become the new LTS) as well as quite possibly an installer and support for zstd in packages instead of zlib/deflate.

September 15, 2023

New images

A new set of images has been released once again.

This is mostly a refresh. The previous images still work fine for installation. These new images bring updated software, and a few other functional changes.

Major updates

1. The dinit-chimera core service set has been overhauled.
2. NTP is active by default in the live images, so you will get correct date/time even without RTC as long as connected to the network.
3. To avoid having files with timestamps in the future on hardware without an RTC, the new swclock service will synchronize time to at least a specific timestamp.
4. PipeWire is now always implicitly active if present.
5. The GNOME images no longer come with an X11 server (outside of XWayland). It can still be installed from the contrib repo.
6. HDMI audio should now work universally, as well as sound on some laptops and devices such as the Steam Deck.
7. And various minor changes.

June 11, 2023

Entering alpha stage

Today marks the day when the project enters the alpha phase. This has some implications, though it is not a release per se, considering Chimera is a rolling distribution; let’s take a look at what it means for potential users and contributors.

So, what does it mean?

Simply put, having entered the alpha phase means that the project is somewhat more ready to deal with users and potential repository expansion. A great deal of work has been done in all areas since the last update, and the distribution is now a lot more stable, with better infrastructure, and so on.

Of course, since it’s a mere alpha, it does not mean the system is considered stable per se. There may still be large-scale changes eventually (hopefully for the better) but early adopters may now consider actually daily-driving the system, and we are ready for the repositories to grow.

This phase is expected to last about a year. Obviously, it is not possible to create a distribution from scratch and immediately mark it stable. The current biggest things in the way are:

1. There isn’t enough software in general
2. Major improvements are still planned for service management
3. Documentation needs work in all areas
4. And obviously a lot of testing

During the next year, it is planned that those things (and others) will be addressed and the project will move towards beta.

In summary, the current state of the project means it’s daily-driveable and can be gradually updated without significant manual fixups, but there may still be bugs, missing documentation, and some things may still change at conceptual level.

Infrastructure

The distribution finally has proper infrastructure now. This means:

1. Central build system (using Buildbot), taking care of automatically building and publishing packages for all supported architectures, and native builders for each.
2. Continuous integration for pull requests.
3. Package repository browser with advanced filtering and search.
4. Nightly global update-check for packagers.

Thanks to all this, there is now streamlined workflow for adding new packages and updating existing ones, making it a significantly lesser effort.

Cports updates since last post

There has been a huge amount of changes since. A summary of these includes:

1. Userland based on FreeBSD 13.2.
2. All existing packages have been updated to their latest versions.
3. LLVM 16 is now the system toolchain.
4. GNOME 44 is the primary desktop environment.
5. Qt6 toolkit is now present in the repositories.
6. OpenJDK 17 Java is now in the repositories.
7. Flatpak support.
8. Several large pieces of software such as Thunderbird, GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, QEMU, OpenMW, Xonotic, Sauerbraten, etc. are now present.
9. Smaller useful software such as Chrony, htop, Deluge, Weechat, Neovim, Dino, Rsync, and others.
10. The option of latest stable Linux kernel branch in addition to latest LTS branch.
11. The cports repository now features more than 1000 templates in main and contrib, with more than 22000 total packages.

This list is not exhaustive.

New images

This update comes with a new set of images. The main improvement is streamlined installation thanks to new chimera-install-scripts package.

March 06, 2023

New images

As of today, a new set of images has been released. This is following the complete world rebuild that has been going on the last few days.

The new images are therefore generated from these new packages, and are the last images that are released before the alpha release.

World rebuild

The world rebuild has been successful and mostly uneventful on all architectures. There aren’t any or many updated versions, as that will happen after this.

However, it is very important that the rebuild has happened for the alpha release that will come soon after this.

Updates since last post

A lot of the work since the last update has been on cleanups and overall quality. Overall, a summary:

1. The hardening overhaul fallout has been mostly addressed. There may be some crashes left, which will be dealt with over the next few weeks.
2. The login stack has been switched from util-linux to shadow.
3. Various service management fixes and cleanups.
4. Overhaul of console-setup to uses non-XKB keymaps by default, removing base system dependency on Perl.
5. Chimerautils has been tagged, and various new tools have been ported (e.g. locate, whereis, script, logger, cal, and others) and many others have been written from scratch.
6. Util-linux has been split up, and much less of it is now installed by default. Several new chimerautils tools replace its various functionality.
7. Base metapackages have been cleaned up.
8. The system has been switched from eudev to systemd-udev.
9. Support for kernel efibootmgr hook for automatic EFISTUB boot entries.
10. Automatic ZFS root detection has been fixed for GRUB, and there is now a new tool to detect root for U-Boot menu and other places.
11. Overhaul of agetty handling, with support for config files to specify various parameters such as baud rate.
12. Our system toolchain now defaults to -fno-semantic-interposition.
13. The apk package manager will not mess up early permissions anymore, simplifying binary bootstrapping.

This is not an exhaustive list.

New images

The new images are mostly an incremental refresh, to allow for cleaner installations that do not update thousands of packages. There have been some notable improvements too, however:

1. The new tools chimera-live-bootstrap and chimera-live-chroot to simplify installations.
2. Much improved detection of serial terminals, which means in a lot of cases it is not even necessary to specify a console= anymore. If the kernel is configured to output to serial in any way, the respective agetty service will be configured, if it exists.
3. The graphical images now use networkmanager by default.

Upcoming alpha

Up next is updating our packages to their latest versions, as a lot of stuff in the repository is by now fairly out of date. Various minor improvements will be done while doing this, and issues reported with the new images will be addressed.

The alpha release should then come a few weeks from now, definitely during March.

The release will mark the next stage of the project, where adventurous people will be able to pick it up as their daily driver, and expansion of the package set can begin.