As of today, Chimera now has binary package repositories for the
ppc64le and x86_64 architectures, as well as fresh ISO images.
Every package has been updated to latest version. That means the system comes with Linux kernel 5.19, latest version of GNOME 42, WebKitGTK 2.36.x, Firefox ESR 102, and other software.
This does not mean that the distribution is ready to be daily driven. These are still experimental, and subject to arbitrary changes and rebuilds. The repositories are currently managed manually. In the coming months, automated infrastructure as well as CI will be launched.
Within the next couple weeks you can also expect the aarch64 architecture
to be added to the repositories (alongside generic UEFI ISOs and Raspberry
Pi 3/4 images).
The main repository is automatically installed in any Chimera system.
To add the contrib repository, add chimera-repo-contrib. To get debug
packages, you can add chimera-repo-main-debug or chimera-repo-contrib-debug.
Packages outside of main and contrib are not built.
This also means that the new ISOs do not contain any tooling necessary to bootstrap the system, as you can easily install that yourself.
Additionally, repos, images as well as auxiliary files such as bootstrap tarballs for language toolchains can now be found on a stable URL, which is https://repo.chimera-linux.org.
Cports and bootstrapping
Most importantly this means you no longer have to bootstrap the system from
source. The binary repos have been integrated into cports which means that
binary-bootstrap now works out of box, and you can build any package you
want without having to bring up the whole system from scratch.
Future plans
The immediate goal is to launch the aarch64 repos and images.
The primary near-term goal is to reach the alpha milestone. That is available on GitHub Issues.
The milestone is subject to expansion, with current completion ETA being somewhere around November. Once the project has reached alpha phase, it will be ready for some careful daily driving and additional packaging.
From there, it is expected that things will stabilize more, so that they can eventually be declared safe for general use.
Alongside that, there are also plans to launch packages and images for the RISC-V architecture, once the build hardware issue is solved.