Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz has just announced to the sm-discuss mailinglist that stable-rc 0.24 has been cut and uploaded to the main distro server, mirrors should be syncing in the next few hours. His message follows.

“Hi everyone,

stable-rc 0.24 is cut and ready for testing. There’s the usual wiki page for those who want to help testing.

The release will be released on July 15th if nothing major gets in the way.

Tarballs have been created and are on the master server, should make it to the mirrors in a few hours.
The chroot for x86 is done and uploaded, volunteers for x86_64 are welcome.

As always don’t forget to file any bugs against our bug tracker so we can fix and integrate any bugs/issues.

Let’s give this new stable-rc a good testing!”

Eric “sandalle” Sandall has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.23 has now been officially released!

“As usual, users of stable merely need to run ’sorcery system-update’. Spells listed on the 0.23 release wiki were tested and qualified to have no known defects of “gating” severity at the time of this release. The tarballs have been signed and uploaded to our server.

To download the grimoire manually, get http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2 or specifically http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.23.tar.bz2.

GPG signatures are available at http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.23.tar.bz2.asc.

I would like to thank Eric Sandall (sandalle) for the x86 and x86_64 chroot tarballs and Arwed von Merkatz (alley_cat) and Mathieu Lonjaret (lejatorn) for their work on the release itself.”

Juan Carlos “Jucato” Torres posted a note to the sm-discuss mailinglist today to inform us of a “surgery” he practice on a SVG version of the logo that Paul “novaburst” Beel provided for us some time back. Message follows.

Greetings mages!

Paul “novaburst” Beel previously commissioned an artist to create a new, vectorized Quoth for our logo. There were some concerns about Quoth’s mangled feet. Frustrated artist that I am, I tried to operate on his feet. The result is one foot less.

Submitted for your enjoyment (and approval?).

P.S. Jaka says it looks too Egyptian. Does it really? :)

Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer, the Cauldron Lead, writes to inform us that the latest test ISO (and from some versions ago) includes man pages, as opposed to the previous generation ones.

Just a friendly reminder about the new ISOs: manpages are actually provided on the ISOs (this includes 0.10.0-test1). If you are not sure how to do something or how to use a program/edit a config file on the ISO or during the install, please feel free to consult the relevant manpages (i.e., man lilo.conf for information about how you can configure lilo).

<@flux_control> ryuji: The normal manpages for the spells are installed. I’ve had them for several ISO releases, and I’ve mentioned it before, yet nobody seems to notice :(

I guess now they are bound to notice more! :)

Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer has released version 0.10.0-test1 of the next-generation ISO for Source Mage.

On his post to the mailinglist:

I finally got all the bits working that are absolutely necessary for this release. I’m sure that there will still be plenty of bugs, but I will need you guys to test the ISO to find them. Then I will squash them. With extreme prejudice. Like, with a rock or something.

The release will most likely happen this evening (EDT). However, I have things to clean up, and I will be trying to minimize the size of the ISO as well, before releasing. Therefore, it’s possible that something will come up (like RL) and I will release tomorrow night, but most likely it will happen tonight. You may now all grip the edges of your seats.

Summary of major changes in this ISO:

• Use of udev in the ISO’s bootup initrd (autodetect hardware and autoload modules for it). Watch out for this, as it’s possible that the ISO will detect your hardware and load modules for it, but the installed kernel might not (we don’t install an initrd for you, at least not yet). I tried to ensure that this would not be the case, but I cannot be certain. Please test using the ISO kernel and make sure that it boots. If you are looking to just have a working system from this and aren’t interested in helping to test the ISO, then I would just recommend (as always) to build a new, fresh kernel for your system rather than relying on the one provided on the ISO. This can be done during the install phase itself (i.e. from within the ISO) by chrooting into /mnt/root (you can just run our chroot script smgl-chroot) and going into /usr/src, unpacking the linux sources (bunzip2 linux-2.6.22.tar.bz2), creating a symlink (ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.22 /usr/src/linux), and then issuing the regular kernel make command series (e.g., make menuconfig && make && make modules && make modules_install).
• The ISO kernel is more modular. I’m hoping that this will resolve bug #14495. I need people with corresponding hardware to test this though.
• ncurses is now most definitely built with utf-8 enabled, both for the ISO and for the system tarball.
• The linux kernel sources are now included in the system tarball, so it should be possible to build a new kernel and/or different kernel modules even if you are having trouble getting a network connection. This should resolve bug #14405.
• Various other bugfixes that are more minor/superficial.

For all bug-hunting, please file bugs against 0.10.0 in the bugzilla database (http://bugs.sourcemage.org). It’s really much more helpful to me if all the bugs are in the same place rather than having to hunt them down via scattered emails or IRC logs. Thanks! :-D

If there are any questions/concerns/problems, I’ll be around in IRC as usual, or you can email me of course.

On the mailinglist, the Release of 0.10.0-test1 thread has gotten quite some feedback, and another thread, install iso 0.10.0-test1 tested has gotten some more feedback for Justin in regards to the ISO.