Debian 13
Debian 13 has finally been released!
One of the biggest and under-hyped features is support for HTTP Boot. This allows you to simply specify a URL (to any d-i or live image iso) in your computer’s firmware setup and then you can boot to it directly over the Internet, so no need to download an image, write it to flash disk and then boot from the flash disk on computers made in the last ~5 years. This is also supported on the Tianocore free EFI firmware, which is useful if you’d like to try it out on QEMU/KVM.
More details about Debian 13 available on the official press release.
The default theme for Debian 13 is Ceratopsian, designed by Elise Couper. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure it was the best choice when it won the artwork vote, but it really grew on me over the last few months, and it looked great in combination with all kinds of other things during DebConf too, so it has certainly won me over.
And I particularly like the Plymouth theme. It’s very minimal, and it reminds me of the Toy Story Trixie character, it’s almost like it helps explain the theme:
Plymouth (start-up/shutdown) theme.
Trixie, the character from Toy Story that was chosen as the codename for Debian 13.
Debian Local Team ISO testing
Yesterday we got some locals together for ISO testing and we got a cake with the wallpaper printed on it, along with our local team logo which has been a work in progress for the last 3 years, so hopefully we’ll finalise it this year! (it will be ready when it’s ready). It came out a lot bluer than the original wallpaper, but still tasted great.
For many releases, I’ve been the only person from South Africa doing ISO smoke-testing, and this time was quite different, since everyone else in the photo below tested an image except for me. I basically just provided some support and helped out with getting salsa/wiki accounts and some troubleshooting. It went nice and fast, and it’s always a big relief when there are no showstoppers for the release.
My dog was really wishing hard that the cake would slip off.
Packaging-wise, I only have one big new package for Trixie, and that’s Cambalache, a rapid application design UI builder for GTK3/GTK4.
The version in trixie is 0.94.1-3 and version 1.0 was recently released, so I’ll get that updated in forky and backport it if possible.
I was originally considering using Cambalache for an installer UI, but ended up going with a web front-end instead. But that’s moving firmly towards forky territory, so more on that another time!
Thanks to everyone who was involved in this release, so far upgrades have been very smooth!
