The Neptune Team wishes everyone a happy new year with a new big Update for Neptune. 

CC BY-NC Don Harder

This Update brings in the postponed Systemd 227 Update aswell as a new Kernel which fixes the vulnerability in the key store handling of the kernel unveiled a few days ago. 
This also includes some smaller Updates like PolicyKit 0.105 and Plymouth 0.9. 

 

This big Update consists of major compontents being updated just like the systemd init daemon. We recommend everyone running the system on btrfs to create a bootable snapshot as backup with btrfs-snapshot b4systemd-Update 

Besides Systemd we also updated to the latest 3.18 LTS Kernel 3.18.25 with included kernel patch for CVE-2016-0728 (Privilege Escalation). 
Due to changes we also updated the Nvidia and ATI proprietary drivers in our repository to be compatible. 

Notice: Latest shipped Nvidia proprietary driver is 340.96. If you need a newer one please consult the Nvidia Website and installation instructions. 

Network-Manager was updated to version 1.0.6 and offers more reliable connections. 

We evaluated VeraCrypt as successor of TrueCrypt and uploaded it to our repository. It automatically replaces TrueCrypt as it is compatible with TrueCrypt Containers.

Alsa was updated to version 1.0.27 which should improve sound support with updated drivers. 

PolicyKit was updated to version 0.105 which offers better support for modern desktops (such as Plasma5). This update should make all Plasma 5 testers device notifier work again also with 'Open in filemanager'

Notice: On upgrading you might be asked to remove various plymouth-themes and plymouth-drm packages aswell as console-common. You can say yes to this as they get replaced by the new plymouth package. If you have a custom theme installed you might want to install the plymouth-themes package after the upgrade. Also when getting asked about overwriting a plymouth config choose the selected default option. 
If the plymouth splash was changed to another theme you can restore the Neptune splash with 

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R caledonia-neptune

All in all we hope you enjoy this big new years update and enjoy using Neptune 4.x as it will be supported until 2018 as LTS version.