A new year a new big Update
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.
Early Christmas Present
The Neptune Team whishes all users a merry christmas.
As a present we offer you today a great new desktop that you might want to try out.
Plasma 5.5 for Neptune 4.4 is available for testing. We prepared four new software repositories for it.
Autumn Updates
There are some fresh new updates for the starting autumn season in Neptune 4.4.
Most of them are simple bugfixes or some service releases.
We fixed and upgraded quickusbformatter and disk-manager which should run again flawlessly.
An error preventing backintime-kde to start is now fixed and you will find a new version in the repo.
A newcomer or old friend of our repo is the e16 window manager which makes its comeback together with epplets and themes.
Phonon, the KDE multimedia framework was upgraded together with its backends vlc and gstreamer.
A whole bunch of smaller packages like bash-completion, dpkg, ifupdown, debhelper, dh-exec, gettext, apparmor and much more. were upgraded to the lastest versions aswell which provide mostly bugfixes and some new features.
Besides these updates we also internally evaluated and tested an upgrade of Systemd. In the end we came to the conclusion to not perform this upgrade for Neptune 4.x as it can bring to many problems to our users. If you want to know more feel free to subscribe and take a look at our Mailinglist.
Hot Summer Update
We are proud to announce hot summer update.
As many requested and true to the motto "It's all about you" we listened to our users and included a libc6 update in our repos. Even if it breaks one major part of "stable" Debian Wheezy Base its a benefit for all users running third party binaries that were built against newer libc6 versions.
Neptune now includes libc6 2.19
Warning: As this is a big update. Please refer to creating a backup first before upgrading. On a btrfs filesystem you can just create a snapshot with the command btrfs-snapshot b4libc6-Update . This will save the system state and offers you a b4libc6-Update boot option in the case after the update anything breaks.
Notice: Future package updates to applications might depend on this new libc6 version. So if you don't want to update libc6 it is recommend to deactivate the Neptune Repositories.
Despite support for third party precompiled binaries this new libc6 Version also brings some speed improvements and security fixes.
Another big update for people using the radeonsi graphicsdriver. We fixed the error that lead to very slow and highly cpu intense video playback by including glamor xv support in xserver-xorg-core.
Newly added was a package called bluray-support that automatically downloads the necessary depenendencies and installs the makemkv libraries to playback blurays. So if you own a bluray player for your computer you can now playback blurays without hurdles or hassles.
Neptune 4.4 Release
We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 4.4.
This version features a new LTS Kernel 3.18.16 which delivers better and more modern hardware support. We also did the biggest update in the graphicsstack since Neptune 4.0 by upgrading to XServer 1.17 and Mesa 10.5.8. This brings in support for modern graphiccards and better 3D performance. Old chips like voodoo or sis however aren't supported anymore. We updated the Hplip driver to support newer hp printers.
We improved the user interface by introducing a new modern looking font aswell as bigger scrollbars.
Kdenlive now can stabilize videos using the vid.stab extension. Gimp now includes the GMic filters and plugins by default.
Neptune Installer is now able to handle UTF-8 chars in usernames and supports formatting partitions with btrfs-tools 3.17.
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Chromium was upgraded to version 43 with deactivated Google Now plugin. The packagemanager dpkg was upgraded to version 1.18 featuring a lot of bugfixes and improvements in overall speed.
We also added a new application called KDE Volume and Partition Manager which is not only capable of managing partitions but also of handling lvm partitions.
Live System users will benefit from fixes to the Snapshot Manager which features a bunch of new predefined snapshots to try out.
Neptune 4.4 can be obtained from our Download Page. You can find a more detailed list on changes on our Changelog Page.
Forum not hacked
After thorough search and investigation it turns out the forum was not 'hacked'. The files that were marked as malware by our server provider weren't infected.
The malware scanner just simply provided a wrong list of infected files.
We appoligize for all the fuzz and trouble. The forum is back online.
Brace yourself summerupdates are here
This month Neptune has some interesting new summer updates. Mainly we now enabled the wheezy-backports software source with a higher priority. This leads to a bunch of new updates for libraries and applications.
To activate this update just update your packages normally via the software management tool apper. This will update the neptune-sourceslist package. After that it should enable all the updates on wheezy-backports for you.
We also updated KDEnlive and added the video stabilizer tool vid.stab. This allows stabilizing shaky video with a simple mouse click and a few settings.
Besides that we also offer a new LTS Kernel 3.18.16 for testing. This comes with the usual aufs3 and bfq i/o scheduler patches to enable a quick responsive desktop experience.
Kernel 3.18.16 is planned to be the default kernel for the upcoming Neptune (4.4) release.
Happy Easter
The Neptune Team wishes everyone happy easter and ships some Update suprise in the easter egg.
We updated the XFS filesystem which includes the support of version 5 of the XFS disk format. Besides upgrading the xfsprogs package we also worked hard upgrading grub2.
Grub2 now supports better booting on XFS partitions and comes with a better support for EFI.
The Neptune Installer now asks for the full name of the user during install and also offers the option to skip installing grub by clearing the bootloader inputbox. Besides that the installer now also configures akonadi after install so it is directly useable without any further interaction.
Newly added to the Neptune softwarerepository is the Enlightenment window manager in version 0.19.4 alias e19.
Calibre aswell Sopcast Player got an update and for developers we upgraded python-qt4 to version 4.11.2, python-kde4 to Version 4.14.1 and sip4 to version 4.16.4.
Neptune 4.3.1 ISO available
Due to a problem with the Neptune 4.3 ISO which lead to unmountable ext4 partitions in live mode we decided to upload a new ISO Version 4.3.1 which fixes this issue.
This issue also caused not being able to install Neptune on a ext4 partition.
Previous installations are not affected as this problem only occured on the Neptune 4.3 live media.
All of you who already downloaded the appr. 1.8 GiB big 4.3 ISO file can find a zsync file on download.neptuneos.com/download to make upgrading a little bit easier.
Neptune 4.3 Release
We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 4.3.
This is the third service release to Neptune 4 and comes with improvements, bugfixes and updates. This includes Chromium in version 41, VLC in version 2.2, LibreOffice 4.3.3 aswell as Icedove 31.5 and many more. The foundation of this release is represented by the current Debian 7.8 ('Wheezy')