This is to announce the immediate availability of Window Maker Live release wmlive-debian 2012-03-11 for both amd64 and i386.
This release is dedicated to three persons, which are of very special relevance for the Window Maker Live CD effort in general: * To Carlos R. Mafra for having revived the Window Maker development by providing and managing the http://repo.or.cz/w/wmaker-crm.git repository for inclusion of any fixes and enhancement code patches by interested contributors. * To Rodolfo 'kix' Garcia for doing an incredible job enhancing the upstream Window Maker code base, while at the same time maintaining the official Window Maker Debian packages, on which the Window Maker Live effort actually relies on. * To Jean Philippe Guillemin, original author of the GTK2-Step theme, for making it possible to almost seamlessly integrate GTK2 based applications with Window Maker, by properly matching the WINGs widget set looks. Thanks a lot to everybody involved making Window Maker become a much more viable desktop and window management option than it ever was! New ISO images can be downloaded from the usual download area at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files Here is a short list of the most notable changes for this release: # Desktop related changes: * The Window Maker root menu has been substantially enhanced, and now offers a preferences backup and restore facility, a much more versatile and customizable AutoStart management feature, a simple means for manipulating the Debian menu file entries and, last not least, a much better Applications menu layout. * The Debian related applications menu layout and entries have been moved to be under full user control. More than a hundred of customized menu files were added to the user controlled ~/.menu directory while still maintaining compatibility with the system 'update-menus' script. * The GTK2-Step theme integration has been much enhanced, making it work independently of the gnome-settings-daemon. * The debian-installer now uses a different GTK2 theme definition, in order to look at least a bit more STEPish. * Among a few other minor packages, the 'backintime-gnome' backup program was added to the default system installation. Support utilities for xdg based menus were removed as they were not used by any of the installed applications. # Under the hood: * The system is now mainly based on wheezy/testing with the few Gnome related components being taken from squeeze/stable, and no further packages from the sid/unstable branch, in order to reduce the latent possibility of unexpected breakage. * When performing an installation parallel to another operating system on disk, the grub boot menu will now be automagically updated with the suitable entries for dual booting once the freshly installed Debian Linux system has been booted for the first time. * The wmlive-fix-grub-install script was enhanced with an automagic fix for the creation of the /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/cryptroot configuration file, which is required for the associated initrd based boot mechanism. Before, any installation to an encrypted LVM unexpectedly failed by leaving the fully installed machine in an unbootable state, because the missing configuration file is not automatically created during the installation stages of the debian-installer. * Many more small fixes and enhancements, which are far too numerous and minuscule to be mentioned separately. # Known issues: * Even if during the installation process the grub install stage doesn't fail anymore, the 'wmlive-fix-grub-install' script should still be executed before actually confirming to finish the installation. The script also fixes a LUKS related issue and an incomplete file copying of the installer, which would otherwise break both cron/at and the mail spool of the resulting system installation. * If the 'debian-installer' does not start while reporting 'Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 keyxhost: unable to open display ":0"', or similar, then there is no other known remedy, so far, than rebooting from the CD and try again. Thanks to Mark Van Kingsley for making me aware. * If no network connection was configured already during the generic installation stages, no automatic update of the apt cache will be performed during the first reboot, and Synaptic will refuse to start up, displaying an error message regarding an invalid value for "APT::Default-Release". In this case, just update the apt cache manually by running either 'sudo apt-get update' or also 'sudo wmlive-apt-refresh', in order to properly sync the outdated local apt repository information of the system, and Synaptic will work as expected afterwards. For more detailed changes information, please consult the accompanying ChangeLog file, which is also available separately in the Sourceforge download area for Window Maker Live. Enjoy installing and using Window Maker Live! Best regards, Paul Seelig -- Paul Seelig <[email protected]> http://wmlive.sourceforge.net -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].
