T2 System Development Environment

… not simply another Linux distribution!

The T2 System Development Environment or sometimes knows as Meta Distribution, allows the fully automated creation of custom OS distributions using state of the art, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation.

From Glibc to Musl, from ARM, to x86-64. T2 supports all major C librares, CPU architectures, window servers and desktop environments as well as countless special purpose and embedded firmware packages!

While T2 initially focused on the Linux kernel, we already have initial, proof-of-concept support for building "home-brew" Other OS pkg ports on BSDs, macOS and Haiku, too!

With support already wide and versatile, we do not plan to stop here, and plan to improve T2's "home-brew" compilation as well as bootstrapping alternative micro kernels, such as L4, Fuchsia, or integrating building "AOSP" Android as well.

And as always: patches welcome!

White paper: English German

News

Doubling down on IA-64 Itanium support

With the recently announced removal of support for IA-64 from the upstream Linux kernel, we would like to stress that the reports of death of this EPIC architecture are greatly exaggerated.

Due to the ease of T2's cross compiling, as well as support and interest by the OpenSource community, we are committed to support IA-64 for at least another decade or two.

If anything, the upstream removal only sparked increased interest in T2 on Itanium support and brought an influx of new developers with IA-64 based machines. If you have highly reliable, explicit parallel IA-64 computers in production, don't delay and try and support highly optimized T2 Linux today!

Dark theme and more

Once a hacker niche now mainstream, and we could not escape it anymore: the Dark Theme!
Accompanied by our new glowing T2 logo!!

Keeping this pace, we did a long awaited refactor on the website's backend that will allow us keep making incremental changes to it with ease in the future. Who knows, maybe a complete design overhaul some day?

Article titles on the main page can now be clicked to highlight the article itself, which also gives you a nice link to share links directly pointing to the choosen article. For example the one you are currently reading https://t2sde.org/#news-2023-08-28

While at it, we finally added an RSS feed for the main page, too! Which truely helps to keep an eye on what is going in the open T2 world without having to constantly open a web browser daily to check for news.

Build time estimation

Te are really happy to announace that, as of revision 64292, the T2 build scripts estimate and display how time time a package will likely require to build!

Of course if works for Emerge-Pkg as well as Build-Target.

This is a game changer for many users with different, especially older systems and especially when testing on multiple different, exotic, vintage and retro RISC machines with varying levels of performance and allows us to better organize around long builds!

This feature is based on binutils reference time units which wer gathered for a really, really long time in T2 package's .cache.

We tried to make it as accurate as possible, but of course some variations, especially for packages not utilizing mulitple parallel threads during compilation are to be expected.

The T2 core develoeprs updated a massive ammount of .cache files to make this as accurate as possible.

And last but not least, we did benchmarks on multiple boards to give people an overwiew of what their hardware is capable of, which you can find under "Perfomance Index" on individual hardware reference page.
See for example the Mango Pi MQ-Pro D1 T2 hardware page.

We hope you like this new feature, because we for sure do!

Intel hardware decoding

We are happy to announce that T2, as of r63868, officially supports hardware video encoding and decoding with Intel discrete GPUs (aka ARC/DG2).

TL;DR: ./scripts/Emerge-Pkg -force intel-onevpl ffmpeg mpv

It required 40 hours of mostly nighttime work to put everything together but we finally did it.

Here are all the packages you need to operate your hardware en/decoder:

Example command:
ffmpeg -hwaccel qsv -c:v vp9_qsv -i input.webm -c:v av1_qsv -b:v 5M -look_ahead 1 output.webm

As an added bonus you also get H264, HEVC and VP9 hardware support!

As usual, patches welcome!
Let us know if it actually works for your DG1 or Xe graphics too!

32-bit Rustc and more big-endian

The last couple of days we spent fixing rustc support for sparc32, notably the elf format which isn't working upstream as well as more RISCV(32) as well as big-endian ARM fixes!

Next release will then come with rustc, cargo and hopefully firefox which requires a more fixes at the time of writing.

As usual, patches welcome if you found something not yet working perefctly on this older, or embedded systems!

Complete system encryption

In the past few weeks, we've been hard at work to improve user convenience when setting a fully encrypted T2 installation.

Our installer already supported full-disk encryption, including encrypted boot partions which you unlock with Grub at boot time since 2020 (r50723).
But until now we were missing a crucial feature for easier data management without being locked with one partion scheme unless doing a clean install: LVM inside LUKS.

As of today, we are proud to anounce that we integrated support for booting LUKS+LVM! We even added support for encrypted swap/suspend-to-disk to complete the security chain so that you can shutdown you pc without closing everything you were working on and worry about someone running out with your drive and dumping the content of your swap partition in case your computer is stored in a public space.

Everything is integrated in Stone which you will be able to experiment by yourself when we release 23.2 iso images.

Rebooting from the installed to the new system is now faster than ever, courtesy of the kexec mechanism that was added in r60600 (r59937, 60059, 60458, 60468, and more that fixed cross-compiling!). Meaning you can now deploy T2 on your server without having time to make coffee before it reboots!

Of course everything is already available in the current subversion repository!
If you have an already existing T2 install make sure to upgrade the following packages before testing anything: grub2, linux, mkinitrd, stone, util-linux.

A typical LUKS+LVM+suspend-to-disk setup would look like so:


	NAME               FSTYPE      TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
	sda                            disk  
	├─sda1             vfat        part  /boot/efi
	└─sda2             crypto_LUKS part  
	  └─toor                       crypt 
	    ├─qvo-swap     whatever    lvm   [SWAP]
	    ├─qvo-root     whatever    lvm   /
	    ├─qvo-boot     whatever    lvm   /boot
	    └─qvo-home     whatever    lvm   /home
	


You can watch parts of that work on youtube:


Next steps for us will be to have sensible defaults suggestions at partition time for user convenience and then rewrite (hopefully soon) a graphical version of the installer.

As always, patches welcome! Come chat with us on the interwebs!

T2 22.9 "TOP SECRET"

Today T2 SDE Linux 22.9 was released. Another major milestone update with latest and greatest GCC, LLVM / Clang, X.org, Mesa3D, Glibc and more. Improved security, as well as SMART and whole-program LTO optimizations.

As technology snapshot a pre-built binary ISO is relased for high-performance x86-64-v3, and of course all other architectures, including: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, sparc, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 can be rolling release updated thru the scripted build system from source – optimized for the native system.

There were 1450 changesets with 2378 lines of commit messages. Approximately 1918 packages got updates, 122 issues fixed, 1918 packages or features added and 47 removed. Around 15 improvements have been committed.

T2 22.6 "Résistance"

Today T2 SDE Linux 22.6 was released. A major milestone update to ship full support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries. Of course all the architectures, including: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, sparc, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 can be rolling release updated thru the scripted build system from source – optimized to the native system.

The 22.6 release received updates across the board, with latest stable Linux kernel 5.17.15, GCC12, LLVM/Clang 14 and the latest of KDE, GNOME and much more.

There were 5014 change-sets with 6334 lines of commit messages. Approximately 4947 packages got updates, 331 issues fixed, 4947 packages or features added and 148 removed. Around 49 improvements have been committed.

T2 feature patch bounty program

The T2 SDE project is thrilled to announce ExactCODE GmbH sponsoring features bounties for selected feature requests. We believe OpenSource developers should be fairly paid for their tremendeous infrasructure work most of the intenet, mobile and embedded platforms are based on nowadays. We are happy to set a good example and T2 being one of the first project that gives back and pays their contributors.

T2 ported Firefox to RISCV64

Today the T2 System Development Environment team is happy to share the latest Firefox working on RISCV64 Linux desktop! While this is a huge step for general RISCV desktop and mobile usability more work remain, e.g. to port the JavaScript JIT to RISCV, too.

T2 21.7 "Rebel Alliance"

Today T2 SDE Linux 21.7 was released. An interim update to ship full support for the new HiFive SiHive Unmatched 64-bit quad-core RISC-V 64 board as well as a reference for the further refined smart optimizations for 32- and 64-bit x86. Of course all the other architectures, including: alpha, arm, arm64, hppa, ia64, m68k, mips64, mipsel, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, sparc64, superh, x86, and x86-64 can be rolling release upated thru the scripted build system.

The 21.7 release received updates across the board, with latest Linux kernel 5.13.1, as well as a major GCC 11 C++ templated ctor bug was fixed.

There were 305 changesets and this is also the first release with our AI bot "Data" contributing more revisions than human developers: Data: 164, humans: 141!

T2 21.5 "Because we can"

Today the T2 System Development Environment Linux 21.5 was released, with an even larger amount of supported, 18 pre- and cross-compiled set of architectures ever: alpha, arm, arm64, hppa, ia64, m68k, mips64, mipsel, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, sparc64, superh, x86, and x86-64.

Major performance improemvnts were implemented, including: not yet upstream x86 concurrent TLB flushing, faster in-kernel zstd update as well as smarter (profile guided Os vs O3) whole system optimizations!

The 21.5 release received updates across the board, while a major point of work was the GCC 11 update as well as re-basing and fixing upstream regressions for our Sony PS3 support as well as various small improvements, including an up to 15 seconds faster shutdown when using sysvinit.

T2 21.4 "Fully Automated"

Today the T2 Project released version 21.4, with the largest amount of pre- and cross-compiled set of architectures so far! A total of 15 architectures: x86-64, x86, arm64, arm, riscv64, riscv, ppc64le, ppc64-32, ppc sparc64, mips64, mipsel, hppa, m68k, alpha and ia64!

As usually most packages are up-to-date, with 1294 change-sets, 1179 updates, and 120 fixes, including Linux 5.11.16, GCC 10.3, LLVM/Clang 12, as well as the latest version of Rust, X.org, Mesa, KDE and GNOME 40!

T2 20.12 tagged and released!

After the first in a decade 20.10 release, 20.12 was already released with all the last weeks improvements, including Sgi Octane support, improved network booting, and updated packages, including the Linux kernel and Mesa3d.

T2 20.10 tagged and released!

A decade in the making, T2 version 20.10 was finally tagged and shipped! Grab your favorite release ISO, e.g. highly optimized AMD64, PPC64 for your PS3, MIPS64 for your Sgi Octane or any other of our release builds for playing along at home!

Support for building packages on other OS: macOS ARM!

After an initial proof-of-concept around 2004, when T2 founder René Rebe needed a Subversion client for at the time relatively new PowerPC Mac OS X, now in the same situation again with Apple's ARM macOS "Big Sur" support for compiling and side-loading Open Source packages on other third-party systems using the vast and universal T2 package repository data is officially becoming mainline!

Initial support for RISC-V!

Initial support for the open-source RISC-V architecture was added to T2! Initial or preliminary, because upstream packages do not include support for all bit-widths, such as 32 vs. 64-bit, and some low-level packages do not yet have upstream support, such as strace and packages of similar low-level nature.

Switched to SHA224 checksums

By switching the bit dated upstream source checksum to SHA-224 the security of validating unmodified upstream sources is greatly improved.

Switched to Zstd compression

With switching to the new Zstandard compression we can greatly decrease download bandwidth for you and our mirrors, as well as uncompression time of big packages during development.

r40000 revisions, Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year!

The first seven years of the T2 SDE were just the beginning: Welcome to revision 40k, and over 3270 packages of which about 50% do cross compile.

All of us wish you and your families a peaceful and recreative Christmas time. May it be a time of peace and reflection for all of you, whatever religion you believe in, whatever culture you are part of and wherever in the world you are.

T2 8.0 "Phoenix" released

After years of development we are proud to announce the availability of the new T2 stable release 8.0.

The 8.0 release received updates across the board, while a major working target was further improving cross compilation, and all official ISO images are now fully cross build!

Over 10000 Subversion revisions indicate the magnitude of the release, with over 200 new packages, new features and various other improvements and fixes.

(more... - download...)

May Day! >36200 revisions, >3219 packages, ~50% cross, 6 years

We now have been working and polishing T2 for over 6 years! A massive effort to maintain all the different architectures - from ARM to x86, operating system support - from Linux to win32, packages - from a2ps to zziplib, and the cross compilation of it.

The T2 SVN tree now contains more than 36000 versioned revisions, with over 3200 packages in tree, of which nearly 50% do cross compile.

The T2 team wishes you a happy public holiday! Enjoy!

T2 @ LinuxTag 2008

LinuxTag logo

T2 project will attend the europeans largest Linux fair, Linux Tag 2008 in Berlin.

The LinuxTag 2008 opens its doors from May 28 to May 31, 2008 at the Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users, developers and deploying companies to learn more about the potential of T2, Linux, Open Source, and Free Software at Europe's leading conference and expo - where .COM meets .ORG.

New, dedicated T2 download server

Thanks to the T2 sponsor ExactCODE GmbH, a new and dedicated master download server for source and binary releases, as well as the upstream source mirror is now available:

http://dl.t2sde.org


Formerly the source mirror and binary releases where only available on a off-site and not really reliable university server.

T2 7.0-rc2 "autumn leaves" released

The 7.0 series release candidate two features bugfixes and stability improvements for the non-x86 architectures, mainly AVR32, PowerPC and SPARC while quite some packages received updates and security fixes.

The major features of series 7 are AVR32 and Blackfin architecture support as well as the brand new GCC 4.2 and GlibC 2.6. Additionally the T2 7.0 series comes with over 400 new packages, while most of the existing packages received an update. (more... - download...)

Digg! (thanks to The Internet Archive)

T2 @ Systems 2007

Systems logo

T2 will attend the Systems 2007, the leading business-to-business exhibition for the ICT sector - in Munich, Germany.


The Systems 2007 opens its doors from 23 - 26 October, with the T2 SDE booth will be located in Hall 2B, in the Open Source area.

1333 T2 package known to cross compile (>45%)

As part of the ongoing 7.0 finalization, a whole new bunch of packages got fixed to cross-compile and thus where marked with the new T2 CROSS tag.
With the now 1333 T2 packages, including nearly all GPE, X.Org, XFCE and most GNOME packages, known to cross compile, over >45% of the T2 packages are ready for embedded development. (more...)

1000 T2 package known to cross compile (>33%)

As part of the ongoing 7.0 finalization a whole lot of packages got fixed to cross-compile and thus where marked with the new T2 CROSS tag.
With the now 1000 T2 packages known to cross compile, over >33% of the T2 packages are ready for embedded development. (more...)

T2 for Blackfin

Blackfin CPU

The T2 SDE project announces the immediate availability of T2 SDE support for the Blackfin CPU architecture from Analog Devices. (more...)

T2 @ LinuxTag 2007

LinuxTag logo

T2 will attend the europeans largest Linux fair, Linux Tag 2007 in Berlin.


The LinuxTag 2007 opens its doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 at the Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn more about the potential of T2, Linux, Open Source, and Free Software at Europe's leading conference and expo - where .COM meets .ORG.

T2 6.0.3 "Spring Fever" released

With the usual care and a new maintenance release of the popular T2 6.0 series was released today.

As stable series, the 6.0 series is maintained under strong API/ABI compatibility aspects and receives bug fixes, security fixes and light, compatible updates only.

The release primarily focuses to iron out all known LiveCD issues for smooth building of custom T2-based LiveCD/DVD and USB sticks.

Prebuilt x86, x86-64, PowerPC and PowerPC64 ISOs images of the minimal-X.org-livecd are available (SPARC64 to follow, soon).

T2 for AVR32

AVR32 CPU

In cooperation with Atmel and ExactCODE the T2 SDE project announces the immediate availability of T2 SDE support for the new AVR32 CPU architecture designed by Atmel, Norway.

The AVR32 STK1000 reference implementation running the T2 SDE Linux will be showcased on the CeBIT 2007, T2 SDE Project booth, hall 5 booth G68/4. (more...)

T2 incorporated support for GPE

The GPE Palmtop Environment is a Gtk+ based user interface environment for palmtop/handheld computers running the GNU/Linux or any other UNIX-like operating system.

Thanks go to Susanne Klaus from ExactCODE for the ungoing mobility effort thru which the GPE packages are now included in T2.

T2 T-Resc(ue) Technology Preview

T-Resc is a new target incorporated into T2. It is meant for demonstration purposes and brings embedded features into the hands of every day users and administrators.

T-Resc is uClibC based as well as size optimized by GCC thruout the whole system to minimize the ISO size. With minimal, k-drive based Xvesa and Xfbdev X servers as well as blackbox few bytes are dedicated to graphic functionality.

Included are open-source disk, network and virus scanning utilities. (more...)

T2 6.0.2 "Continuity" released

With the usual care and maintenance a new maintenance release of the popular T2 6.0 series was released today.

As stable series, the 6.0 series is maintained under strong API/ABI compatibility aspects and receives bug fixes, security fixes and light, compatible updates only.

The release primarily focus to iron out all known sparc64 issues for smooth support on Sun T1, Niagara CPU systems such as the T1000 and T2000 - but also includes non SPARC security fixes, updates and improvements along the lines.

Prebuilt SPARC64, Niagara binary ISO images of the minimal target are available.

T2 6.0.1 "From Zero to One" released

With the usual care and maintenance the first maintenance release of the popular T2 6.0 series was released today.

As stable series, the 6.0 series is maintained under strong API/ABI compatibility aspects and receives bug fixes, security fixes and light, compatible updates only. Package version updates include Linux (2.6.17.9 -> 2.6.17.14) and KDE (3.5.4 -> 3.5.5).

T2 incorporated support for OpenPCD

The OpenPCD is a free 13.56MHz RFID reader and writer hardware design.
This device is able to screen informations from Proximity Integrated Circuit Cards (PICC) conforming to vendor-independent standards such as ISO 14443, ISO 15693 as well as proprietary protocols such as Mifare Classic.

T2 6.0.0 "Ready to Go" released

Finally, after a lot of testing, security updates and work on details, such as simplifing the installation we are proud to announce the immediate availability of 6.0.0 final release code name: "Ready to Go".

The release features u/dev, early user-space, fully modular kernel, X11R7, C++ cross compilation, PowerPC64 and MIPS64 support as well as a whole lot of updates and refactoring under the hood. The x86 flavour already includes support for latest Apple Macintosh Intel (Mactel) hardware and the associated Grub fixes (A20 gate and keyboard) and we finally can ship the first production ready SPARC64 T2 Linux even supporting the Sun T1 Niagara CPU!

T2 @ Linux World Expo Cologne 2006

LWE logo

The T2 Project will be presenting Linux solutions based on the T2 SDE on the Linux World Expo, Cologne, Germany from November the 14th to 16th.


T2 able to cross compile modular X11R7!

T2 always was strong in being self-hosting and starting each build bootstrapping a fresh cross compiler itself - even if the build actually is a native build.


Due to popular demand, more and more packages have been fixed over the past time and T2 is able to cross compile the modular X11R7, now!

T2 2.2 becomes 6.0!

For marketing reasons T2 2.2 will be released as series 6.0 in the upcoming week.


The change of versioning was made to obviously promote the progress T2 made over the last years and thus being way ahead of competing systems.

T2 2.2.0-rc "Get the power back!" released

Finally, the Release Candidate of the 2.2.0 series "Get the power back!" is out. The series features u/dev, early user-space, fully modular kernel, X11R7, C++ cross compilation, powerpc64 and mips64 support as well as a whole lot of updates and refactoring under the hood. The x86 flavour already includes support for latest Apple Macintosh Intel (Mactel) hardware and the associated Grub fixes (A20 gate and keyboard).

T2 2.1.1.1 "lychee punch" released

The first maintenance release (2.1.1) for the stable 2.1 branch was finalized. This release includes bug fixes, security fixes, updates and even some improvement to the SDE. Most notable are: kaffe 1.1.6, kde 3.4.3, xfce 4.2.3.2, wine 0.9.1, mono 1.1.10, eclipse 3.1.1, xpdf 3.01pl1, koffice 1.4.2, samba 3.0.21a, OpenOffice.org (ooo) 2.0.0.1 and mplayer 1.0pre7try2.


A vastly improved Emerge-Pkg script, improved dietlibc as well as improved x86-64 and PowerPC64 support, target inheritance and autoextraction of .zip files was merged from the development trunk.

T2 2.2.0-epsilon "Yuletide" released

Finally, with 2.2.0-epsilon the necessary installer rewrite was done to include support for u/dev. Additionally the 2.2 series includes a fully modular kernel, support for C++ cross compilation, powerpc64 and mips64 support as well as a whole lot of updates, including modular X.Org X11R7 and cleanups and refactoring under the hood.

T2 2.1.0 "Charlotte" released

Finally 2.1.0 was release with some bugfixes and minor (but important) updates, including: GCC 3.4.4, Abiword 2.2.11, Gnumeric 1.6.0, Samba 3.0.20b, and Apache 2.0.55.

Over 2100 packages!

After the addition of the modular X.org - X11R7 - packages we are proud to announce to pass the 2000 packages mark with over 2100 (!!!) packages in the T2 package repositories!

X11R7 packaged in trunk

The modularized X.org release candidate X11R7 got packaged for T2. It is now the default X implementation in trunk and will be used in the T2 2.2 release scheduled for November.

T2 2.1.0-rc3 "The Toasted Badger" released

This, hopefully last, release candidate includes general bugfixes and minor (but important) updates, most notably OpenOffice 1.9-m123, Mono 1.1.8.3, bdb 4.3.28, KDE 3.4.2 and Gnome 2.10.2.

T2 2.1.0-rc2 "Carmenere" released

We are happy to announce the release of our second (and last?) candidate for T2 2.1. The release includes major bugfix, and many harmless updates where most notable are: linux 2.6.11.12, glibc 2.3.5, OpenOffice 1.9-m104, wx 2.6.1.0, mono 1.1.8.2, XFCE 4.2.2, KDE 3.4.1 and Gnome 2.10.1.

T2 2.1.0-rc1 "summer sunshine" released

Again AMD64/x86-64 as well as sparc64 support got improved again.

Of course the release ships with the latest stable release of KDE, GNOME, XFCE and Enlightenment 17.

About 152 packages got updated, including Linux (2.4.31) and Linux (2.6.11.10) and 146 issues fixed. The release includes enhanced Java support, including Kaffee and Jikes. Automatic dependency and installed files detection was improved. Other package updates include Subversion (1.2.0), nvidia (1.0-7174) and Apache (2.0.54). Acroread (7.0) was added.

T2 2.1.0-beta4 "warm rain" released

After an enormous amount of updates and additions we released 2.1.0-beta4 as last snapshot before the first release candidate will be deployed in about one week.


The release includes support for the SuperH CPU family, as well as enhanced AMD64 / x86-64 support, many improvements for cross compiling - including a new embedded target as solid base for industrial products and support for squashfs and unionfs.


Of course, the latest stable release of KDE (3.4.0), GNOME (2.10.0), XFCE (4.2.1) and Enlightenment 17 (2005-03-29).

T2 2.1.0-beta3 "Serpentine" Released

After much last minute showstopper work in the 2.1.0-beta3 branch the tree was frozen and released, finally.


The release includes: uclibc support (builds with far more packages than dietlibc!), parallel build support for make and scons, builds on x86-64, fixed ccache support to work reliable with recent ccache releases, improved sparc64 support, bash3 was fixed significantly, various bootdisk creation and file layout improvements, wide ncurses added, the nvidia binary only driver really does get installed. The numerous package updates include linux-2.6.10, linux-2.4.29 as well as migration to aspell-0.60 and development tools for Atmel AVR chips got included.

T2 2.1.0-beta2 "Your own sweet way" Released

The "T2" project tagged and released the internal milestone 2.1.0-beta2 ("Your own sweet way").


The release includes more ROCK to T2 naming transitions, including the rename of the internally used toolchain directory from ROCK to TOOLCHAIN, fixes for findutils, enhanced X.org radeon support (especially on PowerPC). The command wrapper code got a significant restructuring so that ccache works more reliable now, as well as general ccache fixes and basic distcc support. We now support marking download URLs as "no mirror". And the many updates include gtk+-2.6.0 as well as freetype-2.1.7..

T2 2.1.0-beta "Today is gonna be the day" Released

The "T2" project tagged and released the internal milestone 2.1.0-beta ("Today is gonna be the day").


The release includes updates to linux26 (2.6.8.1 -> 2.6.9), linux24 (2.4.28-pre4 -> 2.4.28),binutils (2.15.91.0.2 -> 2.15.92.0.2), gcc (3.4.2 -> 3.4.3), uclibc (0.9.26 -> 0.9.27-20041106), binutils (2.15.91.0.2 -> 2.15.94.0.1), KDE 3.3.2, Gnome 2.8.2 as well as many other updates, fixes and improvements.

T2 2.1.0-alpha "Way to heaven" Released

The "T2" project tagged and released the internal milestone 2.1.0-alpha ("Way to heaven").

Major changes from ROCK Linux 2.0 and 2.1 include:

  • gcc-3.4.x used exclusively
  • a "sanitized" linux-header package which currently uses 2.6.8.1 headers
  • X.Org is used exclusively
  • some packages got split into individual ones (e.g. alsamad, ogg-vorbis and xine),
  • the .desc D tag for the cvs:// URL scheme got revisited
  • the ugly date encoding via a '!' fot dropped in favor of more natural form as to be executed manually on the command line
  • the .desc NODIST "hack" support was removedas well as the new CD tag not imported,
  • the .desc tags CV-PAT and CV-DEL support was dropped
  • many packages got updated and added
  • no people named repositories - most packages should now be sorted into category repositories - which so far scale quite well
  • no package fork / package split stuff
  • no pseudo cross native compiler hacks and no perl cpan meta package fork whatever (™) stuff
  • no default kernel stuff - a "sanitized" linux-header package is always used (always as up-to-date as possible - currently 2.6.8.1)
  • no linux*-src packages - third party modules will be build as part of any kernel package (will be implemented next week ;-)