News about Obarun news

New base and JWM live images reflect all the recent upgrades and fixes, of 66 and related tools, a few small bugs found on last month’s installer were also fixed.

Download of base, JWM, and docker images here, on the Obarun Download site.

This new set of iso images reflect another major edition of the 66 software as reflected in the official announcement.  The main 66 package itself got smaller and more responsive than ever, and some of its non-essential tools moved to a separate package.  Since the upgrade from 66 v.2.0.xx to 2.1.xx required some manual tweaking this was a reason to create yet another full X/jwm live image.

If you haven’t tried Obarun you don’t know what you are missing.

Latest Obarun installation/live images released (base, JWM, KDE Plasma)

Since the Fall of 2018 Obarun has committed to publish a new base iso-image (Obarun_x86_64-2019-05.iso) every month. The current installer updates itself from the obarun git repository when it starts.   The installer allows you the ability to select desktops and software during installation or install a base system, boot and customize on your own.   2-3 times a year a new live-desktop image using JWM is also published.  This is the latest iso with JWM published mid-April (Obarun-JWM_x86_64-2019-04-2.iso).

Since the major new release and change of repositories in April 2019, along with the introduction of Obarun’s own 66 management system over Skarnet’s S6 init, there have been minor refinements reflected in the new iso.  So if you have last month’s images there is no need to download the newer one. 

There is also an unofficial community edition of KDE-Plasma produced by an Obarun-Developer.  https://repo.obarun.org/iso/2019-05-Plasma (see note below on the list of images)

Although I never liked anything KDE myself I tested it and it works flawlessly.  For those who want to install plasma, although possible with the installer from other isos, it might be helpful to have the live image handy to see how user services are employed and handled by 66 and required for plasma.

Older images (before mid-April 2019) may require some attention and manual intervention to incorporate the changes in repositories, although the installer may take care of the change.

New Obarun iso images – minimal and JWM

Obarun is trully Arch-Linux without systemd.  It has come with a minimalist window manager since its inception more than 3 years ago.  In the past 2 years with JWM and originally with OpenBox, hence the OB in the original name.

Since early September Obarun comes with a minimal no-X image as well, that is about 1/2 a GB in size.  The latest one is the minimal iso that came out October 2nd Obarun_x86_64-2018-10.iso w/ md5sum…  which will be updated at the beginning of each month.

Refracta 9 and Obarun excellence + Artix

The Refracta team is throwing out a glimpse of the nearly ready Devuan 2.0 (ascii) with a new iso release that can be found here:

Check out my kernel version 4.15 Can you tell it is running on OpenRC? All those green and and blue OKs while it is booting up it is proof that it is!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/refracta/files/testing/

I made several installations of the same system in various machines, some being 10yrs old.  Not a problem.  I also installed OpenRC on them and replaced the sysv-rc and it  runs fine.  I can’t really say there is a difference while running it with OpenRC but Ram use is low while coming to an idle on the desktop.  (I only use Openbox).  Experts say that when you upgrade from