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Investing in the Future

- 5 min read - 1011 words
Ikey
Ikey
Founder: Retired

Here we are, at the end of 2024, and what a year it’s been! We’ve made significant progress on Serpent OS, and we’re excited to share some of the highlights with you.

Attained Alpha

Section titled “Attained Alpha”

Virtually 5 years in the making, we recently attained alpha status. Our tooling and concepts have aligned, allowing us to now rapidly iterate on the core deliverable itself: Serpent OS. We’ve seen an explosion in cadence, with our tooling enabling us to quickly and easily deliver updates, new packages and enabling new features.

Since the Alpha 1 ISO (0.24.5), we’ve fixed a number of issues in relation to hardware and booting. We’ve also added new features to moss (refined boot management) and boulder (our build system). Even now we have multiple PRs open to tidy up moss, add automatic generation of monitoring.yaml files, and more.

Keeping the cadence

Section titled “Keeping the cadence”

We’ve been working hard to keep the cadence up, and we’re now at a point where we can deliver new ISOs on a regular basis. Our main focus now is the tooling, in enabling a far more automatic delivery pipeline. The vision is having automated pull requests generated for package updates, automatically handling changes in dependencies and ABI, and ordered by build tier. This will significantly reduce the maintainer burden, in conjunction with planned security monitoring.

Alpha Refresh Available

- 6 min read - 1073 words
Ikey
Ikey
Founder: Retired

In response to feedback from the community, we’re issuing a refresh of the Alpha 1 release, 0.24.6. This refresh includes a number of key updates and improvements, including:

  • Now works with etcher
  • Fractional scaling enabled by default
  • Prebuild icon theme caches to speed up trigger execution (except for hicolor)
  • Add new moss boot status command for introspection into blsforme functionality
  • Fix amdgpu initialisation for older devices, previously leading to black screen on boot

Fractional scaling, much loved

Serpent OS Enters Alpha

- 7 min read - 1247 words
Ikey
Ikey
Founder: Retired

Following a successful prealpha phase, we’re excited to announce that Serpent OS has now entered the alpha stage of development. This milestone marks a significant step forward in the project’s journey. While the usual disclaimers apply, as a certain level of project fluidity is to be expected, we invite you to explore the latest alpha release and experience the cutting-edge features and improvements we’ve introduced.

Screenshot of a Gnome desktop showing files open

Supporting Serpent OS

Section titled “Supporting Serpent OS”

Serpent OS is a community-driven project, and we welcome contributions from developers, testers, and users alike. If you’re interested in helping shape the future of Linux distributions, we invite you to join our growing community and get involved in the project. Whether you’re interested in packaging, development, documentation, testing, or community support, there are many ways to contribute to Serpent OS.

Lastly, you can support the project by becoming a sponsor. Your support helps cover our hosting costs and allows us to dedicate more time to making Serpent OS exceptional. We’re grateful for the support we’ve received so far and look forward to continuing to build something meaningful in the Linux ecosystem.

Serpent OS Prealpha0 Released

- 4 min read - 597 words
Ikey
Ikey
Founder: Retired

Well, it didn’t take us that long, really … Our technical preview, prealpha0, is now available for testing!

A live GNOME environment running on prealpha0 of SerpentOS

Head to our download page to grab serpent-os-prealpha-0.iso now!

This is a super rough version of Serpent OS that is capable of being installed on baremetal hardware and VMs that support UEFI and OpenGL acceleration. It is however not recommended for use daily due to the early nature and a bunch of packages being wildly out of date. It features a minimal GNOME desktop with the Firefox web browser and a terminal.

Right now it contains a CLI installer that can be accessed from the terminal by typing:

Terminal window
sudo lichen

To detract from casual use it is necessary to manually partition the disk before running the (net) installer. You can use fdisk to create a GPT disk with a (mandatory) EFI System Partition and an optional XBOOTLDR partition. This currently also needs to be FAT32 until we integrate systemd-boot driver support. Lastly of course you will need a large enough root partition.

You will need a working network connection, so make sure you’re connected before starting the installer!

Calm Before The Storm

- 5 min read - 940 words
Ikey
Ikey
Founder: Retired

It’s that time of month again, and we have some details to share with you on boot management, as well as plans for real installs landing in May. Additionally, plans for “deferred updates” via mandatory reboots have been dropped!

wip boot code

Project priorities

Section titled “Project priorities”

To better understand the technical deep-dive on boot management further below, we should clarify a slight change in priorities for the project as a whole. For some time now we’ve served as a technical beacon for Solus to guide them towards better strategy and technical solutions whilst awaiting a situation where a rebase is feasible.

While we still look forwards to that future, the present day is the most important to us. Serpent OS must now transition from a collection of tools and promises into a daily driver with actual users. We still aim to cater to the more developer/technical oriented end of the spectrum rather than a “desktop distro”, and want to start this journey yesterday.

The boot management code is currently landing over the coming days, and will be immediately followed by an incredibly rudimentary system installer to facilitate an initial adoption of Serpent OS for the general public. Our intent is to ship some early test ISOs for supporters, and by the end of May have a feasible option for people to use and contribute to Serpent OS on real hardware.

We acknowledge this is an exchange of the pursuit of perfection for a pragmatic rapid iteration cycle and believe the best way forward is to open the doors wide, fixing issues on the job. The initial system will likely be rough and buggy, but it is an official starting point from which we can all build Serpent OS together.