AIMS Desktop 2017.1 released
It is maintained by AIMS (The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences), a pan-African network of centres of excellence enabling Africa’s talented students to become innovators driving the continent’s scientific, educational and economic self-sufficiency."
| From: | Jonathan Carter <jonathan-AT-aims.ac.za> | |
| To: | tech-AT-aims.ac.za, debian-derivatives-AT-lists.debian.org, distro-AT-distrowatch.com | |
| Subject: | Announcing AIMS Desktop 2017.1 | |
| Date: | Sat, 17 Jun 2017 16:04:25 +0200 | |
| Message-ID: | <00de36bf-063f-4711-c2a5-0690345d0dcc@aims.ac.za> |
Welcome to AIMS Desktop 2017.1 ============================== The AIMS Desktop team is proud to announce the release of AIMS Desktop 2017.1. What’s new? ----------- * This is the first public AIMS Desktop release, now based on Debian 9. AIMS Desktop is now released world-wide under free licenses and can be used for personal, educational or commercial purposes. * We have a new website where we’ll have a growing collection of documentation. AIMS Desktop packages are also now in a public git repository. Links are listed below. * AIMS Now ships with Gnome as the default desktop environment, and uses Calamares as the installer. We ship some Gnome Shell extensions to cushion the change to Debian and make the environment more familiar for existing AIMS Desktop users. * Sagemath is now installed from a real debian package, and is no longer shipped via a massive binary distribution. This makes updates much faster and uses significantly less bandwidth for updates. * TeXstudio replaces Texmaker, which our users have reported to be more user-friendly. * Jupyter Notebook is now installed by default. * Live session now includes more partitioning tools to help deal with complex partitioning and recovery tasks. * GRUB is now used to boot both UEFI and BIOS modes, replacing the old isolinux that we used to boot with in BIOS mode. * Better dual-boot support for Apple computers. * AIMS Desktop is now 64 bit only. Users who have 32 bit hardware can download a Debian 9 netinstall iso and install additional packages manually (instructions for this will be available on our website soon). * We now ship Tilix, a powerful terminal multiplexer that allows you to use your screen space more effectively by tiling and tabbing your terminal sessions. Known Issues ------------ * The ‘ping’ tool needs some post-installation configuration to be usable by normal users. You can fix this by running ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure iputils-ping’ from the command line. * When booting from the USB disk, GRUB will briefly show a black window before booting the system. This is harmless and should be fixed by the next point release. * Occasionally the installer will immediately close after the first time it is opened. After opening it again it works as expected. * RStudio binary downloads aren’t yet directly supported for Debian 9. RStudio can be installed with ‘sudo aims-install-rstudio’ which will enable jessie sources and install 3 dependencies from jessie (libgstreamer0.10-0 libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 libssl1.0.0) along with the rstudio binary. * We now ship GeoGebra 4 from Debian instead of Geogebra 5 from GeoGebra.org due to unclear licensing. Users can still install GeoGebra 5 manually. What’s Next ----------- We plan to do two further release based on Debian 9. 2017.2, which will be released later this year which will fix issues we come across during the next few months. Then, 2018.1 released next year that will contain backports and newer versions of popular software used in AIMS Desktop. AIMS Desktop 2019.1 will be based on Debian 10 (codename: buster). We’ll start releasing test images as soon as the stack is ready. During the next few months we also plan to expand our documentation and add instructions on how to contribute to AIMS Desktop. If you’d like to get involved, stay tuned! Useful links ------------ AIMS Desktop website: https://desktop.aims.ac.za/ AIMS Desktop 2017.1 download: https://desktop.aims.ac.za/download Installation instructions: https://desktop.aims.ac.za/getting-started/ Need help? Subscribe to the aims tech mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/aims.ac.za/forum/#%21forum/te... AIMS GitLab instance: https://git.aims.ac.za Debian 9 release notes: Since AIMS Desktop 2017 is based on Debian 9, most of its release notes will also apply. https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/amd64/release-not... Thank you for your interest in AIMS Desktop! -Jonathan (on behalf of the AIMS Desktop team)
Posted Jun 19, 2017 6:33 UTC (Mon)
by darwish (guest, #102479)
[Link] (9 responses)
In the age of flatpack and snappy ... this feels like going back in time.
Posted Jun 19, 2017 6:50 UTC (Mon)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Jun 19, 2017 9:13 UTC (Mon)
by highvoltage (subscriber, #57465)
[Link] (3 responses)
Academic institutions who don't have huge budgets are also approached by big software companies all the time who want to make a 'donation' if you'll make the students use their software. Sometimes it's hard for the funding teams to understand why we'd want to reject them, and sometimes it takes a lot of patience and explaining why we want to stay with free software and why it's the right choice for the project.
That's maybe a first part of my answer, on to the broader topic of distributions. I wouldn't view AIMS Desktop as quite a 'distro' per se. It aims to use only Debian packages from the official debian archives. It couldn't quite reach that for this release, but it will probably for buster. There are certainly a large amount of distributions who spend a lot of effort duplicating existing work at no benefit to the larger ecosystem, but that's not what AIMS Desktop is, AIMS Desktop is merely a way of getting a Debian system up and running fast with the math and science software that's used in our curriculum, and we share it because we know of a few other institutions that have been using previous versions (that were based on Ubuntu).
An alternative to releasing AIMS Desktop would've been to just provide a Debian 9 iso, some documentation, maybe another disk/download with a set of packages, howtos on it, etc. But when the installation process goes from 25 minutes to a whole day and becomes more cumbersome for students, tutors or remote IT staff, it can serve as fuel for outside sponsors who might want to coerce us into using more proprietary software. As it is now, the average AIMS Desktop user has no problems installing the system and being productive on it within minutes, our user experience feedback so far has also been very positive and we have many dual-boot students who tell us they never boot into Windows anymore.
The list of software on the website is sparse, yes. The site is still in early stages so it's not quite as polished as we'd want it to be. I think the questions here are very valid and we'll add better explanations of AIMS Desktop includes, why it exists in its form, etc. But I don't think it's really fair to just dismiss it as another 'pink pony linux' distribution either :)
Posted Jun 19, 2017 10:29 UTC (Mon)
by oldtomas (guest, #72579)
[Link]
(To be fully honest: I'm rather one of those who wouldn't have put that question, because I consider a distro as far more than just "a heap of packages [1]" -- but I'm still glad someone posed this question, because your answer was thoroughly enjoyable, to me).
[1] It's interesting to see here the ages-old reductionist vs. holist thingy :-) aka "is the whole just the sum of its parts or not?"
Posted Jun 20, 2017 4:39 UTC (Tue)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
Posted Jun 23, 2017 13:52 UTC (Fri)
by dr@jones.dk (subscriber, #7907)
[Link]
AIMS is what we in Debian more specifically label as a "Blend":
Blend: a Debian-based distribution that is, or wants to become, a Pure Blend - i.e. has as an explicit goal of improving Debian as a whole, consequently all extras they offer will either become part of Debian, or are temporary workarounds to solve a need of the target group which can't be solved within Debian yet.
Source: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends#Blend
Congratulations with your release!
- Jonas
Posted Jun 19, 2017 9:15 UTC (Mon)
by highvoltage (subscriber, #57465)
[Link] (2 responses)
Yes, currently AIMS Desktop has a ppa, and someone could just do a plain debian installation and add that (it's on my todo list to add those instructions on the site), but our ultimate goal is having every package in the proper Debian archives so that we won't need a PPA for the next release.
Posted Jun 22, 2017 19:42 UTC (Thu)
by amacater (subscriber, #790)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 23, 2017 13:40 UTC (Fri)
by dr@jones.dk (subscriber, #7907)
[Link]
Yes, Debian Edu is fully included in Debian, but the configuration parts of it requires that it be installed using the Debian Edu install media - i.e. some parts of what is included in Debian stay dormant when used from Debian.
Posted Jun 19, 2017 8:39 UTC (Mon)
by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
Everyone has their own ideas for how systems should work and creating a derivative distribution is one way to achieve that in the spectrum of writing everything from scratch to just modifying an install of an existing OS after initial boot. I would say it is at a low point in the curves of short and long term effort needed to achieve your goals, depending on what those are of course.
As far as AIMS goes, I guess it is "a community wanted Debian to work slightly differently and wanted to employ locals to achieve that". The AIMS developers are Debian members already and have been merging their work back into Debian, as many derivatives do.
Why a new distribution?
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