The development of the rolling distribution of openmamba keeps going since the release of the openmamba milestone3. It’s time to give some updates:

milestone4

milestone4 release enters a beta phase. Packages repositories of this milestone release are available and will be synchronized periodically with upstream repositories of the rolling release until it will be released as stable. Advanced users of the milestone3 release may upgrade their own systems using the openmamba-dist-upgrade script by entering the following command in a terminal window:

sudo openmamba-dist-upgrade milestone4

It is also possible to update your milestone3 installation to rolling using this command instead:

sudo openmamba-dist-upgrade rolling

For new installations we recommend to use the rolling release installation media. After the installation it will be possible to switch to milestone4 release by entering the following commands in a terminal:

sudo smart remove openmamba-devel
sudo smart channel –disable devel devel-games
sudo smart channel –enable milestone4 milestone4-updates

KDE 5

The popular graphical environment on which openmamba default desktop is based has been completely updated to release 5 by recently finishing the update of PIM components (email, calendars and other personal information).

milestone4 release ships with the classic KDE Workspace environment in order to give continuity to users upgrading from the milestone3 release. To accomplish this many internal aspects have been worked on to ensure that the update will keep user configurations of KDE parts unchanged.

The new KDE Plasma 5 environment will be a feature of the next milestone5 release.

x2go

Users of milestone4 or rolling releases may use x2go as a performing solution for remote desktop management of desktop and server installations of openmamba (as well as other Linux based distributions). On the PC/Server you want to control the package to install is x2goserver, while the package to be installed on clients is called x2goclient.

Telegram

The desktop version of the popular instant messaging client has been available for months to rolling release users. To use it is necessary to install the package named telegram.

There is also a Telegram bot for openmamba users and developers. This bot, in beta release, lets the users get information on openmamba available packages in an easy and fast way. Furthermore, openmamba developers using the webbuild development environment will also find useful notification functions of the state of build processes.

Flash e Pepper-Flash

Adobe recently started maintaining again the NPAPI version of the Linux Flash plugin  (for browsers like Firefox) which is in sync with the PPAPI version (for Chromium browser), for 32 and 64 bit Intel compatible systems. Installation and update to the latest versions of both plugins are internally managed by openmamba and is available in all the versions including and following the milestone3.

KDE Connect

KDE Connect is an useful component for the integration of KDE desktop with Smartphone devices. The package to install on your milestone4/rolling desktop client is called kdeconnect4.

milestone5 and beyond

The evolution of the o.s. keeps going on naturally by continuosly producing updates of many of the thousands of components. In addition to this the maintainer (who is writing this post) keeps managing the most important parts of the whole project with as much effort as possible.

Some possible objectives of the milestone5 release will be: updating predefined desktop to KDE Plasma 5, support for the arm gnueabihf (Hard Floating point) architecture.

openmamba can get better by getting users feedback and thanks to the collaboration of developers and partners who can take in charge any of the many things to manage. Anybody interested into helping this project is welcome and can use the forum or the other available channels to start.

Special thanks to all the people who collaborate and collaborated to this project.

Happy holidays from openmamba!

After some months in pre-release state, installation media of the milestone3 stable version are available for download with release 3.0.1.

Users of existing pre-release milestone3 installations have already received system updates, while those who want to make new installations or use milestone3 as a “live” system, can use recent downloadable media (livedvd, livecd, diskimg-livecd, livecd-light).