[Lina-dev] Announcing LINA-0.72beta03

[Saill White]

We at Lina Software are proud to announce the release of LINA-0.72beta03!

This release is free of a large number of bugs and annoying features discovered by users of the beta02 release. The new features and bug fixes in LINA-0.72beta03 are detailed below.

LINA-0.72beta03 is not a production release. It is one in a series of betas intended to prepare LINA for wider use. LINA-0.72beta03 still contains a number of bugs and inconveniences, some of which were discovered during the testing process. These “known bugs” are detailed below.

DEMOS IN THIS VERSION:

Nano
Vim
Elinks
ImageMagick
Apache
Wordpress

SUPPORTED OPERATING SYSTEMS:

Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 2000
Windows 2003
Mac OS X Tiger
Linux Fedora 7
Linux Fedora 8
Linux Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
Linux Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)
(We are not currently supporting Debian 4 due to missing dependencies on the basic Debian install. Debian, OpenSUSE and PCLinuxOS will be supported in the next release)

CHANGES IN THIS VERSION THAT AFFECT ALL PLATFORMS:

- The installer downloads the appropriate version of the LINA disk. This allows us to support older versions of LINA. The command “lina -v” was added to return the version of LINA that is installed.

- We have disabled installation messages unless they have DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical.

- We have implemented “quickstart” using a saved virtual machine state to quickly start LINA for running applications. The first applications now takes under three seconds to start in best cases and we are working to improve it in more difficult cases. Our medium-term goal is less than a second. 

- We have added a file path translation library to make text-mode user interface programs like vim run as expected on different platforms.

WINDOWS-SPECIFIC CHANGES IN THIS VERSION:

- We now support Windows 2000 and Windows 2003.

- We have eliminated timed-waits within the LINA installer and replaced them with condition-checking. This eliminates timeouts and failed installs on slow machines.

- We now copy over sleep.exe, touch.exe, and use the full path when installing  in order to eliminate a Windows 2003 hang when a sleep from a parallel cygwin install was encountered.

MAC OS X-SPECIFIC CHANGES IN THIS VERSION

- We have eliminated the Mac OS X installer segfaults on new versions of Tiger that were reported by several users.

- We have added the wget package so that users don't need to install it themselves.

- We have reduced the size of the LINA DMG from 500MB to 100MB.

- We have removed the blank Mac OS X configure screen.

UNIX-SPECIFIC CHANGES IN THIS VERSION

- The text and progress bar now update better in the installers

- We are working to eliminate installer “freezes” that occur when the installer is working, but not refreshing widgets, so the interface can be “erased” by another application obscuring it on the desktop.

KNOWN BUGS AND INCONVENIENCES:

- Starting more than one installer at a time can cause a failure. In the next release we will either prohibit this behavior or work to allow it.

- When installing applications, the installer progress bar appears to freeze because quite a bit is going on. In the next release we will improve our system for informing the user of progress.

- In some circumstances, the first application started on LINA starts very slowly. Quickstart is meant to solve this, but we are still seeing some instances when it takes a long time for an application to start.

- In the Windows installer, the progress bar behaves oddly

- After downloading the LINA disk, the Mac OS X progress bar jumps back and forth

- A critical file needed by LINA (lina/var/lock/safe.lock) was not created in one install instance leading to a failure to install LINA. This bug was not reproducible

- File mappings are sometimes incorrect in applications, resulting in unexpected behavior, especially by Vim.

More information about the release can be found at our community website at http://openlina.org .

Instructions for downloading and installing LINA can be found in our wiki at http://openlina.org/wiki . 

A special thanks to everyone who downloaded and gave us feedback on LINA-0.72beta02. The community's help is making it possible for us to rapidly improve LINA's quality and reliability for the official 0.72 release. 

Sincerely,

The LINA release team