On April 27th 2020, the Emmabuntüs Collective is happy to announce the release of the new Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 Alpha 1 (32 and 64 bits), based on the Debian 11 Alpha 2 Bullseye distribution and featuring the XFCE/LXQt desktop environment.
This new version is rolling out ahead of our traditional time table, because the Covid-19 health crisis maintains home-confined a large part of our collective. So, we are taking advantage of this forced pause to make a nine months jump start for the development of our Emmabuntüs version based on Debian 11.
This distribution was originally designed to facilitate the reconditioning of computers donated to humanitarian organizations, starting with the Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution’s name obviously comes from), to promote the discovery of GNU/Linux by beginners, as well as to extend the lifespan of computer hardware, in order to reduce the waste induced by the over-consumption of raw materials .
This new version of our distribution is built on the foundations of Emmabunüs DE3 under Debian 11 Bullseye, and is now swapping LXDE with LXQt, and support an direct install from the ISO, without the need of an additional post-install step. In order to improve the LXQt experience, we added the Falkon internet browser which allows the usage of only 1 GB of RAM.
We took also the opportunity of this new release to remove some obsolete software and to clean up the amount of offered software, when they were less useful, or redundant. On the other end, we introduced some help-oriented utilities like inxi/inxi-gui, and some others to help our distribution : SMTube, font-manager and mediainfo-gui. We also replaced Nomacs by gThumb, which provides a easy management of the user picture collections.
The whole set of our scripts has been improved and completed to simultaneously support both XFCE and LXQt desktop environments.
The video made by our friend arpinux presents the most important new features embedded within this new EmmaDE4, and the eternal essentials of Emmabuntüs.
Video made by arpinux on EmmaDE4 new features and essentials
This Debian Edition Alpha 1 version includes the following new features, fixes and enhancements :
- Based on Debian 11 Bullseye Alpha 2
- Replaced LXDE by the LXQt desktop environment.
- Added Falkon Internet browser to be used under LXQt
- Added SMTube
- Added inxi/inxi-gui, font-manager, mediainfo-gui and mdadm software tools
- Added « First steps on Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 3 » tutorial
- Replaced Nomacs by gThumb
- Replaced XFCE4-Notes by Gnote
- Replaced KeePassX by KeePassXC
- Replaced Pinta by Drawing
- Replaced Florence by Onboard
- Updated « The Debian Buster beginner’s handbook »
- Updated Ancestris 10-20200208
- Updated Boot-Repair and OS-Uninstaller 4ppa78
- Added bullseye-security repository by swapping bullseye/updates
- Removed Surf, Deja-dup, Simple-Scan and Xsane
- Removed obsoleted software: SystemBack, Picasa, Wifi-radar, Sysinfo
As of April 27th 2020, this version can be downloaded from download.emmabuntus.org.