On August 29th 2023, the Emmabuntüs Collective is happy to announce the release of the new Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 5 1.00 (32 and 64 bits), based on the Debian 12.1 Bookworm distribution and supporting both XFCE and LXQt desktop environments.
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 update of our new distribution includes the basics of Emmabuntüs DE4 under Debian 12 Bookworm, as well as its latest evolutions, an improved boot of the distribution in live mode, and the removal of Wine and PlayOnLinux to save a little space on the ISO, in order to maintain compatibility with USB keys (flash drives) in FAT32 format, as well as the update of Scratch to the latest version 3. 29.1 64-bit version, and the rekease of a French Scratch initiation manual under Emmabuntüs.
This version exhibits the new Emerald graphic theme created by Juliette Taka, the graphic artist who realized numerous wallpapers for Debian, as well as a renovated logo, which new look was designed by Jean-Claude aka JCZ, who was also part of the Debian wallpapers projects. In order to learn more about them, we conducted two interviews with them wehre they talk about their commitment to free software, and that you can access on our blog, look after Juliette, and Jean-Claude.
Emmabuntüs is also a reuse key now based on Ventoy, and we don’t currently plan to update our clones for this key with EmmaDE5, because the creation of these is now automatic, see this tutorial.
This Emmabuntüs DE 5 release includes the following changes or features :
- Based on Debian 12.1 Bookworm
- Kernel 6.1.27
- Xfce 4.18.1
- LXQt 1.20.0
- LibreOffice 7.4.5
- Firefox ESR 102.14.0
- Falkon 22.12.1-2
- Thunderbird 102.14.0
- Added a script to run OS-prober
- Improved startup time in live mode and installation of Calamares under WMware
- Removed PlayOnLinux and Wine to save space following the activation of a new ISO compression mode
- Disabled info message on non-free-firmware repository
- Replaced zram-tools by systemd-zram-generator
- Updated Scratch 3.29.1 to 64-bit version
- Updated of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 5 installation tutorial in French version
Emmabuntüs comes with a large number of software to allow beginners to have all the tools they may need without having to look for them and install them, see the list of all the software available on Emmabuntüs DE 5.
We fully assume this choice, which also allows us to provide a complete ready-to-use solution within the framework of our activities of computers re-use and training for computer classes under GNU/Linux, as for example in Togo within the framework of our collaboration with the associations YovoTogo and JUMP Lab’Orione.
For more details on all the changes, see the release announcements of the intermediate versions:
As of August 29th 2023, this version can be downloaded from our emmabuntus.org site, or by using the alternate link download.emmabuntus.org.