On January 4th 2021, the Emmabuntüs Collective is happy to announce the release of the new Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 Alpha 2 (32 and 64 bits), based on the Debian 11 Alpha 3 Bullseye distribution and XFCE/LXQt.
This January 4th 2021 date, marks also the 10h anniversary of our internet presence, which started with this nice interview made by our Framasoft friends concerning what became the Emmabuntüs collective 3 months later and the our first on-line release in March 2011, followed by the birth of our blog as of July 2011.
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 Emmabuntüs DE3 under Debian 11 Bullseye, including the support of the OEM mode installation within the frame of our reuse campaign. This campaign was launched early September in cooperation with our friends Debian-Facile in France, Blabla Linux in Belgium and Tugaleres.com, see the playlist of the videos (French with English subtitles) made by Blabla Linux and explaining in details how to implement this method. We updated this version with the set of utilities recently added in the EmmaDE3 version : VeraCrypt, GtkHash, Warpinator, and zram-tools.
The most important feature of this release is the unified method used to translate into various languages the Emmabuntüs menus, which are now based on .po type files. This development was triggered by our friend Carl Andersen who volunteered to translate our distribution in Danish.
The translations into other languages were integrated thanks to our friends : Yves Saboret for English, Benoît Boudaud for German, Salvo Cirmi for Italian and Kodashima for Japanese.
We are taking advantage of this release announcement to solicit your help in order to translate the Emmabuntüs menus into other languages. Don’t hesitate to contact us via this page.
We hope to be able to support the integration of more languages in the upcoming Emmabuntüs DE 4 Beta 1, which will follow the release of the Debian 11 version.
The video made by our friend arpinux presents the most important new features embedded within this new EmmaDE4, and the eternal essentials of Emmabuntüs.
This Alpha 2 version includes the following fixes and enhancements :
- Based on Debian 11 Bullseye Alpha 3
- Updated Xfce 4.16
- Added OEM install mode via Calamares
- Added the Danish and Japanese languages support
- Added the VeraCrypt utility
- Added the GtkHash utility
- Added the Warpinator utility
- Added the zram-tools utility
- Added launch of recovery session without Root account
- Added launch of a recovery
- Fixed scripts to handle the Cairo-Dock within both environments
- Swapped obsolete RadioTray with RadioTray-NG
- Swapped Kazam with Vokoscreen-NG
- Swapped ClipIt with Qlipper
- Swapped SMTube with FreeTube for 64 bits
- Upgraded Scratch 1.4 to Scratch 3.3
- Removed Java 8, no longer needed by Ancestris
- Removed Jitsi application
- Updated Multisystem 1.0448 to supprt Emmabuntüs DE 4
- Updated the following tools : HPLip 3.20.9, Kiwix 2.0.4, Firefox ESR 78.6.0, Thunderbird 78.6.0, PulseEffects 4.7.3, VeraCrypt 1.24 Update7, Teamviewer 15.11.6, TurboPrint 2.50-1, Boot-repair & OS-unistaller 4ppa125, MintStick 1.4.4
As of January 4th 2021, this version can be downloaded from our emmabuntus.org site, or by using the alternate link download.emmabuntus.org.