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News from HeliumOS

This Month in HeliumOS: January 2025

Welcome to this year’s first edition of This Month in HeliumOS! In this series, we share updates and news about HeliumOS. Join our Matrix space to contribute or discuss these updates.

User Experience

  • Distrobox Shortcut in App Launcher: Users reported difficulty starting Distrobox, a command-line tool for container management. To improve accessibility, we’ve added a desktop shortcut that opens a terminal with distrobox --help for guidance.

  • HeliumOS 9 Alpha Retirement: Due to the availability of Enterprise Linux 10 and therefore HeliumOS 10 Alpha, we’ve discontinued builds for HeliumOS 9 Alpha. Users testing alpha releases should migrate to HeliumOS 10 Alpha.

  • Expanded KDE Applications: HeliumOS 10 Alpha launched with a small selection of applications from the KDE suite. We’ve since added basic utilities such as KolourPaint (Paint Program), Okular (Document Viewer), and KCalc (Scientific Calculator).

  • Install Scripts for Developer Tools: To simplify setup, several scripts now enable one-command installation or removal of a few popular tools. As an example, users wanting Docker and/or a local Kubernetes cluster can install Rancher Desktop with a single command by runningheliumos-rancher_desktop-enable . This can be just as easily removed by running heliumos-rancher_desktop-disable.

Fixes

  • Boot Screen Update: The Breeze-style boot screen present in earlier revisions of HeliumOS 10 Alpha lacked a graphical password prompt for disk encryption. Switching to the BGRT boot screen resolved this issue.

  • Homebrew Compatibility Fix: When installed via heliumos-homebrew-enable, Homebrew now configures system paths automatically, fixing linker errors when compiling with Homebrew libraries.

  • Hibernation/Sleep Fix: Some devices running HeliumOS were unable to wake from Hibernation. We’ve disabled hibernation in favor of sleep as a possible fix, ensuring reliable sleep/wake functionality. A permanent solution is under investigation.

Thank you for reading! See Pre-Releases to download HeliumOS v10-Alpha. More updates next month!

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