New live/install iso images of SparkyLinux 4.8 “Tyche” are out.
Sparky 4 is based on Debian stable line “Stretch” and built around the Openbox window manager.
Sparky 4.8 offers a fully featured operating system with a lightweight LXDE desktop environment; and minimal images of MinimalGUI (Openbox) and MinimalCLI (text mode) which lets you install the base system with a desktop of your choice with a minimal set of applications, via the Sparky Advanced Installer.
Sparky 4.8 armhf offers a fully featured operating system for single board mini computers RaspberryPi; with the Openbox window manager as default; and a minimal, text mode CLI image to customize it as you like.
All existing other desktops are fully supported, and can be installed via the Minimal iso images or after installing Sparky on a hard drive, via APTus-> Desktop tool.
Changelog:
– full system upgrade from Debian stable repos as of May 11, 2018
– Linux kernel 4.9.88 (PC)
– Linux kernel 4.14.34 (ARM)
– Calamares 3.1.12 with possibility of installing the live system on an encrypted disk
– added new option of live system booting which lets you choose your localization
– sparky tools which need the root access use pkexec now instead of gksu/gksudo/kdesudo/etc.
– added packages: xinit (provides startx command) and bleachbit (for cleaning the system)
– sparky advanced installer features 6 localizations now: Brazilian, English, German Italian, Polish and Portuguese
– APTus 0.4.x has been enlarged of new, additional applications and tools to be easy installed
– removed packages: gksu, gdebi, reportbug, sparky-fontset
There is no need to reinstall existing Sparky installations of 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 RC, simply make full system upgrade.
Sparky PC:
user: live
password: live
root password is empty
Sparky ARM:
user: pi
password: sparky
root password: toor
New iso images of the stable edition can be downloaded from the download/stable page.
Known issues:
– installing Openbox via MinimalCLI image makes problem with the ‘obmenu-generator’ package installation. To solve that, after running Sparky from hard drive, reinstall the package:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --reinstall obmenu-generator
and install ‘sparky-desktop-openbox’ meta package as well.