v7

Spotlight change

• UHCI (that thing for USB 1.1) no longer fails to initialize on boot. I added a patch to make the system's optional timer actually optional, following a suggestion from the VT8500/WM8505 Linux Kernel group.

Big changes

• Debian is updated to bookworm.
• Linux is updated to 6.1.44. I had to fix some stuff about how the i8042 driver works with the devicetree.

Small changes

• I added some code to "activate" the IRQs that irq-vt8500 uses, which eliminates that kernel/irq/chip.c warning on boot.
• The default APT components now has non-free-firmware instead of contrib and non-free.
• This version of Debian has usrmerge, so expect to wait a little longer for that to set itself up on first boot.
• The setup on first boot now tells debconf specifically to use the Teletype frontend, which eliminates the complaints about the Dialog frontend not having the needed program installed. So that's a little less noise there. You should still install whiptail or dialog if you want to use the Dialog frontend after the initial setup though.

Development notes

• The Makefile now now uses git worktree to set up the kernel directory instead of git clone. Use FETCH_KERNEL_OPTS to control downloading the kernel branch instead of CLONE_KERNEL_OPTS.
• We have to list wpasupplicant explicitly in the wanted packages now that network-manager downgraded it dependency to a recommends.

v6

Spotlight change

• We now build the rootfs with multistrap, and the resulting first-boot setup is only ~1/6 as long (~33 min -> ~5 min).

Small changes

• Multistrap doesn't do merged /usr directories, whereas debootstrap did. Beware of what's in /usr/bin and what's in /bin etc.
• We now install an NTP client by default. Because the battery died on my machine and now it always thinks it's March 2022 when it boots up.
• Some extra kernel configurations are enabled: wireless extensions so you can check your connection speed with iwconfig (not installed by default, apt install wireless-tools if you want it) and ext4 ACLs (because journald was complaining).
• Linux is bumped to 5.15.64.

Development notes

• The first-boot no longer runs under eatmydata, now that there's far less dpkg work.
• Multistrap doesn't have a feature for downloading the .debs in advance, so it's a lot slower to make changes to the buildrootfs script or ship directory, because now we'll have to download the packages each time.
• Multistrap fills in the APT sources for us, so there are no more fields to fill in for the first-boot init script. As a result, init.template is now plain old ship/sbin/init.

v5

Spotlight change

• A new build after 6 years: Debian is updated to bullseye, and Linux is updated to 5.15.

Big changes

• Kernel support for the backlight has disappeared.
• GPIO in sysfs is fully gone now, so we're now using gpiod. Use our new wrapper to turn on WiFi, with systemctl start wlgpio.
• The networking setup now uses NetworkManager instead of ifupdown and raw wpa_supplicant. Basically run nmtui.

Small changes

• Kernel support for the power button has disappeared too, but I never knew how to use that, so I'm marking that as a small change.
• We used to download libeatmydata1 (used during the first boot setup) without any integrity check 💀. We now check, phew.
• The APT mirror is now Fastly's deb.debian.org.

Development notes

• The kernel is now based on @alchark's branch over at their upstream repo.
• Shout out to @lrussell887's Debian for WM8505 Netbooks with broader goals. I'm interested in switching to multistrap too.
• Travis CI's offering for open source projects is no more, so now we're using GitHub Actions.

v4

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v3

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v2

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v1

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