Manjaro 0.8.13-rc1 released

After another two weeks of development we are proud to present to you our first release candidate of our next stable release, Manjaro 0.8.13. This time we ship XFCE 4.12 tweaked and patched to have the best XFCE experience possible, Plasma 5.3.0, KDE Frameworks 5.9.0 and latest KDE Apps 15.04!

New in XFCE

Thunar file manager finally supports tabs and other cool features like inverting the selection, improves on location handling and the shortcuts side pane. On the panel we have now a popup calendar and support for timezones. The settings area has improved display settings with the ability to clone displays via the GUI and other basic monitor management options. Last but not least, the window manager has smart placement optimizations for determining the best area to place a new window where it’s least covered on the screen. It also now supports alinging windows next to each other rather than using random gaps.

New in KDE

With this new release of Plasma 5 providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Changes under the hood of KDE include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5. Plasma 5.3.0 introduces a new major version of KDE’s workspace offering. The Manjaro Art Team has forked the new KDE Breeze set and named it Maia to follow in line with the rest of our visually appealing desktops, this artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability. Most of the known errors within KDE5 are now fixed. Post those, we should still take a look at …

Changes in Thus

We worked also hard to improve our graphical installer Thus and our system tools to make the installation and usage of Manjaro as easy and smooth as possible. With this install medias we now support Manjaro to be installed on MMC/SD-Cards aswell. This will some of you to install our distribution to smaller devices without hard drives.

  • Add fstab module from calamares
  • Add support for luks in fstab generation
  • Fix ssd detection for MMC devices
  • Remove uneeded mkdir_p function, remove run()
  • Show root StateBox, refractor, move some comments to docstrings
  • Fixes for gummiboot and luks
  • Clean and “pepify” bootloader.py
  • Remove debug output line in chroot.py, clean up a little
  • Some cleanup of process.py
  • Cleaned advanced partitioning mountpoints check code
  • Ignore some devices in partition-module (propers mmc support)
  • Simplify creating directories
  • Use platform.machine instead of os.uname to get architecture
  • Create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d if necessary before writing the keyboard configuration
  • Setting the LANG variable in /etc/environemnt is not needed
  • Move console and X11 keyboard configuration closer together
  • Services are enabled in buildiso
  • Always add “us” as second keyboard language.
  • Change advanced partition requirements depending if using gummiboot or grub2
  • vmlinuz, initramfs and fallback is provided now directly with thus.conf
  • Don’t look for internet connection endless if none is available
  • Use google.de for ping
  • Adjust ping url in misc
  • Smaller efi partition
  • Don’t unmount root (done on final step)
  • More logging when unmounting
  • Simplify mounting/unmounting code and try to fix unmounting problems
  • Each gummiboot entry has its own file, or will only show the last one
  • Fix vmlinuz and initramfs strings for Manjaro kernels.
  • Efi partition only exist with efi and grub2
  • Fix gummiboot automatic partitioning
  • Remove hdparm and keyboardctl bits
  • Changes from Antergos/Cnchi@aef279f
  • We don’t support separate /usr by default
  • Refractor chroot.py, unmount dirs in reverse, more debug logging
  • Bootloader, install grub efi in a chroot
  • Mount special dirs at the start of configure_system functions
  • Fix mounting special dirs
  • Fix bootloader checking logic
  • Slice the efi_path correctly
  • Remove –verbose flag when installing grub-install
  • Use default value when creating last partition with sgdisk
  • Remove useless code
  • Call grub-install with verbose option, for debugging
  • Pass efi path in automatic mode
  • Calculate partition sizes using integer divisions
  • Use correct device partition number in automatic partitioning
  • Round up swap size in automatic installation
  • Fix validation in user_info
  • Make sure part sizes are ints
  • Mount boot (/boot) before efi (/boot/efi) partition
  • Don’t mount/unmount within mkinitcpio
  • Fix grub-install call
  • Add efi partition size when calculating root partition size
  • Fix some typos in slides
  • Add gtk 3.16 compatibility
  • Fix bootloader crash
  • More efi fixing
  • Fix double-installation attempt of bootloader
  • Fix broken creation of /home folder for user
  • Fix issue with wrong ssd options in /etc/fstab
  • Remove pulseaudio-ctl call
  • Fix crash when detecting ssd
  • Efi partition is /boot/efi
  • Add more translation strings
  • Fix forward labeling issue
  • Fix slide order in check
  • Fix translation issues
  • Added new slides by David Linares
  • LUKS support in advanced mode (manual partitioning)
  • Bootloader installation is now optional in all modes
  • PEPified code
  • Tweaked UI
  • Update translations

Changes in CLI-Installer

  • Adopt syslinux changes
  • Adopt initramfs/vmlinuz renaming
  • Try to fix pacman configuration
  • Add option for x11 keyboard config

This release comes with XFCE 4.12, KDE Plasma 5.3.0, linux318 kernel and all the usual Manjaro and upstream updates. Stable branch was used to create these install medias. Please give us feedback and report any issues with this release.

kind regards Philip Müller, Manjaro Development Team

Written on May 17, 2015