Redox OS 0.8.0

By Jeremy Soller on

Overview

We have a lot to show since the 0.7.0 release! This release, care has been taken to ensure real hardware is working, i686 support has been added, features like audio and preliminary multi-display support have been enabled, and the boot and install infrastructure has been simplified and made more robust. I highly recommend skimming through the changes listed below before jumping into the images, if you want more details. It is also recommended to read through the Redox OS book if you want more information on how to build and use Redox OS.

For this release, I would like to personally thank Ron Williams, who goes by rw_van in the Redox OS chat and GitLab. Ron has provided many valuable contributions for this release, including vast updates to the book, support for building with podman, improvements to the build infrastructure, performing hardware testing, and more. I would also like to thank our Redox OS Summer of Code (RSoC) students, whose work was detailed in prior news posts and much of this work is included in this release. Finally, I would like to thank the donors to Redox OS, for it is their contributions that keep our RSoC program and our infrastructure running. Please consider donating to Redox OS using the links on the Donate page!

Discussion

Links where this release is discussed will be added here. To contact me directly, view the links on my personal website: https://soller.dev/

Supported Hardware

Redox OS generally supports the following hardware, and any issues should be reported as bugs:

Redox OS as of this release generally does not support Wi-Fi, USB, and any other hardware not listed above. Please do not report the lack of support until it is specified as generally supported.

Please consider contributing to our hardware compatibility list here: https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox/-/blob/master/HARDWARE.md

Images

It is recommended to try Redox OS in a VM before trying on real hardware. See the supported hardware section for details on what hardware to select for the best experience. For this release, only x86_64 images are provided, as there is still work to be done on i686 and aarch64 support.

Remember to verify images with sha256sum: https://static.redox-os.org/releases/0.8.0/x86_64/SHA256SUM

Demo

A 768 MiB image containing the standard desktop environment as well as pre-installed demo applications

The demo image includes these additional packages:

Desktop

A 256 MiB image containing only the standard desktop environment. Use this if you want to download a smaller image

Server

A 256 MiB image containing only the command-line environment. Use this if the desktop image is not working well for you

Changes

There have been quite a lot of changes since 0.7.0. I have manually enumerated what I think is important in this list. Links to exhaustive source-level change details can be found in the Exhaustive Details section

General

redox

cookbook

audiod

bootloader

drivers

installer

kernel

orbital

orbutils

redoxfs

relibc

Exhaustive Details

Here is an exhaustive list of changes, generated by the new changelog script: