Flint Os Update

[scooter2014]

Hi All! It’s been awhile since our last email, sorry! We’ve been super busy working on the product, bringing new devs on board and many other exciting things! General Development update Firstly I would like to apologise for the delay between our releases of late. We have expanded our development team and revamped our development develop-build-release workflow in-line with modern DevOps best-practices. This gives us the ability to stay closer with the upstream thus providing more frequent releases going forward. Although this created some overhead for a short time we know it is worth it in the long term. The other core reason for the delay has been a change in the graphics stack for Chromium OS. With Chromium OS r55 onwards the Chromium developers started to remove the X based graphics back-end and replace it with Freon. Freon has many advantages over X but broad out-of-the-box compatibility with different graphics setups isn’t one of them. The minigbm (freon) package has great support for Intel graphics chips and other ARM based solutions but is lacking Ati/AMD and Nvidia support. Our plan is to add support for these other GPUs over time eventually regaining the broad graphics support previously possible. Our first step has been to enable Radeon card support which we have successfully submitted back to the upstream chromium project. If you want to get involved please feel free to contribute to the minigbm development within the Chromium OS project. New Features We’ve been working hard on providing the enhancements the community have been asking for and we have laid the foundation for this with our new Flint OS app built into the OS. Our ambition for this app is for the user to add required tools such as Flash and much more. We will be rolling this out very soon. We also have our first implementation of dual boot enabled, this will allow users to create a dual boot environment on a Mac, Linux or Windows system. We’re currently finalising the requirements and will be releasing it shortly. Pi Update The Pi holds a special place in our heart not only as our first supported platform but also because of all the great work that the foundation does. The move to freon is proving trickier on the Pi than on PC platforms, we believe we have a working minigbm back-end but have been hitting other snags. We recently had a bit of a breakthrough and have a booting GUI image but as you can see from the picture below it’s not quite in a usable state currently. Our future plans regarding OS releases is to update every six weeks in line with the core Chromium OS upgrades and maintain one version behind the current stable chromium version. We will release smaller updates where required in between these larger releases. Thanks again for all the support there are now literally thousands of you signed up to the mailing list and I promise to provide more frequent updates with insights into our new features and development breakthroughs. Please keep an eye on our reddit and twitter as well. Cheers! Will

[bluesmanuk]

I think that it may take off once they get Android app support implemented.

[scooter2014]

Some new Dev blood in mix also helps

[bluesmanuk]

Superceleron to the rescue again then lol