The release of the T2 SDE 26.3 meta-distribution has been published, providing an environment for creating custom distributions, cross-compilation, and maintaining package versions up to date. Among the popular distributions built on the T2 system, Puppy Linux stands out. The project offers 10 ready-made bootable ISO images with a graphical environment based on KDE, assembled for architectures arm64, ia64, ppc64, ppc64le, riscv64, riscv64 rva23, i686, and x86-64.
The platform focuses on creating builds based on the Linux kernel, but prototypes are separately developed to build packages for various operating systems, including macOS, Haiku, and BSD systems. Plans include supporting the creation of environments based on other kernels, such as L4, Fuchsia, and RedoxOS, as well as building for Android (AOSP). More than 7,000 packages are available for building.
T2 supports 20 hardware architectures used in both modern embedded systems and on outdated equipment. For example, support is provided for gaming consoles like Nintendo Wii U and Sony PS3, as well as workstations from SGI, Sun, and HP. For most architectures, booting is possible in environments with 128 MB of RAM. Supported architectures include Alpha, Arc, ARM64, HPPA64, IA64, Loongarch64, M68k, Microblaze, MIPS64, Nios2, OpenRISC, PowerPC 64, RISC-V 64, s390x, SPARC 64, SuperH, i486, i686, i786, x86-64, and x32.
Among the changes in the new version:
- Fully reproducible builds with the KDE Plasma desktop environment have been formed, utilizing Wayland. Cross-compilation support has been provided for most components of Qt6 and KDE. Builds with KDE are available not only for x86-64 and ARM64 architectures but also for i686, IA-64, PowerPC64+le, UltraSPARC64, and RISCV64+RVA23 systems. Optionally, support for installing other user environments, including GNOME and Cosmic, is available.
- Packages with a modified version of the X server have been added, which restores support for the 2D acceleration architecture XAA (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture). XAA support allows for the reintroduction of 2D acceleration capabilities for systems with very old graphics cards (ATi Mach-64, ATi Rage-128, SiS, Trident, Cirrus, Matrox Millennium/G450, Permedia2, Tseng ET6000, and Sun Creator/Elite 3D), which had to resort to software rendering because DDX drivers for these cards do not support current acceleration architectures.
- Over 7300 packages have been updated, including GCC 15.2, LLVM/Clang 22.1, Linux kernel 6.19.5, Mesa 26.0.1, Glibc 2.43, Musl 1.2.5, and uClibC 1.0.56.
- The system manager systemd is enabled by default.
- Added the ability to boot in live mode for testing and graphical installation.
- Support for parallel package builds has been implemented.
Source: opennet.ru
