After 9 months of development, testing of experimental builds of ALT Linux for Chinese processors with the Loongarch64 architecture, which implements a RISC ISA similar to MIPS and RISC-V, began. Options with user environments Xfce and GNOME, collected on the basis of the Sisyphus repository, are available for download. It includes a typical set of user applications, including LibreOffice, Firefox and GIMP. It is noted that Viola became the first Russian distribution to begin creating builds for Loongarch64. Among the global projects, a port for Loongarch was recently accepted into Debian GNU/Linux.
To speed up the preparation of the port in ALT Linux, the developers used the process of catch-up package assembly, which allows automating the assembly for new platforms, using information about the appearance of new versions in the main repository. Initially, approximately 6 months were spent manually porting thousands of base packages for Loongarch64, after which an automated build process was set up, which allowed to increase the number of available packages to 17 thousand (91.7% of the entire Sisyphus repository). In addition to Loongarch64, the ALT Linux distribution is compiled for 5 primary (i586, x86_64, aarch64, armh, ppc64le) and 3 minor (Elbrus, mipsel, riscv64) platforms.
Additionally, you can note the publication of experimental builds of ALT Mobile for mobile devices. The builds come with the Phosh graphical shell, which is based on GNOME technologies and uses the Phoc composite server running on top of Wayland. Images for QEMU (x86_64, ARM64 and RISC-V), as well as a firmware image for the Pinephone Pro smartphone, have been prepared for download. The composition includes programs such as Telegram Desktop, Chatty, Firefox, Chromium, Megapixels, Clapper, MPV, Amberol, Evince, Foliate, GNOME Calculator, GNOME Sound Recorder, GNOME Software, GNOME Control Center, Phosh Mobile Settings, ALT Tweaks, GNOME Calls and GNOME Maps, adapted to work with small touch screens.
Source: opennet.ru