Initial Ark Linux 64bit Snapshot Ready for Download

 

Those of you who have been watching our development tree will have noticed x86_64 packages being built over the last year or so — in the last week, I’ve extended the installer and CD build scripts to handle them the right way, and an initial snapshot build is available at http://arklinux.osuosl.org/dockyard-devel/iso/arklinux64.iso.

Of course, this is a development snapshot, so it shares all the features of the upcoming release — but also all the reasons why dockyard-devel isn’t being released as 2009.1 or even 2009.1-beta. Among other things, support for hotplugged devices is suboptimal, applications that should go to root mode crash on startup, apt-get doesn’t work, and there’s no splash screen.

That said, I’m using this version on my main machines these days, and if you know how to get things done without GUI helpers, it works pretty well. It is definitely ready for developers to prepare their code for the next release,