13 Jan 2026

feedPlanet Debian

Steinar H. Gunderson: plocate 1.1.24 released

I've released version 1.1.24 of plocate, as usual dominated by small patches from external contributors. The changelog is below:

plocate 1.1.24, January 13th, 2026

  - Improve error handling on synchronous reads. Reported by
    Björn Försterling.

  - Remove ConditionACPower=true from the systemd unit file,
    to fix an issue where certain charging patterns prevent
    updatedb from ever running on laptops. Patch by Manfred Schwarb.

  - Add a new option --config-file for changing the path of
    updatedb.conf. Patch by Yehuda Bernáth.

As always, you can get it from the plocate page or your favourite Linux distribution (packages to Debian unstable are on their way up, others will surely follow soon).

13 Jan 2026 10:57pm GMT

Simon Josefsson: Debian Libre Live 13.3.0 is released!

Following up on my initial announcement about Debian Libre Live I am happy to report on continued progress and the release of Debian Libre Live version 13.3.0.

Since both this and the previous 13.2.0 release are based on the stable Debian trixie release, there really isn't a lot of major changes but instead incremental minor progress for the installation process. Repeated installations has a tendency to reveal bugs, and we have resolved the apt sources list confusion for Calamares-based installations and a couple of other nits. This release is more polished and we are not aware of any known remaining issues with them (unlike for earlier versions which were released with known problems), although we conservatively regard the project as still in beta. A Debian Libre Live logo is needed before marking this as stable, any graphically talented takers? (Please base it on the Debian SVG upstream logo image.)

We provide GNOME, KDE, and XFCE desktop images, as well as text-only "standard" image, which match the regular Debian Live images with non-free software on them, but also provide a "slim" variant which is merely 750MB compared to the 1.9GB "standard" image. The slim image can still start a debian installer, and can still boot into a minimal live text-based system.

The GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktop images feature the Calamares installer, and we have performed testing on a variety of machines. The standard and slim images does not have a installer from the running live system, but all images support a boot menu entry to start the installer.

With this release we also extend our arm64 support to two tested platforms. The current list of successfully installed and supported systems now include the following hardware:

This is a very limited set of machines, but the diversity in CPUs and architecture should hopefully reflect well on a wide variety of commonly available machines. Several of these machines are crippled (usually GPU or WiFI) without adding non-free software, complain at your hardware vendor and adapt your use-cases and future purchases.

The images are as follows, with SHA256SUM checksums and GnuPG signature on the 13.3.0 release page.

Curious how the images were made? Fear not, for the Debian Libre Live project README has documentation, the run.sh script is short and the .gitlab-ci.yml CI/CD Pipeline definition file brief.

Happy Libre OS hacking!

13 Jan 2026 1:53pm GMT

Aigars Mahinovs: Sedan experience (BMW i5)

Two years of midsize electric sedan experience

This February (2026) marks a full 10 years since I started working for BMW, and a key employment bonus is the ability to drive a company car on special two-year leasing terms. Just before the new year 2026 started, I said goodbye to my latest company car. After driving the BMW i4, I switched to the BMW i5. In terms of power, it was a downgrade as I switched from the maximum power i4 M50 xDrive (all-wheel drive, 600 hp) to the i5 eDrive40 (rear-wheel drive, 340 hp). Did I regret that? Not for a single second! After driving 60,000 km in the last two years with the BMW i5, I was really sad to let it go -- it was the best car I have ever driven. Simple as that.

Read more… (16 min remaining to read)

13 Jan 2026 10:00am GMT