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Ultramarine 42 Found its Towel

Image Drop! (Again)

You may remember a similar drop for Ultramarine 41. As domino effects go this year has been pretty wild. Ultramarine 42 has been out for a bit for existing users, but let's see what's new in the images.

Taidan Improvements

We've put a lot of time into Taidan, our out-of-box experience, in Ultramarine 42. It's really matured into a polished and useful tool. We hope to land some more features in Ultramarine 44 this winter, so stay tuned to that.

WSL with Hardware Accel

Windows Subsystem for Linux users now have hardware acceleration! This means you can run apps inside Ultramarine inside Windows using the GPU from your real device. Hope you have fun with this one!

Now to Mado for what's new in Terra:

Terra 43 has Landed

We Need Your Help!

If you have any suggestions (including package requests) for Terra, you may submit them here.

If you would like to become a package maintainer (it's easier than Fedora I promise!), please look into our guide.

Changes

Dropping Collaboration with Repology

Due to maintenance burden and conflicts, collaboration between Terra and Repology has ended starting in Terra 42.

Specifically, Repology requires all Terra sources to be fully accessible via a predictable URL format. However, package sources are stored recursively in the monorepo, which is why we created madoguchi (aka. mg) to overcome this issue. However, Repology still reported missing links from the mg API without giving further information while we failed to reproduce the issue.

We recommend using pkgs.org instead.

Performance Speed-ups in CI

We have managed to squeeze out more optimizations to our build system (which is based on GitHub Actions, you may read more here), meaning we can now deliver your favorite packages more quickly.

Mock Speed-ups

Mock in Terra now skips container bootstrapping and instead directly installs build dependencies in the SRPM step, speeding up CI time for mock packages.

Switching to ARM Runners

We have noticed ARM runners schedule and pull containers faster than x86_64 runners on GitHub Actions, which is why we have switched to ARM runners for our normal tasks, such as auto-updating, backporting, and manifesting.

Large Runners

We now have proper x86_64 "large" runners!

We have been struggling with GitHub's runners performing more intense builds, notably our Zed packages. Introducing more powerful large runners mean we can finally handle builds that require more storage space, RAM, and/or CPU resources.

Smaller Builder Containers

We managed to squeeze down our builder size by ~90% to 240MiB. Combining with the switch to ARM runners, the time required to pull our containers shortened from ~50s to ~20s.

More SRPM Macros

Roachy and I (Mado) during summer have cooked and proposed more than 9 different releases to our in-house anda-srpm-macros, featuring bug fixes and more handy RPM macros. Documentations will soon arrive in our devdocs.

Contributor Corner

Thank you to everyone who tested and contributed to Ultramarine 42 and Terra 43, we appreciate every bit of help.

Thank you to our monetary and hardware sponsors:

• Owen Rummage - $5/mo
• Peter Stöckli - $5/mo
• markun8633 - $5/mo
• Daryl Fisher - $5/mo
• Oliver Medhurst - $5/mo
• University of Minnesota Association for Computing Machinery - Hosting

Want to join this list? Sponsor us on GitHub! You'll support Ultramarine, Terra, and get some sweet perks.

If you'd rather donate hardware, please email ihaveachromebookidontwant@fyralabs.com.
This email is for all hardware, not just Chromebooks. If you're especially keen you can just email Owen.

Getting Support 

Join one of our Chats, the subreddit, or Open an Issue on GitHub. We'll get you going again in no time

Delays, 43, and a Second Kitchen Sink

Back to me (Jaiden) and ooh boy I'm writing another one of these.

Ultramarine 42 got hit with a domino from 41. You're probably thinking of a row of dominoes falling neatly, imagine someone using a domino like a metal chair instead.

I feel bad about these delays, it's stressful and incredibly demotivating to work on something with a deadline stamped 6 months ago, I imagine the rest of the team feels similarly.

We understand that this is less than you may expect from us, and for that we are truly sorry. We hope that upgrades have helped ease issues over the last few months.

But now we're past these two releases from development hell! We polished up a ton of papercuts in 42, and can focus on the small bumps that get us a fresh pile of 43 images and upgrades.

Ultramarine 43 will not be flashy, but it will be less delayed. Keep an eye on your app stores and this blog for news.

Thank you for sticking with us, the kindness and support we get from the community, especially in the Discord, makes this all worthwhile. We love making Ultramarine for you, and hope you love using it.

P.S. for my regulars, Fyra This Week will be back on 10/27, we've got a lot to talk about!