Release 1.9 - The tinkerer

Hello everyone!

We are happy to announce that a new version of AstroArch is available!

First and most important, there are no breaking changes which means you don't need to flash the 1.9 image, updating with update-astroarch willl bring you over to 1.9.

There are no big changes in this release, few pesky bugs have finally been fixed and more documentation has been added, additionally a new layer for tinkerers has been added which now allows some more customization for people who desire to run custom scripts or have the environment configured differently.

IMPORTANT: it seems discover is not officially supporting ArchLinuxARM anymore, I am unsure if this was intentional or not, flatpak may now be used with discover to install packages

KSTARS HORRIBLE LIGHT BLUE SKY: if you don't flash 1.9 but you just upgrade (1.9 has this configured already) you will notice at daytime the sky in Kstars will be light blue, if that is the case follow the instructions under this thread to fix it => https://indilib.org/forum/general/14737-upgraded-kstars-awful-colors-help-needed.html

Enjoy and clear skies to everyone!

Fixed

• date time not updating via internet
• not being able to set the system clock from plasma

New features

• indi-pylibcamera is fully supported and fully working
• plugins! AstroArch started to ship what we call plugins, plugins are very small scripts that will help you dealing with some packages faster
• add plugin to enable/disable the gps daemon
• add plugin to install and enable sftp server
• add plugin to install and enable bluetooth
• you can now add a new file under /home/astronaut/ called extra_zsh.sh and you can add there your own scripts to do stuff, those will be magically loaded and be available every time a new session (ssh/terminal) is started so you can tinker whatever you like still keeping everything synchronised with the main configuration

Documentation

• documented how to setup your GPS and have it working
• documented how to add more packages
• documented how to install python packages
• documented hot to add a password to novnc
• documented how to use a vnc client and not a browser
• documented how to use GUI installers (discover, pamac)

Deprecated

• unfortuantely the raspberry Pi 3 is not more officially supported because of hardware constraints
• pipewire-media-session is finally deprecated for good in favor of wireplumber

Full Changelog: v1.8...v1.9

release 1.8

If you are upgrading from 1.7, the upgrade is too complex to script so please download the new image and flash it - sorry for any trouble!

Additionally, be aware that it is very likely that 1.7 will break after 2024-03-17 as one of the package sddm won't be pinned anymore and it is likely to break the system, please upgrade before that date or don't run update-astroarch

Fixed

• the dark them has no more striped bug or incomplete colouring
• fixed polkit rules and group permission, now reboot and shutdown won't emit any error

Removed

• x11vnc - this was breaking the UI theme and has been dumped, farewell!
• vnc clipboard, tigervnc doesn't support clipboard paste

Added

• discovery - you can now use a graphical program to find, add or remove software
• update notification - if there will be some packages to be updated, a bell will appear
• HDMI - AstroArch supports now both VNC and HDMI!
• use UUID instead of /dev/X, this will allow to boot the same image from SD, USB, HDD or NVMe with no manual changes (previously required)
• better initial support for Pi 5, some configs are baked especially for your pi5
• tigervnc as VNC server, this will add some nice performance boost to VNC

Changed

• the default wallpaper is now a slideshow
• resizing partition at first boot now works with every media automatically
• the access point now has a small suffix e.g AstroArch-XXXXX where X are random chars

Release 1.7

CHANGELOG:

• Do not make links to desktop
• Document README.md with useful passwords
• Fix logic for raspberry in bootstrap script
• Fix repo sync for old update scripts
• Document booting AstroArch from external disks
• Document how to add swap
• Fix starting condition for x11vnc systemd unit
• Swap systemd-timesyncd with chronyd (this should fix all time sync issues)
• Fix missing raspberrypiconf for i2c in build script
• Add fortune and cowsay for enhanced MOTD
• Add arandr to change screen resolution
• Drop support for version 1.4
• Replace gedit with kate (text editor)
• Disable kwallet (this should fix all WiFi issues with passwords)
• Document how to set timezone using CLI
• Document mkscr in the build guide
• Fix plasma5 packages dependencies (plasma is close to release 6 and packages are changing names to avoid conflicts)
• Exit early if bootstrap script fails at any command
• Added firefox as fallback browser

Release 1.6.0

CHANGELOG:

• Onboarding a RTC device to syn time at boot is now easy, the i2c-dev is enabled by default and the only thing needed is adding the device name to the i2c-rtc overlay to load the kernel module and sync time automatically
• Added AstroDMx to pre-packaged software
• Added indiserver UI to pre-packaged software
• Added astromonitor as a system package
• Repackaged websockify for web VNC connections (python 3.11 broke the old package)
• Fixed a broken libssl1.1 dependency that was causing paru to fail

Release 1.5.0

• added commands to rollback indi/kstars
• replaced Alacritty with Konsole
• force desktop icons to be executable

1.4.0 - new icons and better resolution

• we have now our own set of icons!
• by default astroarch starts now at 1920x1080

NO NEED TO MAKE A NEW IMAGE - update-astroarch is now able to apply changes

v.1.3.1

Full Changelog: v1.3.0...v1.3.1

Prepare for upgrade without reinstalling the ISO

download link => https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jYBeKFioCXWDqEf0wk0shj0Dn7eJ8dcX/

v1.3.0

Full Changelog: v1.2.0...v1.3.0

Bugfix:

• fix device name on resize script
• fix overlapping chars in terminal
• fix time not synchronizing
• fix samba sharing
• fix astromatto repo name

Generics:

• reworked dependencies
• moved to raspi kernel (SDDM+plasma not wokring on linux-aarch64)
• bumped kstars to 3.6.2
• bumped indi to 1.9.9
• bumped phd2 to 2.6.11dev3

link to iso => https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UBenTuSsUSR8bYcdnjDZRb8xtzDdeAfK/

1.2.0

This the first release known to work with most of the equipment, the archlinux kernel has been swapped out in favor if the raspberry one to solve some FTDI issues I was seeing

v1.1.0

Fix:

• image properly resize on first boot
• wallpaper set up correctly on first boot

New:

• samba now starts on system boot
• indi, kstars and phd2 are now coming from a repo and not compiled on the machine