melon 0.3 “Cantaloupe” (superseded)

Superseded by melon 0.4 “Dudaim”.

melon 0.3 “Cantaloupe”: a faster-booting, smaller build of the 0.2 system (9 October 2026). melon releases are named after melon varieties, in alphabetical order. It was built and checked on a machine without hardware virtualization, so not every test could run: please read “How it was tested” below, in particular that the desktop ISO has not been checked as far as a working desktop.

Which file? Most people want melon-desktop-20261008-x86_64.iso (KDE Plasma on Wayland, live session and installer). Write it to a USB stick (Rufus, balenaEtcher, Ventoy or dd) and boot it. melon-20261008-x86_64.iso is the console-only edition. Check your download against SHA256SUMS.

What's new since 0.2

• Faster boot.
  • An installed melon with no other operating system next to it skips its boot menu after 1 second (hold Shift or press Esc to open it; next to Windows the menu still shows for 5 seconds). GRUB_TIMEOUT and GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE in /etc/default/grub change this.
  • Startup no longer waits for every device to be probed: on the desktop, stage 1 mounts as soon as the disks are there, and the graphics driver, Wi-Fi and sound finish while the services start. The kernel option melon.udev=sync brings the old, slower order back if a machine misbehaves.
  • Services that wait for each other check every 20 ms instead of every 0.42 s.
  • New command melon-boottime shows where a boot's time went.
• Faster live session and installs. The kernel reads the ISO's compressed image on all cores at once (SQUASHFS_COMPILE_DECOMP_MULTI_PERCPU, SQUASHFS_FILE_DIRECT).
• Smaller. GRUB's build leftovers (36 MB on disk) and two unused sizes of the default wallpaper (24 MB) are gone. The desktop ISO is 803 MB (837 MB in 0.2); the console ISO is 385 MB (396 MB).
• Updated packages: linux-melon 7.0.0-r5, runit 2.3.0-r1, eudev 3.2.14-r2, grub 2.14-r3, melon-base 0.1-r34, breeze 6.6.4-r1.

Existing installs don't get these packages yet

The new packages above are not in the online package repository yet, so updating an existing melon install does not bring them in: for now they only come with these ISOs.

How it was tested

Built and tested on a Windows 10 laptop (WSL2, Ubuntu 24.04), where hardware virtualization is not available to QEMU (Windows 10 can't pass it through on this AMD CPU), so every VM ran in software emulation. All packages and the repository index on the ISOs are signed with the melon key.

Ran and passed, on the console ISO:

• qemu-test.py live: boot the ISO and run the unattended install (BIOS);
• qemu-test.py disk: boot the installed system (BIOS) and check it;
• qemu-test.py disk --uefi: boot the same disk with UEFI;
• melon-boottime on the installed system, and a boot with melon.udev=sync on the kernel line.

Ran on the desktop ISO, but failed at the end under software emulation, so the desktop ISO is unverified:

• qemu-test.py desktop-install (install the desktop ISO, boot the installed system, log in through SDDM, Plasma). The install finished (427 s) and the installed system booted; its checks of services, the MIME cache, Flatpak's X11 authorization, file ownership, printing and the gauntlet rewards passed. It then failed: Plasma was not running 20 seconds after login, the greeter was reported as restarted or without a session, and after an SDDM restart the gold greeter was not running; the screenshots it took are black. Software emulation is very slow, so this may be the emulation and not the ISO, but that has not been shown. The desktop ISO has not been checked as far as a working desktop: that needs a run with hardware virtualization or on real hardware (see “On real hardware” below for a first boot).

Not run, without KVM:

• qemu-test.py desktop (the live Plasma session: services, USB stick, printing, Wi-Fi).
• The --luks (encrypted root), dualboot (next to Windows), --offline and --vmware variants.
• The udev start-up change only exists on the desktop profile (the console profile uses mdev), so its effect has not been measured here.

On real hardware:

• The owner booted the desktop ISO on a real PC, and it booted fine.

Problems?

If hardware doesn't work, run sudo melon-hwreport in Konsole and attach the file it writes to an issue.