Linux in The News 4-18-22

Last Updated on April 18, 2022 by KC7NYR

The latest TurnKey Linux distribution is based on Debian 11 and introduces an experimental build for Rapsberry Pi 4.

I’m excited to finally announce the stable release of Turnkey v17.0. It’s been a bit of a slog, taking way longer than I had hoped and there are only two this time. Regardless, we’ve finally made it to the stable release milestone, at least for Core and TKLDev. Hopefully we can keep the momentum up and have more v17.0 appliances ready really soon!

In the meantime, these 2 new v17.0 appliances are published to our mirror network and are also available for download direct from their relevant appliance pages (app page links above, direct download links below) or launched directly from the Hub.

Finally, whilst I can’t take any credit at all, I’m super excited that community member, Yannick has produced “preliminary” Raspberry Pi 4 builds! I’ve only just ordered mine, so I can do some testing and hopefully get “official” RPi builds released sometime soon. If you have an RPi4, please do download an image and give it a test drive. I’m sure that Yannick would welcome some feedback, considering all the hard work he has put in developing this from scratch!

As per previous TurnKey major version releases, the biggest change is the Debian version that this TurnKey release is based on. TurnKey 17.x release is based on Debian 11/Bullseye. As noted in the release candidate announcement the main changes have generally been at the software level, although much of the work will likely not be immediately obvious to an end user. Most of the python2 to python3 code updates occurred in v16.x, however, much of our build infrastructure (including tools in TKLDev) was still python2.

If you have a Raspberry Pi 4, please do go have a look at Yannick’s RPi4 thread. Whilst it isn’t (yet) official TurnKey, Yannick has been on and off involved with the TurnKey Community for a few years now and his efforts have been greatly appreciated. If you do give that a go, please be sure to post feedback on that thread. Even if everything works exactly as you expect, we’d love to hear that confirmed!