A second refresh to the January 2019 Snapshot ISOs is now available, bringing with it all the improvements and updates made to Feren OS since the last ISO refresh was released, as well as re-doing the ISOs on the latest Mint base.

As current Feren OS users may have noticed, there have been some issues happening lately with the SourceForge Repositories for Feren OS, which have been going on for about over a week now, where the Packages file and potentially other files that APT tries to retrieve on an apt update appear to return 404 Errors, and therefore 'fail' to download, even though they exist. Due to this issue being random at first before getting as bad as it has now and not showing any signs of stopping, alongside other issues happening with the SourceForge Repository that are less than desirable, I am now slowly transitioning the Feren OS PPAs to a new location, before entirely retiring the old ones on SourceForge.

This won't, however, mean that the Feren OS ISO pages on SourceForge are being retired - only the Feren OS Repositories page will be getting 'retired' from SourceForge soon.

This is just a quick blog post to say that the Feren OS Stock i386 ('x32') and Feren OS Stock amd64 ('x64') ISO Download Links have been updated to bring the January 2019 Snapshot to the latest package versions. There is not much in terms of differences here, but the differences that are here are quite significant for new users.

All the packages that are update-able to their latest versions on the Ubuntu 18.04 base have been updated to their latest versions, meaning you will not have to do as many updates upon installing the OS than you will have to with the original January 2019 Snapshot ISOs.
As well as this, Weather (Applet) has been updated to make it work again as well as bring its latest available features, thanks to version 2.1.2.

As well as these updates, another program was recently made for Feren OS that all Feren OS Machines will now come with by default (current users may have noticed it being installed with updates) that will only show initially for new users. The 'Welcome to Feren OS' screen, also known as 'feren-oobe', is a screen that appears initially on all new user accounts on Feren OS and allows the user to set up a few parts of the Feren OS experience right from the get-go before they begin using Feren OS:

• Codecs (skips the page automatically if you have installed the codecs during the installer, can be auto-skipped via other ways)
• Theme and Layout (choose between Default, Dark Mode, or one of the Feren OS Layouts)
• Clock Placement (choose between Clock On Desktop or Clock On Panel) if you have chosen Default or Dark
• Animations (choose to enable or disable animations)
• Enjoy Feren OS as you desire it to be initially and be sent right to your Desktop after the screen is finished.

More options might come soon to this 'OOBE' (Out Of Box Experience) Screen, such as picking your Accent Colour, and more, but this will be sure to make Feren OS a lot better for new users that may not like small details such as the theme mode (light/dark), the clock placement, and/or the other tiny details. This 'OOBE' will also be ported over to Plasma in the future as an initial Feren OS 'OOBE' screen for Feren OS Next now that Feren OS Next has a Themer equivalent for it.

In conclusion, I hope new users and current users alike will love the changes made to the January 2019 Snapshot ISOs to improve the initial experience of Feren OS greatly, and I hope you are enjoying and/or will enjoy Feren OS!
​The download link remains the same, have fun.

So, I'm going to be blunt starting things off: 2018 was a huge year for Feren OS, and also me (The Developer) alike, for many reasons. Because of this reason, I'm more-so going to be doing a general(ish) review of 2018, albeit with the biggest focus being on Feren OS-related events. To put it short, there were many great happenings in 2018 for Feren OS and GNU/Linux in general as an OS Family, however, as many will have already known by now, it was not all sunshine and rainbows this year. We lost some pretty significant people in regards to my childhood and very likely many others', for starters, and secondly things were not all too easy at times, and mistakes were made, and I'm not going to deny that.

In wake of the immediate availability of Linux Mint 19.1's Repositories to Feren OS Users done earlier today, both the 32 Bit Feren OS ISO and the 64 Bit Feren OS ISO have been updated, with Feren OS 'KDE Experimental' getting an update of its own at a later time and date. The ISOs can be downloaded at the same place as they have always been available at, and all the MD5SUMs and SHA256SUMs have been updated on the 'Get It' page of the website.

​Here's what has been changed in the ISOs:

You've heard this correctly, Feren OS's Linux Mint Repositories can now be easily upgraded to those of Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa, meaning that Feren OS can now have Cinnamon 4.0, Nemo 4.0, and all the other changes for non-Feren-OS components reflected onto its experience.

Updating is as simple as can be, just update 'feren-os-ppa-settings' to the latest version, Refresh the APT Cache by hitting 'Refresh' in Update Manager, and then update everything as the Mint 19.1 Repositories should then take effect the moment feren-os-ppa-settings is installed and the APT Cache refreshed.

Anyway, since it's simple enough to update, let's see what has changed:

So, if you haven't heard yet, Linux Mint 19.1 has had a BETA released for it which includes Cinnamon 4.0, and all the other latest additions and such for it, and here's how things are right now with getting Feren OS ready for Cinnamon 4.0:

There are now new updates to the Feren OS ISOs available, which bring with them urgent fixes for potential installation failure vectors, as well as updating everything possible to the latest versions.

Here's the changelogs for each ISO:

So, after the poll on the Google+ over the desired choice of Desktop Environment for the 'Emergency Desktop Environment', sparked by the potential desire of Linux Mint Team to kill off Metacity support in Cinnamon (Metacity is the Window Dressings around windows, which includes the Close, Maximise, Minimise and Menu buttons, and the borders around windows), the word from the community of Feren OS Users who participated made their call, with the options being either KDE Plasma or GNOME. Due to a more than overwhelming response in support of using the Plasma Desktop Environment as the next DE, and due to a number of other reasons as well, Feren OS is about to change, for the better.

Every day I'm always trying to make improvements and features and improve existing features in order to make the Feren OS Experience as great as possible... this can also mean that issues may arise and so I want to try and make sure that the issues are as lacking and rare as possible, but quite recently that has slipped a bit, and some noticeable cracks have shown in the updates Feren OS has had in recent time, before eventually being fixed, within Feren OS and Feren OS's packages alone. Here's an apology for the inconvenience those issues might've then caused, as well as me explaining what I've put in place since that has happened.

Known Bugs/Issues for 1/1/2019 Update:
- 'Login Window', aka 'lightdm-settings', is left-over from when LightDM was still the DM for Next
​- displaymanager.conf has been re-added to the Calamares Installer (caused LightDM Initialisation Failure issues for some users) for SDDM Configuration, but I'm not entirely sure about whether it will work fine for everyone now or not.
- Default Favourites will only display once the menu has been swapped out for an 'Alternative' menu, due to a slightly glitchy value for the default favourites value (don't know what causes it, but looking into it)...
- Some Open With defaults are completely wrong, such as Text Files opening in Okular rather than Kate by default, these will be ironed out near the end of development, most likely
- Potentially more minor niggles
Changelog...? Check the January 2018 Snapshot Announcement Blog Post for that...

So, I got hold of Issue 241 of Linux Format from a local store after hearing that there was a review of Feren OS in it, meaning it'd be good for me to check it out, on top of the fact that I usually get Linux Format anyway, to then find out that they NOT ONLY did a review of the OS, BUT ALSO a full-fledged article on Feren OS, namely getting started with the OS! Cheers for that, by the way, if you're reading this, you people that made those the review and the article, but I thought I might spend a blog post clarifying some things up that seem to have been confused regarding Feren OS in 2018.

So, for all those who want to translate Feren OS to other languages, you can now obtain the POT files for the strings in Feren OS Programs and Additions to other applications (for bits that'd otherwise be in English no matter what locale's chosen), from this GitLab Repository:

Some notes:
- Please follow the instructions on the Repository Description in order to contribute translations
- It'd be preferred if you DO add po and mo files in the specified locale's folder, based on the main POT File, you can use programs such as 'poedit' to create the 'po' file, and then you can make the 'mo' file with commands such as 'msgfmt -v namehere.po -o namehere.mo'.
- The repo, at the time of writing this, is currently sparce. The repo will gain more and more POT files as the OS gets more and more packages updated in order to add translate-ability to them, as so far only Layout Manager has translate-ability in-code. (2018.07.0.0.1)

So, a little bit of a short blog post, but, there's two things I'd like to highlight:
1. The upgrade path for Feren OS on 16.04 users
    - The upgrade path, as promised, for Feren OS on 16.04 users to update to an 18.04 base, has now been unblocked once more, because of a promise I made that upon the release of Ubuntu 18.04.1 the path would be unblocked once more, as well as the fact that, obviously, Ubuntu 18.04.1 got released officially. With the latest updates to the Major Updater, future Major Updaters also now have better protection against errors that could be caused from issues such as not being able to access the Feren OS Repositories, etc, now too, with a package check for a package on the Feren OS Repositories failing then causing the program to stop Major Updating before the process gets to the point where things aren't easily undone, as an extra pre-Update check.

2. Contributions for Translating
    - So, about Translations: I know a lot of you have been sending me emails about wanting to contribute translations to Feren OS, and for that, I'll say right now: Sorry for not replying, and I'll, once done with a big change that I'm working on for Feren OS Live, for the standard OS usage path (More Details Soon), I'll work on adding in translation support for Feren OS Additions, as well as add a repository on my GitLab with all the English Strings, and then have all the locales I know of separated in there as branches, with all the strings, in files, so that translators can then fork, translate, and pull request the translations for different locales, so that I can then attempt to add in translations for non-English languages in Feren OS.

Applies to: 2018 October Snapshot (Codename: Titanium) and later snapshots (Updated)

An important update has released for feren-os-majorupdate. If you haven't updated to version 2018.07.0.0.1 or above, and haven't Major Updated yet, you should upgrade that package now, as well as make sure that 'feren-ppas' is up to date too.
Well, you've all waited patiently for this moment, and now I'm happy to announce that I have dropped all the packages required for upgrading Feren OS to an Ubuntu 18.04/Mint 19-based Feren OS.

Here's what you need to do:
1. Go into Update Manager
2. Hit 'Refresh'
3. Once the updates list has been refreshed, select 'feren-os-majorupdate' to be updated, and hit 'Install Updates'
4. Restart the system when you want to begin the long update process, and confirm that you'd like to update there and then the next time Feren OS boots.

If you can't find an update for 'feren-os-majorupdate', here's what you need to do:
1. Go into Software/Software Manager
2. Search for 'feren-os-majorupdate'
3. Go to 'feren-os-majorupdate' (Package) and install it
4. Restart the system when you want to begin the long update process, and confirm that you'd like to update there and then the next time Feren OS boots.

NOTE: If you still have 'feren-system-packages' installed, then that package should pull down the 'feren-os-majorupdate' package for you onto the system, assuming it's up to date.

For businesses, you can still schedule the Major Update if you haven't already done so, by checking this blog post.

Again, thank you everyone for waiting patiently for this update path to be added in, and a huge thanks to those who helped test the Major Updater, as well, thanks to all the hard work, the general users should now be able to comfortably update over to 18.04-based Feren OS.
PS: If you do catch wind of an error relating to the package 'acpid', don't worry about it. I know about that issue, and so implemented a next-boot script that then fixes that issue automatically for you the next time Feren OS boots after the Major Update, before then clearing out the remains of the Major Updater, now it's then not needed, for now, so that you can get right back to managing installed applications, packages, etc.
Oh, and regarding the ISO: That's coming a little bit later, I was mainly focusing on the upgrade path for now, and so haven't yet started on the next snapshot's ISO (based on Mint 19.0 Cinnamon).

So, here's good news, and also a mandatory "please help me test stuff" message, regarding the Feren OS Major Update Utility, which is coming (hopefully) very soon to facilitate the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04/Mint 19 for current Feren OS Users.

So, the good news is that throughout all my testing, I can confirm that the utility can now successfully be booted directly into in its own graphical step of the boot process, to make sure that the least amount of damage can be done to Feren OS during the base update, as well as successfully update to 18.04 while keeping all the Feren OS and Mint goodness in the OS, on the following hardware:
- Virtual Machine (Tested in VirtualBox)
- Intel (HP Pavilion dv6 Tested)
- AMD (Lenovo Yoga 510 Tested)

However, here comes the mandatory "please help me test stuff" message: NVIDIA. You might have already noticed that there's a mention of all the common hardwares that Feren OS is known to install on, BUT NVIDIA. This is because of unfortunately I have, as of right now, got NO machines to test which have NVIDIA Hardware on them, and so can't test the Major Updater / Update Process on NVIDIA Hardware, which is where you people come in.