Moving on with the Feren OS Repositories

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.

​Where are the new repositories?

For now, the new repositories are being hosted on separate GitHub Repositories on the Feren-OS GitHub Team, with more improvements being planned for the repositories in the future. As of the time of writing this, these are the new repositories:
Stable: https://github.com/feren-OS/Feren-Repository
Unstable (now 'testing'): https://github.com/feren-OS/Feren-Repository-testing (currently empty at the time of writing due to not having any packages to test yet)
Non-LTS Update Channel: https://github.com/feren-OS/Feren-Repository-nonlts
Misc. Extra Software: https://github.com/feren-OS/Feren-Repository-software
Extras for Neon-U.E.-PPA-enabled computers: https://github.com/feren-OS/Feren-Repository-neon

How do I switch repositories to the new ones?

To switch the repositories on your Feren OS install to the new GitHub Repositories, you have two options:

• Either be able to see an update for and update feren-os-ppa-settings to 2019.02.0.0.1 and have the repositories switched over automatically during that update...
• ...or run the following command in Terminal, as long as you have Administrator rights and an internet connection (Sudo Password = Your Password):

.           sudo sh -c 'wget -O - https://github.com/feren-OS/Feren-Maintenance-Scripts/releases/download/2018.02.0.0.0/switch-to-gh-repos.sh | bash'

Once you have done either of those two options, you should now be on the new repositories rather than the old ones.

Miscellaneous changes + upcoming changes:

• The Feren OS x64 and x32 ISOs are being redone to fix some virtualisation issues, and will now include the new repositories right out of the box upon those ISO updates' release.
• The PPA structure may also change again in the future, so updates may come in the future to change the repositories again to reflect their new structures.
• The 'neon' PPA will not be a permanent repository, as it's just there for now for Next as I experiment with the KDE Neon User Edition PPA's inclusion in Feren OS, and decide whether I want to include that repository, clone that repository and deliver updates slower to guarantee stability to Plasma and other packages, or just not include it at all.
• The Major Update scripts have already been updated too to change the repositories over.

I hope you will enjoy Feren OS once more after making this change to your install(s), and I apologise for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. While the new repositories are still repetitively downloaded for some weird reason, they are a step in the right direction towards fixing the 'repeating package list downloads' issue once and for all.
For now, enjoy Feren OS, and I will hopefully see you for better news...

The Feren OS Developer