After our Artemis Neo 22.8 release that only addressed the Grub issue for the offline installer, we are proud to present, Artemis Nova, a release that next to the regular upstream refreshes also ships with some additional changes under the hood.
The improvements and system refresh described in this announcement are for the benefit of the ISO live environment and the installation process, so existing EndeavourOS users don’t have to reinstall since we are a rolling distro. We do have some additional info for running installations in this announcement, so make sure you keep yourselves updated on this.
But before I go on with the release announcement I want to give a big shout-out to the forum and Reddit moderators, the entire Telegram admin group and our entire community on all of our official and unofficial channels for helping each other during the recent Grub issue. You all put your shoulders together and did an incredible job. Thank you so much for this stellar achievement, we love you for giving EndeavourOS that extra special touch.
Artemis Nova 22.9
Wallpaper by Rockwallaby
This release is still operating under the major Artemis release flag, so it doesn’t ship with major new features, those are still in progress by the development team for our upcoming major release, Cassini.
The refresh package versions are:
- Calamares 3.2.61
- Firefox 104.0.2-1
- Linux kernel 5.19.7.arch1-1
- Mesa 22.1.7-1
- Xorg-Server 21.1.4-1
- nvidia-dkms 515.65.01-2
- Grub 2:2.06.r322.gd9b4638c5-4
Community editions improvement
- ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols changed to ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols-2048-em due to upstream package changes.
EndeavourOS repo moving
Historically, the endeavouros repo has been below the Arch repos on the list of repos in /etc/pacman.conf. This presents a couple of challenges:
- When we have to create custom versions of packages, we then make our tools depend on the custom versions as is the case with
eos-yad. This creates dependency challenges as has been seen in the past. - If we need to temporarily override something from the Arch repos, we can’t. For example, if we could have temporarily held back grub until we figured out what was going on, we could have greatly lowered the impact of that issue.
We want to be clear, we are just moving our existing small repo to the top and it does not mean we are planning to grow the size of our repo or start overriding critical packages with custom versions. This is consistent with what many other Arch-based distros are doing.
This does create an interesting challenge for us, the nature of the change requires that we will need to modify existing installs. Generally, modifying existing installs is something we don’t do. However, in this case, having a portion of our installs with the repo in different spots will create breakages which we also don’t want. As a result, very soon, we will be pushing out an update which will move the repo to existing installs. We strongly recommend letting this script run. However, if you don’t want your installation to be modified, you can opt-out by adding # EOS do not modify to your /etc/pacman.conf. The script will look for that before making changes.
Grub
As part of the recent challenges with Grub, it has come to light that running grub-install is required when updating grub. Unfortunately, this is difficult for a distro like EndeavourOS to safely automate. This is because EndeavourOS is a distro where we view our installation as a starting point from which we encourage our users to customize it to meet their individual needs. As a result, we have no control over the configuration of the bootloader on existing systems.
We have been considering what to do about that going forward. For Nova, we have decided to take a conservative approach. As a result, we are now shipping a mostly vanilla Grub experience by taking the following actions:
- Removing
grub-tools(This will also be removed from the repos shortly after this release). -
os-proberis no longer enabled for new installations (It is still installed by default). - The custom grub theme has been replaced with a background image.
- Installation doesn’t use a random number for the
bootloader-idanymore.
What this means for new installations
- If you want grub to automatically detect other OSes, you will need to enable os-prober by setting
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=falsein/etc/default/grub. - When you install or remove kernels, the Grub menu will no longer be updated. You will need to run
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Alternatively, you can installgrub-hookfrom AUR if you are comfortable with automating this on your own install. - When Grub is updated, you will need to run
grub-install. There is a message that will inform you of this as part of the update process. - Other grub-tools functions, such as fixing the results of os-prober for other Arch-based installs, have been removed.
- Also, the grub entries will now look “EndeavourOS Linux, with Linux linux”. It might appear like that is a bug but that is how it ships from upstream. The Linux, with Linux part is basically hardcoded in
/etc/grub.d/10_linuxand the final linux is the name of the kernel.
What this means for existing installs
- We are not modifying any configuration on existing installs related to Grub.
- You will start seeing messages about
grub-toolsbeing missing if you update with an AUR helper. - We recommend that you remove
grub-toolsbut ultimately the decision is left to the individual.
I want to thank the entire dev team for this release and for your hard work. Even though Nova is an interim release, the obstacles you endured in creating this one were challenging at the least. In-between server migrations and offering the community help you were able to bring these significant changes in a very short time frame. This is a paramount achievement considering how small our team is. You genuinely can be proud of what you have achieved because you went far and beyond the definition of what an enthusiasm-driven distro is…
version: 
Thanks for your work and your transparency 