Apertis 16.09 Release

16.09 is the current stable development release of Apertis, a Debian/Ubuntu derivative distribution geared towards the creation of product-specific images for ARM (ARMv7 using the hardfloat ABI) and Intel x86-64 (64-bit) systems.

Since this release Intel x86 32-bit systems are no longer supported, which includes devices like Zotac Z-BOX.

This Apertis release is based on top of the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) LTS release with several customization. Test results of the 16.09 release are available in the 16.09 test report.

Release downloads

Apertis 16.09 images
Intel 64-bit

The minimal, target and development images are tested on the reference hardware (MinnowBoard MAX), but they can run on any UEFI-based x86-64 system. The sdk image is tested under VirtualBox.

Apertis 16.09 repositories

 deb https://repositories.apertis.org/apertis/ 16.09 target helper-libs development sdk hmi

New features

Routing information sharing for navigation services

Traprain is a new library introduced in Apertis 16.09 allowing navigation services to share routing information with third party applications. It enables applications to get the available routes to reach one or more destinations: for instance, with Traprain an application can request the routes to the nearby restaurants and sort them by estimated arrival time form the current location to help choosing the one to book.

See the Geolocation and navigation design for details.

Hardware accelerated support for Web contents

Apertis 16.09 ships with readily available support for accelerating Web contents (CSS3 transforms and animations, WebGL scenes) using the GPU efficiently under Wayland. This means that you can navigate the modern Web even with limited CPU resources and run WebGL scenes fully unleashing the power of your GPU.

Most of this work has now been landed upstream and we plan to submit the remaining optimizations soon.

Canterbury API for launching preferences

A new API (org.apertis.Canterbury.AppDbHandler.LaunchAppPreferences) has been implemented to allow applications to launch their preferences in mildenhall-settings, including design and support work, and unit tests for the implementation in Canterbury.

Automatic debug packages

A full rebuild of every package in the archive has been carried out to be able to provide automatically-generated debug packages in the Apertis repositories: this means that every package in the archive which ships binary executables or libraries now automatically has an associated -dbgsym package that contains the debug symbols for those binaries, making debugging with gdb, valgrind, perf and other development tools much easier and consistent.

Groundwork

Web engine stabilization

The move to WebKit2GTK+ has been a major improvement in Apertis 16.06: for this cycle we focused on smoothing any rough edge and making it even more stable. We fixed bugs in page rendering, touch events positioning, touch scrolling, browser drawing loop, contextual zoom to provide a modern and fast Web engine, fully integrated with the platform.

JavaScript bindings to platform APIs

Apertis 16.09 ships a preview of the ability to use platform APIs from native applications written in JavaScript using the Seed engine and GObject-Introspection. This will enable application authors to write their applications in pure JavaScript and sets the foundations for Web applications based on standard W3C technologies that can have access to the full capabilities of the platform.

liblightwood 2 API review

A plan for submitting and reviewing the patches to change liblightwood from version 1 to version 2 (introducing new interface-based APIs) has been created, and an initial round of review on the core work and a couple of the ported widgets has been done. This work will continue into 16.12, now that the groundwork has been laid.

Memory Management

As test cases grows more sophisticated, improper memory management has been detected in various points. To provide the most stable environment even on long running session several memory management issues from leaks to double-free has been fixed mostly in libthornbury and mildenhall

mildenhall-settings refactoring

Common code that could share a single implementation has been moved from each settings program to mildenhall-settings itself, improving the separation between the UI drawing logic and the settings backend. This reduces the chance of bugs, makes development easier and it’s slightly more efficient overall.

Design

List and UI customisation

Various updates have been made to the list design (not yet released) and to the UI customisation design, to cover some new use cases and to clarify how the list (or roller) interacts with adapters and with models, so that objects are stored once in a model, and can be displayed in multiple views simultaneously without being duplicated in memory.

Web runtime

Work has started to define a runtime to host Apertis applications written using only HTML/CSS/JS: instead of C, C++ or Python, applications can use HTML and CSS for all their UI needs, and JavaScript for their logic. They can be fully local, without the need for an Internet connection or use remote services just like any other Apertis application. With the help of the JavaScript bindings previewed in this release, applications using th web runtime will still be able to access all the features provided by the platform.

We always want to make developing for Apertis as easy as possible, and this is another step in that direction.

Locale listing and switching

Minor updates have been made to the internationalization design to clarify the recommendation to use the systemd-localed D-Bus service for determining and changing the system locale. Updates have been made upstream to gettext to allow it to be used to extract and translate strings from ClutterScript files, which are used for UI design.

Infrastructure

Continuous integration improvements

New packages have been added to the continuous integration loop, such as connman, appstream-glib, hotdoc, seed-webkit2, apertis-docs, and apertis-designs. See the CI package list for the complete listing.

Updated packages

The on-going baseline effort has lead to several base packages to be updated: it is worth mentioning the addition of appstream-glib in the target package set, the addition of the syntax-highlighting, devhelp, and license extensions to hotdoc (already available extensions such C, dbus, gi, search and tag have all been upgraded to the latest upstream versions) to the development package set, and the addition of development tools such bmap-tools for speeding up the copying of images into boot media to the Apertis SDK.

Special attention has been put on packages composing the reference HMI, all updated with the latest features and bugfixes. New packages such as traprain, apertis-docs, apertis-designs have also been added to Apertis.

Apertis infrastructure tools

For Debian Jessie based systems:

 deb https://repositories.apertis.org/debian/ jessie tools

For Ubuntu Trusty based systems:

 deb https://repositories.apertis.org/ubuntu/ trusty tools

Images

Image daily builds, as well as release builds can be found at:

 https://images.apertis.org/

Image build tools can be found in the Apertis tools repositories.

Test Framework

The list of available test cases, including manual and automated, can be found here.

LAVA service packages are available in the Apertis tools repository. To install, please follow instructions.

Known issues

  • , - Popups do not work

  • - Software power button does not work on target

  • - Factory reset does not work

  • - mildenhall-settings: does not generate localization files from source

  • - cgroups-resource-control: blkio-weights tests failed

  • - Systemd ftbfs: tests failed

  • - Target does not reboot after system update

  • - Bluetooth pairing fails

  • - Multitouch does not work with the Mildenhall compositor

  • - No features are loaded in Settings application

  • - PAN NAP testcase fails in the bluez-phone testcase

  • - telepathy-gabble: Several tests failed

  • - connman-usb-tethering Test case fails on SDK

  • - libsoup-unit: ssl-test failed for ARM

Apparmor:

  • - apparmor-session-lockdown-no-deny fails

  • - apparmor-pulseaudio: ARM Failed to drain stream: Timeout

  • - apparmor-libreoffice: libreoffice.normal.expected fails: ods_to_pdf: fail

  • - apparmor-session-lockdown-no-deny asserts that canterbury is running, but that isn’t true on SDK

  • - apparmor-session-lockdown-no-deny asserts that various app-bundle processes are running, but that doesn’t work on LAVA

Web (WebKit, browser, GtkClutterLauncher, etc.):

  • - webkit-clutter-javascriptcore: run-javascriptcore-tests fails

  • - Status bar in browser does not get updated

  • - Toggle button string is not visible in the browser

  • - Not able to select input-box on-click in GtkClutterLauncher

  • - Unsupported launguage text is not shown on the page in GtkClutterLauncher

  • - Browser crashes while running http://scripty2.com/demos/touch/simple/

  • - PDF documents cannot be viewed on the browser

  • - Cookies cannot be activated in the browser

  • - Alert box pop up isn’t coming up in browser

  • - Youtube videos cannot be viewed on browser

  • - Alignment issue in browser

  • - Horizontal scroll is not working correctly in browser

Roller:

  • - Items below to the expanded row cannot be selected

  • - Items cannot be selected in Launcher

  • - Focus lost during transitions

  • - Issue with Mildenhall Roller tests

Eye (video player):

  • , , ,

Music application:

  • , , , ,