We've done it! m23 rock 11.4 is ready - and now Debian Squeeze is available as an additional client distribution and TDE (which can be seen as a continuation of KDE3) was added to the list of desktop interfaces to choose from.

Everybody who used KDE3 before and missed it painfully in the new distributions can now use an alternative: TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) can now be installed with m23 on Debian Squeeze clients. The differences to the KDE3 you are used to are so irrelevant - except for some small details - that KDE3 users will find their way around the new desktop easily. Of course, there is not only the Trinity desktop available, but also the corresponding program packages.

There have been made improvements on the installation of KDE4, too. By default, gstreamer is now used as backend for the multimedia API Phonon, which is quite useful - as multimedia content (for example audio streams in amarok) can now be played right away.

We had to make some adjustments for m23 to be able to install Debian Squeeze. For example, the m23-xorg.conf generator, which is necessary to set up the graphic mode and the VirtualBox guest additions automatically, was made more robust and now supports newer VirtualBox versions. In this context, the m23 installation routine for the VirtualBox server was adapted for the automatic setup on Debian Squeeze (and other Linux distributions using the same VirtualBox version). Because of their new LSB conformity, the m23 initscripts are now executed smoothly and on time.

To make it possible that software packages can be installed using non-default settings, we added configuration pages for the packages from Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu Lucid that give you the same adjustment options as in manual installation and package configuration.

The m23 user interface now offers more information about clients both installed with m23 and integrated into m23. So now the client properties of both show the first and last name of the main user, the system language, user and group numbers for LDAP and extensive DMI information. Moreover, the readability of the m23 interface was improved by showing table rows in alternating colours in many dialogues. The client status in the client task overview is now shown in the language of the m23 interface.

And of course, there have also been some corrections and bug fixes. Making and deployment of disk and partition images is working again. The m23 server installation program will now find the drive with the installation CD in every case (thanks to the two hardworking administrators Stephan and Bernd) and will adjust the keybord language for the local terminal correctly. The client boot media for amd64 now also contain the file libresolv.so.2, which is necessary for lspci, so more hardware information can be sent to the m23 server. Further minor changes, which cover several configuration 'special cases', which occur in practice, were added to the m23 packages so m23 can work smoothly. More about those minor changes can be found in the Changelog.

The new version is available as an update from the m23 interface, via APT, as ISO file for burning the m23 server installation CD or as preinstalled virtual machine (the two last to be found in the Download section).

Have fun!