sidux changes to aptosid by upgrade or ISO

on September 21, 2010

A press release dated September 11 came to the community's attention Monday, September 13 of the renaming or, as some reported, a fork of sidux to aptosid. Due to conflicts with the commercial backer of the Debian-based distribution, sidux developers have separated themselves from the Sidux e.V. association to continue developing aptosid on their own.

aptosid is based on Debian Sid, the unstable developmental branch, with a heavy concentration on the desktop experience. It is a KDE distribution that adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. These guidelines basically enumerate the main traits of the GNU General Public License, although they are not strictly confined to the GPL. sidux, now aptosid, tries to remain solely Open Source, however it is not included in the Free Software Foundation's list of Free System Distributions due to binary blobs in or accompanying the kernel.

For those running sidux who wish to upgrade to aptosid, the aptsoid site has directions for accomplishing the task. Switch to the aptosid repositories¹ by changing your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sidux.list file and running "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade". After confirming the change to aptosid, run "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade" again.

New installable live images based on Debian sid (as of 2010-09-13) were released on September 14. These images feature kernel 2.6.35.4 and KDE 4.4.5. ISOs are available in KDE-lite, KDE-full, and Xfce versions in 32- or 64-bit. Full specifications and download information is available at www.aptosid.net.