Rounding Out 2017 With a Final Release

Well, Christmas is almost upon us and with it comes the final release for ArchLabs this year.  Once again the intention was for just an ISO refresh but once again we got on a roll and we found once again,  we had enough to warrant a full release.

With that, the ArchLabs team and I are proud to bring you 2017.12.

The biggest addition to ArchLabs this time around is the removal of Calamares and the re-appearance of ABIF.  There are a couple of reasons behind this.   Firstly, both Nate and I prefer ABIF as our method of installation and secondly, we managed to trim down the ISO by a few more MB’s.

ABIF has been fine-tuned to suit ArchLabs needs and is a bit more of an in-depth way of installing ArchLabs.  Don’t be scared off by ABIF, it is surprisingly simple to use.

For those of you who have never used ABIF, you will be able to find a walkthrough in the next coming days at our forum.  In the meantime, this example here is very similar to ABIF, you should be able to use this demonstration for now.

New members to the Archlabs Team

Alongside the new ISO, we have two new members to welcome to the ArchLabs team.  Lawrence Ott (avnsgt) and Stavros Grigoriou (unix121).  Larry is our documentation man.  Stavros, he looks after our Reddit page and is in the process of giving it a make over.

Together Larry and I are working on a collection of information pertaining to the default (and possibly popular) applications and utilities as well as some tips and tricks.  This will be known as the “ArchLabs Knowledge Base“.  We were hoping to have this ready to coincide with the 2017.12 release but as usual, our non-Linux lives have got in the way and we are a bit behind the eight ball.  The Knowledge Base will see a release in the very near future.

A few cool things we came through with for this release is an @archlabslinux email address.  You can contact us anytime via these email addresses which are listed under our profiles at the “Team ArchLabs” page, here.

What’s new?

Minor but extremely worthy additions and changes to ArchLabs are as follows:

• jgmenu a very cool menu has been added to Polybar.
• Polybar itself has had another makeover, and I think it is looking super sharp.
• Pacli has been forked for use with ArchLabs.  All the options now work as they should.
• A new default monospaced font has been added, the very stylish Fantasque Sans font.
• The obligatory change to the default wallpaper, which is pretty much expected upon every release.  I personally have subscribed to the “Ubuntu Theorem of New Release Wallpaper“, which is “slightly changed but still the same”.  I think this brings a consistent and recognisable look to ArchLabs.
• Numerous minor changes across the board.
• Polybar-zen, that’s all I’m saying…..lol.
• Oblogout has been removed, rofi-logout has replaced this.  Looks good too.
• Al-Hello has had another upgrade and is looking incredible.  For those of you who don’t know what Al-Hello is, it is our post install welcome script.  AL-Hello enables us to keep our ISO size at a reasonable download size for those of you on limited bandwidth connections.  That aside you can also install a number of desktop/window managers (i3, bspwm and awesome as well as XFCE) in addition to the default Openbox.

Get ArchLabs 2017.12

As per usual, you can get your ArchLabs fix from the Get ArchLabs page using either Sourceforge or via a Torrent (torrent links will be available in the coming days), just click the images below for your preferred method of download.

We won’t be releasing a LTS kernel edition this time. So if you would prefer to use the LTS version, download from the link above.  Once installed, update as normal.

Instructions on how to check the integrity of your ISO are at the link above.

If you are on an earlier version of ArchLabs, chances are, if you have been updating regularly, you will already have the latest packages anyway.

2018 and Forward

2017 has seen a year of growth and finding our feet, we now feel we are on the right path heading in the right direction.

Thank you to all our patrons, users, critics, supporters, reviewers and anyone else that has in some way been involved with ArchLabs, even if you shared just a screenshot.

Have a very happy holiday and a safe New Year and we will see you all in 2018.

Cheers and beers

The Archalabs boys.