Latest eLxr News
Bookmark this page to keep up-to-date with the latest news and product information for eLxr.
Contents:
Aria 12.9.0.0 Release is Live!
Experience the latest performance, stability, and cloud enhancements!
By: Ryan Hunt
The wait is over! eLxr Aria 12.9.0.0 is here, bringing improved performance, enhanced cloud capabilities, and critical updates based on Debian 12.9 (“bookworm”).
** What’s New?**
- eLxr Cloud Images - Now available in qcow2 format, making it easier to deploy and scale!
- CI/CD Testing Enhancements - Streamlined automation, validation, and deployment pipelines for better reliability.
- Documentation Updates - More clarity, better examples, and improved guidance for users and developers.
- Performance & Stability Improvements - Optimizations across the board for a smoother, faster, and more secure experience.
Download now and explore the latest updates!
What’s Next?
- Continued refinement of the eLxr community with an upcoming forum and mailing list!
- Additional security updates and system performance improvements in upcoming releases.
- See you at DebConf 25 in July to connect with broader community and discuss future developments!
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Aria 12.7.0.0 Release Now Available
Latest release highlights include cloud-native advancements, virtualization support, and hardware enablement
By Mark Morton
The eLxr project is excited to announce the eLxr 12.7.0.0 Aria community release. For specific release notes, refer to the eLxr Release Notes and Release Information.
This release provides enhancements in three pivotal areas:
- Scalability and resource constraints
- Performance optimization
- Strengthened trust, compliance, and data protection
eLxr 12.7.0.0 includes the following product additions:
- New security features for Intel x86 ISO images and Secure Boot with the sbctl tool for self-signing UEFI keys specific to your implementation
- New support for NXP i.MX8+ and i.MX9 hardware, with instructions for enabling graphics support
- Updated support for NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin hardware, including a live image with console-based graphics and full graphics and multimedia support with the NVIDIA binaries.
- New virtualization host support, including ESi VMWare, WSL 2.0, and Azure Image
- Ready to deploy Docker containers in standard or slim versions to meet more robust development needs
This release marks another major milestone for the eLxr community, Debian, and our broader open-source ecosystem. We extend our heartfelt thanks and congratulations to all contributors, developers, and partners who made this milestone possible. Your hard work and dedication are the backbone of our innovation and growth.
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Aria 12.6.1.0 Release Now Available
Next release for deploying from edge to enterprise
The eLxr project is excited to announce the eLxr 12.6.1.0 – Aria community release. For specific release notes, please refer to the eLxr Release Notes and Release Information.
This release marks a major milestone for the eLxr community, Debian, and our broader open-source ecosystem. We extend our heartfelt thanks and congratulations to all contributors, developers, and partners who made this milestone possible. Your hard work and dedication are the backbone of our innovation and growth.
Key Features & Highlights of eLxr 12.6.1.0 – Aria Community Release
Containerization: Our latest release introduces a suite of container images to enable lightweight, efficient deployments. Users can now access the Universal Base Image (UBI), Slim Image, and Distroless Base Container for Python, all readily available on Docker Hub. This variety of containers provides greater flexibility and smaller image sizes, simplifying deployment while ensuring secure and efficient workflows.
Cloud-Native Enablement: We’re embracing cloud-native architectures, bringing support for Kubernetes (k8s) for server environments and k3s for edge deployments. In addition, container runtimes like Podman and Docker Compose are now fully supported, offering a streamlined approach for developing, deploying, and managing applications. This release also includes several additional cloud-native components to enhance your container orchestration capabilities, all found in the eLxr GitLab Cloud repository.
Virtualization: With full support for host virtualization on KVM, eLxr is capable of running diverse guest operating systems including RHEL, Windows, VxWorks, and Ubuntu. This makes it easier to manage mixed environments with various guest OS requirements.
Availability on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs): To simplify cloud deployments, eLxr now offers x86_64 AMI availability on AWS, ensuring easier integration with your cloud environments. Furthermore, eLxr is now compatible with AWS GovCloud, expanding our reach to support government-specific cloud requirements and ensuring that eLxr is ready for secure and compliant deployments.
Project Enhancements: We have enhanced our project infrastructure with a renewed focus on open-source processes, making our tools and workflows more accessible to contributors. Our documentation has been refined to make it easier to get started and contribute, and we’ve also enhanced our CI/CD pipeline automation and testing frameworks to streamline development and deployment.
This release is a testament to open-source innovation and community collaboration. We believe that these improvements and new capabilities will significantly enhance the experience for developers, operators, and users, while helping us build a stronger, more integrated open-source platform.
We encourage everyone to explore the latest release and log issues to the eLxr community to help us continue evolving and improving our platform.
Stay tuned for more updates and join us as we move forward in our journey together!
Get Involved with eLxr
The eLxr project believes that our approach promotes accessibility and flexibility for anyone who wishes to join, allowing them to close their gap between technology-ready and distribution-delivery, or simply to take advantage of gaps that have been closed already.
No matter whether you want to use or contribute to eLxr, you are part of the eLxr project, and we encourage and welcome your participation. If you are developing new technologies, let’s get them validated and integrated to drive innovation. If you plan to use eLxr, let the rest of the community know about your experience, your use cases, the problems you solved, and how we can further improve. We look forward to seeing your contributions!
Get started by checking out the eLxr landing page (elxr.org), where you’ll find more information and gain access to the eLxr repositories, downloads, and documentation.
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Introducing eLxr
Delivering Enterprise-Grade Linux for Edge-to-Cloud Deployments
By Mark Asselstine
The eLxr project has launched its first release of a Debian derivative inheriting intelligent edge capabilities of Debian, with plans to expand these for a streamlined edge-to-cloud deployment approach. eLxr is an open source, enterprise-grade Linux distribution that addresses the unique challenges of near-edge networks and workloads.
What Is the eLxr Project?
The eLxr project is a community-driven effort dedicated to broadening access to cutting-edge technologies for both enthusiasts and enterprise users seeking reliable and innovative solutions that scale from edge to cloud. The project produces and maintains an open source, enterprise-grade Debian-derivative distribution called eLxr that is easy for users to adopt and that fully honors the open source philosophy.
The eLxr project’s mission is centered on accessibility, innovation, and maintaining the integrity of open source software. Making these advancements in an enterprise-grade Debian-derivative ensures that users benefit from a freely available Linux distribution.
By emphasizing ease of adoption alongside open source principles, eLxr aims to attract a broad range of users and contributors who value both innovation and community-driven development, fostering collaboration and transparency and the spread of new technologies.
The eLxr project is establishing a robust strategy for building on Debian’s ecosystem while also contributing back to it. Because “Debian citizens” contribute eLxr innovations and improvements upstream, they are actively participating in the community’s development activities. This approach not only enhances eLxr’s own distribution but also strengthens Debian by expanding its feature set and improving its overall quality.
The ability to release technologies at various stages of Debian’s development lifecycle and to introduce innovative new content not yet available in Debian highlights eLxr’s agility and responsiveness to emerging needs. Moreover, the commitment to sustainability ensures that contributions made by eLxr members remain accessible and beneficial to the broader Debian community over the long term.
A Unified Approach for Intelligent Deployments at the Edge
Today’s technology demands agility and responsiveness to rapidly changing requirements and operational challenges. By integrating cutting-edge technologies from open source communities and technology companies into its distribution, the eLxr project enables users to leverage innovations that may not yet be widely distributed or easily accessible through other channels.
Over the past decade, “build from source” solutions such as the Yocto Project and Buildroot have been favored for enabling various use cases at the intelligent edge. Traditional methods of building embedded Linux devices, which offer extensive customizations and the ability to generate a software development kit (SDK) providing a cross-development toolchain, have allowed developers to maximize the performance of resource-constrained devices while offloading build tasks to more powerful machines.
However, the increasing connectivity demands of edge deployments, including over-the-air (OTA) updates and new paradigms such as data aggregation, edge processing, predictive maintenance, and various machine learning features, necessitate a different architectural approach for both near-edge devices and servers. This results in using multiple distributions, creating a heterogeneous landscape of operating environments and increasing complexity and cost. Such complexities impose significant burdens — the need to monitor for CVEs and bugs, use of additional SBOMs and diverse update cadences, and many other challenges.
To address these issues and provide a more homogeneous solution, eLxr has been introduced as a Debian derivative, using modern tools to ease maintenance while combining traditional installers with a new set of distro-to-order tools that allow a single distribution to better service edge and server deployment. Coupled with a unified tech stack, this initiative offers a strategic advantage for enterprises aiming to optimize their edge deployments, create a seamless operating environment across devices, and set the foundation for future innovations in edge-to-cloud deployments. Existing enterprise solutions move more slowly than the speed that users require to quickly innovate and rapidly adopt new technologies.
As a distribution partner for open source communities and technology companies that have developed innovative solutions but lack the means to widely distribute them, the eLxr project bridges a crucial technology delivery gap.
Why Debian?
The eLxr project chose Debian for two primary reasons: Debian’s staunch defense and adherence to the open source philosophy for more than 30 years and its embrace of derivative efforts.
Debian encourages the creation of new distributions and derivatives, such as eLxr, that help expand its reach into various use cases. Debian sees sharing experiences with derivatives as a way to expand the community, improve the code for the existing users, and make Debian suitable for a more diverse audience.
Get Involved with eLxr
Wind River® contributed the initial eLxr release as the first step in a journey that grows a community committed to timely distribution and delivery of new, ready technology in a guaranteed open source distribution.
The eLxr project believes that our approach promotes accessibility and flexibility for anyone who wishes to join, allowing them to close their gap between technology-ready and distribution-delivery, or simply to take advantage of gaps that have been closed already.
No matter whether you want to use or contribute to eLxr, you are part of the eLxr project, and we encourage and welcome your participation. If you are developing new technologies, let’s get them validated and integrated to drive innovation. If you plan to use eLxr, let the rest of the community know about your experience, your use cases, the problems you solved, and how we can further improve. We look forward to seeing your contributions!
Get started by checking out the eLxr landing page (elxr.org), where you’ll find more information and gain access to the eLxr repositories, downloads, and documentation.
You can meet the community leaders in person at the next DebConf in Busan, South Korea, July 28–August 4, 2024; at the upcoming Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna, Austria, September 16–18, 2024; and at the Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo, October 28–29, 2024.