I’d like to give you all a short overview about the next plans for IPFire 2. As we developers are heavily working on IPFire 3, which is making very good progress, but is not yet ready for beta testing, we are planning to release another major release of IPFire 2 which will be called IPFire 2.13.
We think this step is necessary to keep up with the recent developments in the Linux kernel and so we are going to update to Kernel 3.2. This is a long term support kernel which comes with a lot of performance improvements, new device drivers to improve the hardware support and much more.
Especially in the ARM area, where IPFire currently supports Pandaboard, Marvell Kirkwood-based architectures and the Raspberry Pi computer, a recent kernel is needed.
There will also be much improvement in the toolchain and the basic system components like glibc and build tools. These will help us to increase performance in the userspace.
In the last couple of weeks, we received a lot of patches from our Community Developers which will also be included and make using the web interface nicer, as well as bring feature enhancements in various areas. Among these patches, there are addon updates for e.g. asterisk and there will be some smaller new addons.
I am telling you all this, because we want you to join. If you have a bug that annoyed you for a long time, but you never reported it, please go ahead, fix it and send us the fix. A lot of fellow IPFire users will thank you for that.
If you always wanted to have a special addon, or device driver included, feel free to implement it. If there is any trouble, don’t hesitate to ask for help.
The right place for all of this is the developer’s mailinglist.
See you there,
Arne