Release | Endless OS 3.9.4

[dan]

Endless OS 3.9.4 was released for existing users today, Saturday April 24th, 2021.

Downloadable images for new users will be available in the next few days.

Kolibri enhancements

Kolibri channels which are installed on the system will now appear as icons on the desktop, for all users. These launchers have the same name and icon as in the Kolibri interface.

To use this feature, you must have Kolibri running system-wide. After upgrading to 3.9.4, you may need to install, update or remove content from Kolibri to cause desktop icons to be generated.

In new Endless OS images which come with Kolibri content pre-installed, you will not be asked to set up Kolibri and create an administrator account the first time you run Kolibri. To learn more about managing your Kolibri installation, try https://support.endlessos.org/en/apps/kolibri.

Offline USB updates fixes

This release includes two fixes for known issues with Offline USB OS & App updates:

1. Previously, the OpenH.264 Flatpak would be partially copied to the USB drive along with OS updates and apps. However, for licensing reasons this Flatpak cannot be installed offline, and installation would fail on the target machine as a result. In Endless OS 3.9.4, it will not be copied to the USB drive at all.
2. Previously, if a USB drive did not have a label, updates could not be copied to it or installed from it. This is fixed in Endless OS 3.9.4. (However, if you are attempting to update a machine running an older version of Endless OS, you will still need to give the drive a label as described here.)

Detection of hibernated Windows in dual-boot setups

In this release we have fixed an issue where Endless OS was failing to detect that Windows was hibernated, when Endless OS is installed alongside Windows in dual-boot mode.

Because of the way we set things up in these setups, we don’t support booting Endless OS when Windows is hibernated, and would normally detect this situation and instruct the user to reboot into Windows and do a proper shutdown before trying to boot Endless OS again. But for systems installed using an Endless OS version between 3.8.0 and 3.9.3, there was a regression with this detection mechanism, which led to Endless OS failing to start and ending up in the system’s emergency shell.

While this situation can be recovered from by simply rebooting into Windows and performing a proper shutdown before trying to boot into Endless OS again, the mechanism is now working again on new installations of Endless OS 3.9.4. Unfortunately, we do not have a mechanism to deliver this fix automatically on updates, so if you are affected by this problem and would like to have it fixed, you would need to re-install your dual-boot system using Endless OS version 3.9.4 or newer.

You can see which version was used for your original installation in the Endless OS image section of the diagnostics file generated by the eos-diagnostics command.