So, I recently released the first Alpha of Lemur 3.0 (Seen in the image above). It actually was more of a pre-Alpha release. I probably should have held it back, but I needed to test the waters on a few things. Yes, it was missing a thing or two…okay, it was missing a lot! However, it was stable enough to use and what was missing could easily be added via Synaptic.

I made the decision to take Lemur back to its roots and the recent release was only partially setup for that decision. This may have led to some confusion for those not familiar with the Lemur of old and I do apologize. Originally, Lemur was a CD based distro but as time passed it became more difficult to keep it CD size and I had to move to DVD. The idea of old Lemurs was to have a base distro that users could build from/customize to their liking. Not everyone likes using the same apps so Lemur provided the base and then via APEman (aka: Easy Lemur, Control Center) users were given options. APEman is back and being updated to work like it did before…giving users the choice. With all that being said, I’ve been asked by a couple of people if I could provide a more complete (stocked) Lemur as I did before. Unfortunately, I won’t be doing that. First, it goes against the concept of being a base distro and makes APEman pointless. Second, the Lemur installer will eventually have the option to install those extra bits during installation of Lemur (which would be the same as me providing a more complete Lemur.). I’m working on the second Alpha release of Lemur 3.0 and it will be more polished and fine tuned. APEman will be updated properly as well.

In other news, I’ve been asked about the Xfce Lemur. It used to be the main desktop in Lemur and some are wanting it to make a comeback as well. Honestly, I’m on the fence with this one. If I did another desktop, I would lean towards a Budgie Lemur. However, Budgie in Debian Stable is old and I would probably end up having to build it from source (which is not a problem…just more work.) or I could pull it from Debian Testing (and deal with dependency issues I’m sure). I started a poll in the forums to get feedback on this. Feel free to vote!

The next release shouldn’t take too long…stay tuned!