New Purism owner, Pure OS questions

Software PureOS
1

I received my new Purism yesterday and have been letting it acclimate due to the weather.
What version of PureOS is shipped with it?
I tried to find the OS and the sources on the Purism site with no luck. Where are the sources for it?

(debating which OS to use on it and will be experimenting with different ones, planning on upgrading the hardware)

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2

Congrats :)))

What version of PureOS is shipped with it?

PureOS is a RR distro so there arenā€™t any versions, afaik.

3

PureOS is based on Debian Testing and is therefore not a rolling release distribution.
Here is a good overview: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pureos
With cat /etc/issue you get the version displayed immediately at least under Debian, so I suspect something similar with PureOS (unfortunately I donā€™t have one there for testing).

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4

Purismā€™s GitLab repo is here:

You can also find the PureOS package repository and source code for those here:

https://repo.puri.sm/

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5

Yes, PureOS is based on Debian Testing but at the moment it is not ā€˜freezingā€™ Testing and turning it into a stable release, rather it is kind of a rolling release based on need. There will be a roadmap forthcoming hopefully that more clearly explains the plans for PureOS and the process.

Unfortunately distrowatch is not quite accurate (PureOS does not come from France) but Iā€™ll try and get in touch with someone at distrowatch and update that.

6

The best way to tell which version of PureOS you are running is to go to the command line and type ā€˜lsb_release -aā€™ On my Librem 13, version 3 the output from that command says;

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	PureOS
Description:	PureOS GNU/Linux 8
Release:	8
Codename:	green

So Iā€™m running PureOS version 8 on this machine. Hope that helps.

7

Thanks all. This week has been too busy to work on it (maybe Saturday). I did find the PureOS site, and it linked to the Purism site, but not the other way around, which seems odd and against the spirit of the GPL, to me. Figured a link would be more obvious.

8

or just write in the terminal the following:
apropos ā€œreleaseā€
then read and chose what you think it is that you want to find. then you can type anything you want instead of ā€œreleaseā€ and it will find those commands for you.

i would be interested to know how pureOS receives itā€™s security updates ? is it similar to debian stable(currently 9.6) ?

9

Security updates happen a number of ways, though the bulk of userland relies on Debian Testingā€™s security process. This is relatively fast in the sense that you donā€™t have to wait until security fixes get backported to stable. We are very close to a number of projects, like coreboot and Heads so we can participate there as well. We are in the early stages of outlining what an advanced, security specific team would look like inside PureOS and what sort of value it would bring to the wider free software ecosystem.