Surfing the net I came across a distribution that caught my attention and it is that from the moment I saw the text "Collaborate" I knew that something good would happen and so it is, since personally I didn't know that Collabora had its own Linux distro, which has a name Apertis and was initially designed for automobiles, but has now expanded to a variety of electronic devices, industrial equipment and embedded technology.
Apertis is Designed on the basis of Debian GNU/Linux 12 and its approach takes into account the potential legal challenges associated with some free software licenses, such as GPLv3, which prohibit practices such as tivoization (binding software to hardware in a restrictive way). Instead, preference is given to options that allow the use of certified software and firmware, digitally signed by the manufacturer.
The Apertis project Follows Debian guidelines and includes only software under open licenses or at least allow free distribution. In addition, Each build includes an SBOM report (Software Bill of Materials), which provides details about the licenses and versions of the files used, helping to identify potential vulnerabilities.
About Apertis
The distribution It is structured in a modular way, which allows manufacturers to customize and tune the system environment to specific needs. In addition, it supports both the creation of builds using traditional deb packages as monolithic images, which are updated atomically using OSTree technology.
A standout feature of Apertis is your ability to create builds that do not include software licensed under the GPLv3 license. Instead of using old versions of GNU tools that were incompatible with this License, Apertis has adopted modern and permissive alternatives, such as the uutils utilities written in Rust and distributed under the MIT license. Also, instead of using GnuPG, Apertis opt for Sequoia-PGP, which is distributed under the GPL-2+ and LGPL-2+ licenses. However, for those who do not have problems with the restrictions of the GPLv3, there is also the option of using traditional tools
Apertis subjects all its components to rigorous testing, both manual and automated, on reference hardware platforms such as the Raspberry Pi 4 SoC R-car boards. The results of these tests are made public to ensure transparency and automated testing of complete systems on reference equipment is performed using the Linaro Automated Validation Architecture (LAVA) infrastructure.
The distribution's kernel is based on the latest LTS version of Linux. For example, the Apertis 2024.3 version uses kernel 6.6, instead of kernel 6.1 of Debian 12. Each Apertis release has a maintenance cycle of 1 year and 9 months, with quarterly updates to fix bugs.
The distribution includes over 5000 packages, and all development, including images, utilities, and configurations, is done openly in a public Git repository. GitLab is used for collaboration, and continuous integration is managed via GitLab CI. The OBS (Open Build Service) toolkit is used to generate binary packages from source code, and APT repositories for distribution are managed with aptly.
Apertis 2024.3
It is worth mentioning that Apertis is currently in its 2024.3 version and several improvements and features have been included in it, in addition to the update to the new Linux kernel.
Among the improvements and new features that stand out:
- Podman Support:
Allows running OCI containers without root privileges or orchestration daemons.
Improves integration with Apertis licensing policies. - ONNX Runtime Support:
Includes the machine learning accelerator for inference, with support for frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and scikit-learn.
Optimize performance on specialized hardware and accelerate training on NVIDIA GPUs.
The package was incorporated into Debian in response to community requests. - OP-TEE support improvements:
optee-os, optee-client and optee-test have been integrated, enabling support for hardware such as TI SK-AM62x and QEMU ARMv8.
These packages were also contributed to Debian. - Compatibility with new boards:
Initial support for IT SK-AM62.
Detailed guide to customizing images for hardware like the Orange Pi Zero2. - Advanced compiler warnings:
New profile for dpkg with additional warnings that improve system security and quality. - Improvements in image generation and SBOM:
Tool that makes it easy to track changes in daily builds. - Advanced SBOM Reports:
Details of licenses and copyrights for non-binary files.
Security reports to track CVEs in dependencies.
Using OSS Review Toolkit to improve license review.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link
Download and get Apertis
System images are available for x86_64, arm64 and armhf architectures and can be obtained from the following link