In quick succession to m23 19.1, which brought a lot of changes and which, consequently, took quite a long time to be developed, we now release m23 19.2 with many, yet fewer changes. m23 now supports the recently released Debian 10 Buster for use as client platform, as well as as basis for the m23 server. The new Debian-10-based Raspbian for the single-board computer Raspberry Pi can now be used for the m23 server base, too. The (beta version of) Linux Mint 19.2 Tina has been added to the list of distributions that can be installed with m23. m23 clients with Debian 10 and Linux Mint 19.2 again come with all the known preconfigured desktop environments. There was also some time left for fixes and small improvements (e.g. to m23-autoTest), most of which were needed for making m23 compatible to Debian 10.

Debian 10 Buster

For m23 clients with Debian 10, the known wealth of installable desktop environments is again available: Mate (optionally as minimal variant with only the absolutely required packages), Cinnamon, Gnome, KDE, LXDE and Xfce. Clients can be installed as 32- and 64-bit variants – independently of the desktop environment.

Some adjustments to m23 were needed, to make it compatible with Debian 10:

• phpLDAPAdmin is now included in a special version which also works with PHP 7.3.
• Free IP addresses are now suggested and checked correctly on 32-bit systems again.
• The SSL certificates that protect the communication between the m23 server and its clients now contain the server's IP address in an additional attribute because wget will not accept them otherwise on Debian 10. Preexisting m23 server certificates will be updated automatically when the server is updated to version 19.2.
• A similar issue has been fixed for the GPG signatures of some package sources, which are now created in a slightly different way to be valid for the version of apt in Debian 10.
• MariaDB is now specifically configured, to reinstate the known behavior (since MySQL 3.23) on insertion of new lines into a table without indicating content for all fields.

Linux Mint 19.2 Tina

From this version on, m23 includes (preliminary) support for the beta stage Linux Mint 19.2 Tina for installation on clients, with the full range of functions that is available for other distros. It comes with three preconfigured desktop environments: Mate, Cinnamon and Xfce. Clients can be installed in both 32- and 64-bit variants, independly from the selected desktop environment. As of July 19th, 2019, Linux Mint 19.2 seems to be installable with m23 without any problems whatsoever. In the case of issues popping up later, these will be corrected in a future m23 update.

m23-autoTest

There were a couple changes made to m23-autoTest, the framework for automated tests for the m23 server and clients:

• Timeouts are now dealt with correctly and lead to warnings instead of cancellation of the test.
• The new crash detection regularly checks for changes in the display content of a virtual machine. When there are no changes detected within a certain amount of time, the VM will be marked as "crashed" and the test will be aborted.
• The m23-autoTest script generator is now able to create test scripts specifically for a single client distribution where all available desktop environments will be tested.

m23 app for Univention Corporate Server

The m23 app for UCS 4.3 and 4.4 will soon (if not already) be published.

Update

The latest version is only available as an update via the m23 interface or via apt. For installing a fresh m23 server, please use the server installation packages or your preferred installation media for the previous version. A new ISO file for creating an m23 server installation medium, a preinstalled virtual machine and an image file for RaspberryPi will be available again for the next m23 version.