The package team has been working on a special section of our main repo that will allow users to install things like new graphics stack and firmware, including updated mesa packages, xorg drivers, and the like. It also has updates to various graphics acceleration packages and some applications that may be able to make use of them.
The repo is called “Advanced Hardware Support” or “ahs”. (Pronounced Oz)
The idea is that for users with newer hardware, the user can enable the ahs repo and, unlike the “mx test” repo, leave it enabled. Only packages that do not cause conflicts with the current main kernel will go into “ahs”.
The target is those users with things like newer amdgpu hardware, or later intel graphics sets, or those requiring newer mesa packages. The primary focus is the graphics stack.
The ahs repo will only be manually enabled by users who choose to do so. There is a hope that this will help us migrate packages to main over time as the current debian base ages.
Note that new kernels will remain in test and dkms driver packages will also continue to go into test, so users may still need to install a later kernel (particularly amd users) but at least users won’t have to fiddle with enabling test everytime they want to install a package just because they updated their graphics stack.
To enable the repo, open up mx-repo-manager, go to the last tab, and enable the “ahs” repo. Its been added since the last mx-system update, and the mirrors should be populated by now. Then do a “dist-upgrade” to get the newer packages.
If the ahs repo never shows up with updates, then you can add it manually to the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mx.list file wit the following definition.
#ahs hardware stack repo
#deb http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/ buster ahsThis new repo section is a little bit of an experiment. If you are perfectly happy with the stable repos and graphics stack, there is no real reason to add the ahs repo to your sources.