Sunday, September 18, 2011

GeeXboX 2.0

Benjamin Zores has announced the release of GeeXboX 2.0, a major new version of the media centre purposed Linux distribution for embedded devices and desktop computers: "After countless years of development, the 2.0 release of GeeXboX (code name 'Love It or Shove It') has landed. This new GeeXboX 2.0 is radically different from the 1.x series and, sorry to disappoint some of you, will not provide the same level of services. We are now doing much more things than we used to do with 1.x, but unfortunately a few things have to be left behind. But the GeeXboX philosophy remains the same and we still aim at targeting the most PCs and devices as possible, in as lightweight as possible a way. GeeXboX now also support many embedded devices running ARM SoCs and many more will be added in the months to come. These devices just make the perfect fanless, energy-efficient HTPC and GeeXboX just makes the perfect media center distribution for those." See the complete release announcement for a full list of features. Download (MD5): geexbox-2.0-i386.iso (72.0MB), geexbox-2.0-x86_64.iso (73.0MB).

Qomo Linux 3.0

Qomo Linux, previously known as Everest Linux, is a community distribution maintained by the Linux-Ren community in China with support from Red Flag and other companies. Qomo Linux 3.0 was released partially in celebration of the Free Software Day of 2011. It is based on the latest stable version of the Linux kernel patched by the community with abundant hardware support. Systemd preempts upstart to speed up the booting process, and certain package descriptions have been translated into Chinese for better localization. LibreOffice is now the productivity suite, but is only available from the online software repository simply for reducing the footprint of the ISO image. Check the brief announcement (in Chinese) with a few screenshots. Download: Qomo-3.0-i686-Live.iso (681MB, MD5).

Trisquel GNU/Linux 5.0

Rubén Rodríguez has announced the release of Trisquel GNU/Linux 5.0, an Ubuntu-based distribution carefully stripped of all non-free components in order to comply with Free Software Foundation's four software freedoms: "In what we can now call it a tradition, we celebrate the Software Freedom Day by publishing our latest release: Trisquel GNU/Linux 5.0 STS, code name 'Dagda'. Today we publish both the standard GNOME-based and the lightweight LXDE-based 'Mini' editions. Current Trisquel 4.5 users can upgrade using the update-manager application, without the need for re-installation. Advanced installations -- server, RAID/LVM, encrypted, etc -- can be done using the 'netinstall' images. The standard edition includes, among many others, the following packages: Linux-libre kernel 2.6.38, GNOME 2.6.32, LibreOffice 3.3.3, Abrowser (our unbranded Mozilla-based web browser) 6.0.2." Here is the full release announcement with several screenshots. Download: trisquel_5.0_i686.iso (676MB, MD5, torrent), trisquel_5.0_amd64.iso (696MB, MD5, torrent), trisquel-mini_5.0_i686.iso (453MB, MD5, torrent), trisquel-mini_5.0_amd64.iso (465MB, MD5, torrent).