SystemRescueCd 2.8.0

SystemRescueCd 2.8.0, a Gentoo-based live CD with specialist utilities for data rescue and disk management tasks, has been released. What's new? "Updated standard kernels to long-term supported Linux 3.2.19 (rescuecd + rescue64); updated alternative kernels to latest stable Linux 3.4.2 (altker32 + altker64); fixed USB installer script for Linux: usb_inst.sh; updated GPT fdisk to 0.8.5 (fdisk utility for GPT partition tables); updated FSArchiver to 0.6.15 to support recent features in Btrfs and ext4 file systems; updated firmware files in the initramfs from Linux firmware 20120502; Updated DBAN to 2.2.6 (hard drive disk wipe and data clearing program); updated GRUB 2 bootloader to 2.00beta6 (GRUB 0.97 is also provided); updated list of kernel modules to put in the initramfs (storage and network); do not attempt to find sysrcd.dat on extended partitions." Here is the complete changelog. Download: systemrescuecd-x86-2.8.0.iso (379MB, MD5).

SolusOS 2 Alpha 3

Ikey Doherty has announced the availability of the third alpha release of SolusOS 2, a Debian-based Linux distribution featuring a highly tweaked GNOME 3.4 desktop: "The SolusOS team is pleased to announce the release of SolusOS 2 alpha 3. This release uses the GNOME Classic Desktop Environment 3.4 (not fallback), which is heavily tweaked to behave and look the same as GNOME 2. Please note that this is a development release and is not intended for use on production machines. What’s different about SolusOS’s GNOME? In SolusOS 2 we will be using GNOME 3.4, which in its current state features a largely unusable fallback mode. We decided to patch various parts of GNOME to make our implementation look and act identically to our GNOME 2 setup seen in SolusOS 1. This has been done in a way that will ensure 100% upstream compatibility." Read the full release announcement for a list of main packages and known issues. Download: SolusOS-2-A3.iso (945MB, MD5).