Porteus 2.0 RC1

Ira McDaniel has announced the availability of the first release candidate for Porteus 2.0, a set of Slackware-based live images with a choice of KDE 4, LXDE, Razor-qt and Xfce desktop environments: "The Porteus community is excited to announce Porteus 2.0 RC1, the first development release of a new version for our standard and Xfce editions. Porteus is a lightweight, highly configurable and flexible live distribution based on Slackware that is optimized to run from USB drives, flash cards, CDs or other storage media. The 32-bit standard edition now ships with Razor-qt as the desktop environment, replacing Trinity/LXDE. Some of the more important changes from Porteus 1.2 include: bumped Linux kernel to 3.7.1 and userland to Slackware 14.0; switched to initramfs and added a second initramfs for PXE booting...." Visit the Porteus forum to read the full release announcement. Download: Porteus-v2.0-rc1-i486.iso (235MB), Porteus-XFCE-v2.0-rc1-i486.iso (198MB), Porteus-v2.0-rc1-x86_64.iso (224MB), Porteus-XFCE-v2.0-rc1-x86_64.iso (186MB).

Finnix 107

Ryan Finnie has announced the release of Finnix 107, a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian's testing branch: "Today I am pleased to announce the release of Finnix 107, only two months from the previous release, but packed with new functionality and bug fixes. Finnix 107 includes Linux kernel 3.6, and includes a fix for the (overhyped, it seems) ext4 corruption bug. Average Finnix startup times have been reduced even further by the cleanup of legacy code. In addition, the shutdown procedure, which largely has not changed in years, got a revamp and is now noticeably quicker. The x86 ISO is now being built with the isohybrid method, meaning you can now write the ISO directly to a USB flash drive at the block level to boot it." Read the release announcement and release notes for further information. Download (MD5): finnix-107.iso (117MB, torrent), finnix-ppc-107.iso (117MB, torrent).

The reNIX Theme Ported To GTK 3.6, PPA Available For Ubuntu 12.10/Linux Mint 14

reNIX, an amazing GTK+ 3 theme, has been updated recently to work with Gnome 3.6 which can be now installed in Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal). This latest release also fixes some minor issues. reNIX is compatible with both Unity and Gnome Shell.

The PPA below is available for Ubuntu 12.10 and Linux Mint 14. To enable this theme, you may use Gnome Tweak Tool or any other tool of your choice.

reNIX Installation

To install reNIX from PPA, open the terminal and enter these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:upubuntu-com/gtk+3.6 

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install renix-gtk

reNIX Removal

In case you want to remove this theme from your system, switch to another theme, then issue this sequence of commands:

sudo apt-get remove renix-gtk 

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:upubuntu-com/gtk+3.6 

sudo apt-get update