Comes with an improved installer and updated components

Nov 2, 2017 20:10 GMT  ·  By

4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki‏ is informing us today on the general and immediate availability for download of the final release of his 4MLinux 23.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

4MLinux 23.0 has been in development for the past three-four months, during which it was available only for public testing as a beta version. Only now it's been promoted to stable, and we can finally have a more in-depth look at the new features implemented in this new stable branch.

First off, we'd like to inform the reader that the 4MLinux 22 series has been marked as OLD STABLE, and 4MLinux 21 is no longer supported as it officially reached end of life. That being said, if you're using 4MLinux 21, you must upgrade to 4MLinux 23, but 4MLinux 22 users will still receive maintenance updates for a couple of months.

Here's what's new in 4MLinux 23.0

Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9.52 kernel, 4MLinux 23.0 ships with up-to-date components like the LibreOffice 5.4.3.1 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 56.0 and Chromium 61.0.3163.100 web browsers, Mozilla Thunderbird 52.4.0 email and news client, Audacious 3.9 audio player, and VLC Media Player 2.2.6.

AbiWord 3.0.2 word processor and Gnumeric 1.12.35 spreadsheet editor are also pre-installed in 4MLinux 23.0, along with the GIMP 2.8.22 image editor, Skype 5.5.0.1 VoIP client, MPlayer SVN-r37931 video player, Dropbox 37.4.29 file sharing client, as well as Wine 2.19 for running Windows apps and games.

Talking about games, 4MLinux 23.0 uses the Mesa 17.0.4 graphics stack, which, unfortunately, is no longer supported upstream. If you have the possibility of upgrading to Mesa 17.1 series do it immediately after installing the system. On the server side of things, this release brings Apache 2.4.28, MariaDB 10.2.9, PHP 7.0.24 and 5.6.31, Perl 5.24.1, and Python 2.7.13.

And now for the good news, as 4MLinux 23.0 features an improved installer that lets you install the OS on Btrfs, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, NILFS2, EXT2, EXT3, and EXT4 partitions, out-of-the-box support for RAID, SCSI, and LVM devices, as well as much-improved multimedia support for FAAC, JPEG 2000, GIF, Musepack, and Monkey's Audio formats.

4MLinux 23.0 is available for download right now on our website, and it's the recommended version for all users. Again, if you're using a release from either the 4MLinux 21 or 4MLinux 22 series, make sure you upgrade to version 23.0 as soon as possible. Check out the full list of installed packages for more details.