14 DAY TRIAL // Paul Sherman announced the release of Absolute Linux 13.0, bringing this lightweight Slackware derivative up-to-date. Because of the important system-level changes that happened in Slackware 13, the Absolute Linux developers had a hard time making all their customizations work with this new base. However, they managed to get their IceWM and PCManFM modifications in sync, and all the script utilities working, for this 13.0 release of Absolute Linux 13.0.
The kernel differs from that in Slackware, it was recompiled to add a tickless operation for on-demand timer interrupts, high-resolution timers and voluntary preemptive latency. Absolute's custom Python scripts were updated to comply with the current Python synthax, so you won't see any deprecation warnings anymore when running them.
Along with the updated customizations, many bugs were fixed, like the SVG file support in Mozilla Firefox, which was switched from using its in-built SVG decoding library to employing the librsvg plugin. Also, PCManFM doesn't crash anymore, the sources of those snags being traced to thumbnail rendering. Furthermore, integration between the ROX desktop and PCManFM has been improved, adding, along the way, support for quick thumbnail creation and image resizing.
K3b, the KDE CD-burning application, was also fixed to close multi-session disks correctly, and AbiWord was fixed to print files without crashing. A new, default calendar/schedule application was added to the taskbar clock's left-click action, and, if you right-click it, you will have the option to set the system time without needing to have super-user privileges.
In sync with Slackware 13.0, the package archiver was switched to LZMA, allowing many more applications to fit on the distribution's CD. Among them, you will find the popular OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 word-processing suite, but AbiWord remains included for a better legacy system support.
Download Absolute Linux 13.0 right now from Softpedia.