Martin Ultima and his team have just announced today the immediate availability of Ultima Linux 8.4, a Slackware-based Linux distribution, optimized for x86 and AMD64 platforms. The new release includes many new and updated packages, improvements and additions. "The Ultima Linux Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Ultima Linux 8.4, a release so profoundly important, we’ve returned to creating real HTML pages rather than an endless series of forum posts. No gadgets, no gimmicks, no three-dimensional surfaces: just a fast, ‘set-and-forget’ distribution that gets things done without getting in your way." - said Martin Ultima in the release announcement.

Highlights of Ultima Linux 8.4:

· The codebase was completely rewritten, is now based on the ultima-scripts and replaces most of the Slackware-derived code;
· Excluding Adeona, Adobe Flash and GRUB, which are the only non-native programs on the x86_64 platform, the base system is now highly optimized for both x86 and AMD64 architectures (including the glibc and kernel packages);
· Improved support for ATI and NVIDIA video drivers, better support for wireless network, and initial support for ASUS Eee PC and a few other popular netbooks;
· The LiveCD scripts, X auto-configuration and hardware detection were greatly improved;
· The Ultima desktop is now cleaner and more refined than ever before (includes many Ultima enhancements and tweaks);
· Improved security and privacy, thanks to the newly introduced Adeona packages (a theft prevention and recovery tool), Tor (a free tool for anonymous surfing) and Privoxy (a privacy-enhancing web proxy);
· Support for disk encryption;
· Lots of system improvements and various fixes.

Included applications:

· Linux kernel 2.6.24.7
· X.Org 7.3
· GCC 4.3.0
· KDE 3.5.10
· Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16
· Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.16
· OpenOffice.org 2.4.1
· Opera 9.52
· The GIMP 2.4.7
· Amarok 1.4.10
· MPlayer 1.0 RC2
· Xine 0.99.5
· Apache 2.2.9
· Sendmail 8.14.3
· MySQL 5.0.51a

For a complete list of the included packages in the Ultima Linux 8.4 distribution, please go here.

Download and try Ultima Linux 8.4 right now from Softpedia.