14 DAY TRIAL // Black Lab Linux 5.0 Beta 2, a distribution that is better known after its previous name, OS/4 OpenLinux, has been released and is now available for download.
Black Lab Linux is a distribution designed for general desktop and power users and comes with a lot of applications and features, and the developers have decided to also release an Xfce version of the famous distro.
The Xfce desktop environment has been their choice for quite some time, so it's not a surprise that they continue to use it.
“Today we are pleased to announce the beta 2 release of Black Lab Linux 5. This will be the last Beta for Black Lab Linux 5 until the final release. While it contains all the functionality that will be released in the gold release in May, right now we are working on stability. With that, lets go over what has changed with Black Lab Linux 5,” reads the official announcement.
According to the changelog, the distribution makes use of Xfce 4.11, which is the latest and most advanced version out there. True, it is not drastically different from the previous release, but it's nice to see that the developers are working very hard to implement the latest version possible. It's not the stable release branch, but it's probably stable enough.
Also, Black Lab Linux comes with Google Chrome 33 as the default Internet browser, the new Revelation Password Manager (a very important app to have), Google Maps, a Messaging Center, LibreOffice 4.2 (which is also the latest branch of this office suite), Audacious as the default music player, Totem as the default movie player, OpenSSH 6, BleachBit (along with the Bleachbit Administrator), and Nixnote.
So far, only the 64-bit version has been released, but the developers have promised that a 32-bit version will be available at launch. You also have to keep in mind that Black Lab Linux is not a free operating system. Its makers usually charge a moderate sum for this Linux distribution, but only for the first couple of weeks. For that money they provide support for setting up the system in whatever configuration you choose.
Check the official announcement for more details, features, and changes about this release. You can download Black Lab Linux 5.0 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.