14 DAY TRIAL // Black Lab Linux 6.0 Preview 2, a distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, has been released and is now ready for testing.
Black Lab Linux started its life like an alternative to Windows and Mac OS systems, but the developer shifted gears during the development and tried to do something different. It worked for the most part, but it's still pretty friendly towards Windows users.
As it stands right now, the developers have two distros under construction, one that's in the 5.x branch and this new one, which is very different from everything that's been done before with Black Lab Linux.
The previous release in this new branch of Black Lab Linux used GNOME 3 as the desktop, but it looks like the developers didn't like it and they have switched to Xfce. This is not really an issue, because this is a very early version of the distribution and not all of the features and options have been decided upon.
As you might know already, the new Black Lab Linux 6.x is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which means that the current edition of the distro might receive a longer period of support if everything goes according to plan.
Besides the implementation of Xfce 4.11.5, the developers have also added the latest Mozilla Firefox 31, Mozilla Thunderbird 31, Linux kernel 3.13 (which is available from the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS base), Linux kernel 3.16 in the repositories, OpenSSH 6.6, and a number of backported GStreamer drivers for better Kinect Support.
Also, a number of problems have been fixed as well. The Nouveau driver for older NVIDIA cards is now working properly, the installation of the operating system on SSD drives now works as it should, the XFS filesystem support has been fixed, and the Intel HD graphics driver is now available for download from the official repositories.
Black Lab Linux devs usually make the operating system free of charge a couple of months after the initial release. All the development releases are free and can be tested without any problems, even in virtual environments. It should work without any issues in VirtualBox.
Check the official announcement for more details, features, and changes about this build. You can download Black Lab Linux 6.0 Preview 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.
