It now includes Ubuntu 14.04's kernel packages

May 11, 2015 04:10 GMT  ·  By

On May 11, the Black Lab Software developers announced the immediate availability for download of the first service release of the Black Lab Linux 6.5 computer operating system.

According to the release notes, Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1 is the first to standardize on the KDE desktop environment, as the developers announced last week that they would drop support for any existing flavor of the distribution, including the Xfce, MATE, or GNOME desktop environments.

Being based on Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1 includes its Linux 3.16.0-36 kernel and all the upstream security patches and bugfixes from the upstream Ubuntu repositories as of May 6, 2015. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr)'s kernel 3.13.0-52 is also included.

"Along with security fixes Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1 completes our transition to one standard desktop, KDE," says Roberto J. Dohnert. "Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1 will not have separate ISO's of the different desktops, but you can download and install alternative desktop environments from the repositories."

Here's what's new in Black Lab Linux 6.5 SR1

The first SR (Service Release) of Black Lab Linux 6.5 comes with the Mozilla Firefox 37.0.2 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 31.6.0 email and news client, KDE Desktop Sharing support for remote access, KolourPaint for basic image editing, Shotwell image viewer and organizer.

Additionally, the new Timeshift tool that lets users create "restore points" of their sessions has been included, which means that it is now possible to restore your desktop to an earlier state at any given time. Of course, many other packages have been updated to their latest versions.

Download Black Lab Linux KDE 6.5 SR1 and Black Lab Linux 6.5 x86 SR1 right now from Softpedia, where you will find Live DVD ISO images that have been optimized for computer supporting either of the 32- or 64-bit architectures. The operating system is also available for purchase as a USB key from the project's website.