May 17, 2011 09:30 GMT  ·  By

Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-42 is now available for download. The latest update brings a fresher source distro, since it's based on a very recent Debian Sid, a new Linux kernel and other changes.

Debian Sid, as of May 13, 2011, is used as the base for Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-42. This means that it should be running a fairly recent set of packages since Debian Sid is where the popular distro is being actively developed.

"Stable Clonezilla live 1.2.8-42 has been released. This release of Clonezilla live includes major enhancements, changes and bug fixes," Steven Shiau announced.

Linux kernel 2.6.38-5 is included in this release, the very latest stable build. Syslinux 4.04 has also been included in Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-42.

Among the changes in the latest release is the switch to XZ compression for Initrd, saving 3 MB for the live ISO image, or archived file system.

This may not seem like much, especially since Clonezilla has plenty to grow until it can fill a regular CD, but the change comes with no penalties.

"The pre-run and post-run commands were moved to the login shell instead of init so now it can be interactive, .e.g. sshfs mounting with password input," the announcement detailed other changes.

"The grub2 boot loader for EFI was added. This is a testing function for booting a Mac machine from an USB device with GPT partition," it added.

Other updates include the change from gPXE to iPXE in the boot menu. Some changes have been introduced in Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-24 that affect the way users manage boot parameters and static IP addresses at boot, which are detailed in the announcement.

About Clonezilla

The Clonezilla Live is a minimal Linux distribution based on Partition Image, ntfsclone, DRBL and udpcast. It allows you to massively clone computers simultaneously.

Clonezilla Live supports the following filesystems: ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, fat16, fat32, ntfs and hfs+. It can be used to clone Linux, Microsoft Windows and even Intel-based Apple Mac operating systems. Any other filesystem can be cloned with dd.

Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-42 is available for download here.