14 DAY TRIAL // Finnix 101 has been released, on Christmas Day no less, the latest update to the lightweight Linux distro that's been in development for over a decade. Things look rather similar on the surface, but Finnix 101 comes with quite a bit of work under the hood and is a major update over the previous Finnix 100.
"Today marks the eggnog-induced release of Finnix 101, the seventeenth release of Finnix since its beginnings over ten years ago. Finnix 101 includes major behind-the-scenes architectural changes, the re-introduction of PowerPC support, new features, and minor bug fixes," Ryan Finnie announced the release of the latest Finnix update.
Finnix 101 adds support for PowerPC processors again, boasting that it is one of the few LiveCD distros to support the aging architecture.
While a PowerPC version should be available with each future release, there is no 100 percent guarantee that this will be the case, the developers warn.
Under the hood, Finnix 101 comes with quite a lot of changes. "Many of the changes are intended to make development and re-development (remastering) easier and more powerful, and to help with deployment by Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers," Finnie explained.
"Changes include a new CD filesystem layout, an enclosed remastering environment, a Finnix-specific SysV-compatible RC system, and componentized Finnix RC scripts," he added.
The changes should affect those using Finnix as the base for their own custom builds. In fact, there is a separate blog post detailing the changes remasterers should expect.
Finnix is based on Debian testing, but the latest release borrows the updated kernel from the "experimental" Debian builds. Finnix 101 comes with Linux kernel 2.6.36 rather than the Linux kernel 2.6.32 included with Debian testing or unstable.
Finnix 101 also comes with a hardware detection tool (HDT) available at boot time for x86 systems. The tool enables users to access system information without booting into the full operating system.
Finnix 101 is available for download here on Softpedia.