14 DAY TRIAL // Ryan Finnie announced a few days ago the immediate availability of a new version of his Finnix Linux distribution, now powered by the recently released Linux kernel 3.0.
Dubbed Algoma, the Finnix 102 operating system was released at the end of last week, on July 23rd, and it features a smaller distribution size, support for Xen pvops and support for the 486 architecture.
There are lots of other Linux distros that use Linux kernel 3.0, but they are still in development. Therefore, we can say that Finnix 102 is the first stable Linux operating system that uses the brand-new Linux kernel 3.0.
The 3.0 kernel found in the Finnix 102 release was produced by the Finnix developers and it was partially based on Debian pre-release kernels. Support for Linux kernel 3.0 in Finnix was heavily tested throughout the entire Linux 3.0 RC process.
Finnix 102 also features the powerful XZ (LZMA2) compression for root and initrd, which resulted in a smaller ISO image up to 20%. Finnix 102 has been also tested on a Power Mac G5 DP/DC computer.
Last but not least, Finnix can now be booted in a Xen environment without the need of extra configuration or building, by using the included initrd.xz initial ramdisk, the linux64 kernel file, and the Finnix 102 ISO image as a virtual block device.
About Finnix
Finnix is a bootable Linux distribution for system administrators. It allows you to mount and manipulate hard disks and partitions, recover data from them, probe networks, install other operating systems, and much more.
Above all, Finnix is small; currently the entire distribution fits on a mini-CD. Finnix is not intended for the average desktop user and does not include any graphical environments, office tools or sound support, in order to keep distribution size low.
Download the latest release, Finnix 102, right now from Softpedia.