After months and months of hard work, the GeeXboX development team proudly announced, on the last day of January, the immediate availability of GeeXboX 1.2, a Live CD based on the number one Linux multimedia player, MPlayer. The new release of GeeXboX is also the last one from the 1.x series and it introduces support for the x86_64 architectures, HDTV optimizations and a Win32 installer, which will allow users of the Microsoft Windows operating system to install GeeXboX on the current hard drive without the need of formatting and partitioning.

"Here we finally are. Today marks GeeXboX 1.2 release that was awaited for such a long time. This is a really important step for the project, being the very latest release from the 1.x series. [...] So again, GeeXboX 1.2 is the last version you'll see that relies on our original MPlayer OSD based blue screen user interface. Over the years (and especially last months), a lot of efforts have been made to work on the upcoming 2.x series, that will feature a complete rework of the UI, based on the ultra fast and shiny Enlightenment toolkit. [...] But let's get back to 1.2. This is our very latest stable release and will stay so for quite a while, until 2.0 is fully ready for use. With this release, we've done our best to please everyone in order to provide you with best video playback experience and we hope it'll keep on going." - said the GeeXboX team in the official release announcement.

Highlights of GeeXboX 1.2:

· Updated Linux kernel to version 2.6.27.13;
· Added on-demand CPU frequency scaling policy;
· Updated the ATI video driver to version 6.10.0;
· Repaired some VCD playback problems;
· The GOOM audio visualization effect was disabled;
· Some bad color effects for TV cards were fixed;
· The partitioning step on the installer was simplified;
· Unified the disk installer (GRUB is used for USB sticks too);
· Fixed a hard drive mounting issue, when 2 disks had the same name;
· Added Microsoft Windows installer;
· Added USB network drivers;
· Added support for unpartitioned disks.



For those of you who don't know yet what GeeXboX is, it is a very small (approx. 20 MB) Live CD based on the very popular Linux multimedia player, MPlayer. GeeXboX is made for watching movies and viewing photos on your PC, even if you don't have a hard drive. Because it's so small, GeeXboX boots in only a few seconds, and after the system has loaded the CD will automatically eject from the CD/DVD-ROM so you can enjoy hard drive movies, DVDs and photos on your PC, as GeeXboX will run entirely from RAM and it will offer you a very nice and intuitive interface.

Download GeeXboX 1.2 for 32-bit, 64-bit and PPC architectures right now from Softpedia.