The Linux distribution features numerous desktop environments

Mar 12, 2014 17:01 GMT  ·  By

Porteus 3.0, a portable Linux operating system that can be installed on a USB device, CD ROM, SD card, or hard drive, and based on the Linux Live Scripts, has been released by the Porteus Community, with numerous features and a lot of changes and improvements.

Porteus 3.0 has been named the Standard Desktop Edition and has been released for the 32- and 64-bit architectures, but the developers also prepared for download the Porteus Kiosk Edition 3.0.

“We've put together prepackaged modules for Google-Chrome, Opera, LibreOffice, Abiword, Skype and printing/scanning software, which can be dropped in place to get out-of-the-box functionality! Please note that the ‘Development’ module will now need to be downloaded as a standalone module if you wish to compile additional software in Porteus,” reads the official announcement.

The Porteus Linux distribution has been designed to run from small installation media, such as CD, USB flash drives, and so on, and it's smaller than 300MB, making this the perfect candidate for systems that need a light and easy-to-install OS.

One of the most interesting facts about the Porteus operating system is that users can customize it (along with Porteus Kiosk Edition) with the help of a web wizard, which allows users to choose the architecture, the word processor, the Internet browser, the default drivers, and a few other categories. You can still download a prepackaged ISO if you don't want to customize anything.

The developers made some interesting changes for this edition. The Porteus Package Manager has been replaced with a new version, called USM. Apparently, it's no longer necessary to maintain a Porteus module repository. The new Porteus Package Manager will pull Slackware packages across 5 repositories and convert them to modules, making the work of the Porteus developers a lot easier.

The Linux kernel also got a bump, and it has been updated to version 3.13.6, which is the latest and the most advanced stable kernel released so far.

Also, support has been added for random IP taken from a private pool when nothing has been defined by the user, logrotate has been configured to rotate system logs once they reach 500KB in size, archivemount 0.8.3 has been added, and libvdpau-va-gl has been implemented.

The default KDE desktop has been upgraded to version 4.12.3, and the MATE environment has been updated to version 1.7.1. Other important packages that have been updated are Mozilla Firefox 24.3.0, Google Chrome 33.0.1750.146, Opera 12.16.1860, LibreOffice 4.2.1, and a few others.

A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement. Download Porteus KDE 3.0 Download Porteus LXDE 3.0 Download  Porteus MATE 3.0 Download  Porteus RazorQt 3.0 Download  Porteus Xfce 3.0