14 DAY TRIAL // Welcome to the 102nd issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!
The following Linux-based operating systems were announced last week: Parted Magic 4.11, OpenSuSE 11.3 RC1, Sabayon SpinBase & CoreCDX 5.3 and SystemRescueCd 1.5.6. In other news: FFMpeg 0.6 brings support for VP8, WebM, HTML5; AMD releases new ATI Linux video driver with support for OpenGL 4.0 and RHEL 5.5; the new Transmission 2.0 BitTorrent client has lots of interesting features and is faster than ever; Google releases Linux tools for some of its popular services. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated and the development releases.
Summary:
On June 14th, Patrick Verner announced the immediate availability of a new version of his popular Parted Magic operating system. Parted Magic 4.11 comes now with Linux kernel 2.6.32.15, Partclone 2.3, and many other updated packages, as well as some bug fixes and improvements. Parted Magic is an operating system created to help users easily partition their hard drives or perform various recovery tasks.
Highlights of Parted Magic 4.11:
· Linux kernel 2.6.32.15; · Added lm_sensors 3.1.1; · Added Perl 5.10.1; · Added DBRL 1.9.5-79; · Added Clonezilla 2.3.5-21; · Added RAR 3.9.3; · Added unrar 3.9.7; · Added vmfs-tools 0.2.1; · Removed Xarchiver (replaced with File Roller).
Download Parted Magic 4.11 right now from Softpedia.
On June 17th, Michael Löffler announced the first release candidate for the upcoming openSUSE 11.3 operating system. openSUSE 11.3 RC1 comes with a very light release announcement, but packs plenty of bugfixes and other finishing touches. Several “annoying” bugs were squashed since the last Milestone and, at the moment, there’s just one known waiting to be fixed.
Download openSUSE 11.3 RC1 now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.
On June 17th, the Sabayon Linux team announced the immediate availability of two new editions of their popular Sabayon Linux operating system. The Sabayon SpinBase and CoreCDX editions are designed for Linux experts and advanced users that want to set up a home server or create their very own operating system, based on Sabayon. The SpinBase edition was previously known as CoreCD, and it allows users to make Sabayon spins or set up a home server, and has a new text-based installer powered by Anaconda. On the other hand, the new CoreCDX edition has X.Org and is built on top of the Fluxbox window manager, allowing users to easily obtain a minimal installation of Sabayon, in a multiboot environment.
Highlights of Sabayon Linux SpinBase and CoreCDX:
· Linux kernel 2.6.34 optimized for desktop usage; · Based on the Glibc 2.10 and GCC 4.4; · Small ISO images that can be booted from CD or USB stick; · Text-Based installer for the SpinBase edition; · Graphical installer for the CoreCDX edition; · Basic networking; · Ready for Portage and Entropy (allows access to lots of installable apps); · Easily customizable system (with the help of Entropy); · OpenVZ-enabled kernels optimized for servers are available in the default repositories; · Fast installation process (guaranteed to take less than 5 minutes).
Download Sabayon Linux 5.3 SpinBase Edition right now from Softpedia.
Download Sabayon Linux 5.3 CoreCDX Edition right now from Softpedia.
On June 18th, François Dupoux announced the new SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 Linux-based operating system. Being powered by the alternative Linux kernel 2.6.34, and the standard 2.6.32.15 Linux kernel, SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 now includes the popular Gparted 0.6.0 application for partitioning tasks with support for drives with sectors larger than 512 bytes. Moreover, the FSArchiver and Memtest86+ apps were also updated.
Highlights of SystemRescueCd 1.5.6:
· Updated the alternative Linux kernel packages to version 2.6.33.15 (with altker32 and altker64); · Updated the standard Linux kernel packages to version 2.6.34 (with rescuecd and rescue64); · Updated GParted to version 0.6.0, which supports drives with sectors larger than 512 bytes; · Updated xfsprogs to version 3.1.2; · Updated the tg3, e1000e and bnx2x ethernet network drivers in the standard kernel; · Fixed some issues with the tg3 ethernet driver for Broadcom cards; · The Parted package was recompiled to work with versions of glibc smaller than 2.11; · The usb_inst.sh script was improved; · The SystemRescueCd USB installer for Microsoft Windows received some customization options; · isohybrid was disabled; · Added the PXEBOOTSRV_EXTRA and PXEBOOTSRV_TIMEOUT options to pxebootsrv.
Download SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 right now from Softpedia.
· Released on June 15th, FFmpeg 0.6 brings lots of highly anticipated features. It improves the support for HTML5 video, has a better Vorbis decoder, and faster Theora and H.264 decoders. The most important feature of this release is the support for Google's VP8 codec. Moreover, the matroska demuxer has been updated to support the WebM container. Read more about it here.
· Announced on June 15th, Transmission 2.00 is a pretty significant upgrade and the developers tout better performance both of the program and of the downloads themselves as well as several new features to make the lives of the users easier. One of the big new features is the support for Local Peer Discovery, which allows the client to look for peers on the local network. This saves bandwidth and should also considerably improve performance. Read more about it here.
· On June 16th, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced another improved version of its ATI Catalyst Linux display driver, available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. ATI Catalyst 10.6 introduces final and stable support for the Red Hat Enterprise 5.5 Linux operating system, official OpenGL 4.0 and OpenGL 3.3 support, and many 2D performance improvements. The software version was updated to 8.741. Read more about it here.
· On June 18th, Google proudly announced GoogleCL, a set of new command-line tools for some of its popular services, such as Google Calendar, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube and Picasa. GoogleCL will allow you to upload photos to Picasa and videos to YouTube, add Google Calendar events or contacts on Google Contacts, edit Google Docs documents or post on your Blogger blog... all straight from the Linux terminal. Read more about it here.
Video Clip of the Week: Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 1
· For this week, we've posted a 720p HD video clip to showcase the Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 1 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system. The video has 9 minutes and 40 seconds and was posted by novelldesktop. Enjoy!
· CIITIX-WiFi 1.0 · CIITIX 1.0 · vatlator 1.0 · MMourcebuntu GNU/Linux 10.04 · nFluxOS i686 Final
Distributions Updated Last Week:
· Leeenux 4.01 · Clonezilla LiveCD 1.2.5-27 · Greenie Linux 7L · CacheGuard OS 5.6.1 · R.I.P. 9.8 · EeeMC 10.04.21 · GParted LiveCD 0.6.0-1 · Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD 5.5 · Zenwalk Core 6.4 · Tor-ramdisk 20100618 · Fermi Linux 5.5
· Ultimate Edition 2.8 Alpha 1 · Tiny Core Linux 3.0 Alpha 7 · Lubuntu 10.10 Alpha 1
See you again next Monday, June 28th, for another issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly.