14 DAY TRIAL // Welcome to our 4th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly! In this edition, you can read about the replacement of Automatix, our exclusive first look at NimbleX 2008, the new features brought by Dell on its selected computers powered by Ubuntu 8.04, the HAMMER filesystem introduced by the new version of DragonFly BSD and the new features brought by the third alpha release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Nautilus with tabs). Also, don't forget to check out the latest Linux distributions released last week, at the end of the article!
Summary:
On Monday, Bogdan Radulescu gave us an exclusive copy of his new distribution, NimbleX 2008, which comes with no more than 7 (seven) desktops/window managers in only 200 MB! Amazing, isn't it?
NimbleX is a 200 MB Linux distribution, which can boot from a small 8 cm CD, a flash memory like USB flash drive and even MP3 players. Because it runs entirely from a CD or USB, it doesn?t require installation or even a hard drive. NimbleX was build with the help of Linux-live scripts. The beauty of it is that, even if small, it has a beautiful graphical interface and also a lot of built-in software for browsing the Internet, writing documents, listening to music, playing movies and much more. You even have basic server functionality. NimbleX 2008 includes the following applications:
? The GIMP 2.4.5 (versatile image editor) ? Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16 (powerful web browser) ? XMMS 1.2.11 (audio/radio stream player) ? MPlayer 1.0 (video player) ? AviDemux 2.4.1 (powerful video editor) ? Transmission 1.22 (BitTorrent client) ? Xine 0.99.5 (video player) ? K3b 1.0.4 (CD/DVD burning application) ? Guarddog (Firewall configuration tool) ? LinuxDC++ 1.0.0 (DC++ client)
Download NimbleX 2008 right now from Softpedia.
ATI/AMD released on Monday a new version of its Linux graphics drivers, one that introduced support for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2. ATI Catalyst 8.7 also introduces early support for OpenSuSE 11 and Redflag DT 7.0. The following are the issues resolved in this release:
? The display will no longer fail to show an image after the ATI driver installation; ? When switching from the notebook's display to an external CRT monitor, corruption will no longer be noticed; ? When using the Catalyst Control Center or the aticonfig utility, the NTSC, PAL or SECAM signal changes and gets applied to the TV output; ? The issue that caused the X server to restart with the aticonfig --enable-monitor option on Ubuntu 7.04 was fixed; ? Direct GL context will no longer fail when you create two successive connections.
Download the ATI/AMD Linux Display Driver 8.7 right now from Softpedia.
The Fedora Unity team was proud to announce, on Monday, the immediate availability of a new Re-Spin DVD based on the official release of Fedora 9 and injected with all the updates released as of July 18th, 2008. The new Fedora 9 Re-Spin DVD is available for download as an ISO image for i386 and x86_64 architectures. With this Re-Spin DVD of Fedora 9, the team also fixed the following issues:
? Because of some translation problems in the Russian language, the Fedora 9 installer, Anaconda, crashed during software selection. This happened only if the installation was done in the Russian language; ? minstg2 failed to install because the /usr/sbin/lspci was missing.
The Fedora 9 Re-Spin was created especially for those of you who might want to install Fedora 9 and have all the recent updates already included, in a single DVD image. Download the Fedora 9 Re-Spin DVD right now from Softpedia.
On Tuesday, Matthew Dillon proudly announced the release of DragonFly BSD 2.0, which features the HAMMER filesystem, numerous kernel, hardware and userland changes, and a lot of contributed software such as BIND 9.3.5-P1, bzip 1.0.5, less 418, libarchive 2.5.5, OpenSSH 5.0p1, and GCC 4.1.2. The HAMMER filesystem is the star of this release and it features:
? On-mount crash recovery support (without fsck); ? Fine-grained snapshots and snapshot management support; ? By default, it's historically accessible; ? Queueless incremental mirroring, master to multi-slave; ? Rollback and undo support; ? Reblocking support; ? The maximum storage capacity allowed is of 1 Exabyte (one quintillion bytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).
Download DragonFly BSD 2.0 right now from Softpedia.
IPCop 1.4.20 was also announced on Tuesday. This version has been split in two parts, in order to solve the issue of free space limitation related to the great number of new package additions, since the recent releases. Let's have a look at some of the updated applications included in this release:
? OpenSSH 4.7p1 ? dnsmasq 2.45 ? tzdata 2008d ? pcre 7.7 ? Apache 1.3.41 ? e1000 7.6.15.5 ? bzip2 1.0.5 CVE-2008-1372 ? e2fsprogs 1.40.11 ? Squid 2.6.STABLE21 ? bin 9.4.2-P1 ? r1000 is now compiled with jumbo frame support ? lzo.so binary was included
For more information about this release, take a look here. Download IPCop 1.4.20 right now from Softpedia.
On Thursday, Dell announced the new features added on its selected XPS M1330N, Inspiron 1525N notebooks, and the Inspiron 530N desktops powered by Ubuntu 8.04. Here they are:
? WMV, WMA and MP3 audio playback; ? LinDVD DVD player for improved video playback; ? All XPS laptops support biometric fingerprint readers; ? Full OpenGL support for Inspiron 530n with ATI graphics; ? HDMI audio output support for both ATI and Nvidia video cards.
The Ubuntu 8.04-powered Dell machines will be available for customers in the United States, Germany, Spain, France, Canada, the United Kingdom and many Latin American countries (like Colombia and Mexico).
The first alpha version of openSUSE 11.1 was announced on Thursday by the hard working people behind the openSUSE project.
Among the new technologies and applications, which will be included in the final version of openSUSE 11.1, due for release on December 18, you will find:
? Linux kernel 2.6.27 ? KDE 4.1.1 ? KDE 3.5.10 (optional) ? GNOME 2.24 ? OpenOffice.org 3.0 ? Software update stack improvements and many more...
Download openSUSE 11.1 Alpha 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an alpha release and should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.
Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Alpha 3 was released on Thursday and it's the first Linux distribution to introduce the brand new Nautilus file manager with tabs.
Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Alpha 3 includes the following applications:
? Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 ? OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 ? The GIMP 2.4.6 ? F-Spot 0.4.2 ? Pidgin 2.4.3 ? Brasero 0.8.0 ? Transmission 1.22 ? Rhythmbox 0.11.6 ? Ekiga 2.0.12 ? Evolution 2.23.4 ? Nautilus 2.23.5.1
Download and test Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Alpha 3 right now from Softpedia.
On Friday, we introduced to you the Automatix replacement: Ultamatix, an application that can install and uninstall the most used and popular programs for Ubuntu and Debian users. From multimedia codecs and archiving tools, e-mail clients and web browsers, to audio/video ripping and burning software, Ultamatix can do them all. Ultamatix is designed to work with Ubuntu Ultimate Editon 1.8, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), the unstable branch of Debian Linux, and it brings you dozens of games! Read the full overview of this useful application, here.
Download Ultamatix right now from Softpedia.
Distributions Released Last Week:
? easys GNU/Linux 4.1.1 ? R.I.P. 6.1 ? Inquisitor 3.0 ? Ubuntu Muslim Edition 8.04.1 ? VectorLinux 5.9 (Light) ? Freezy Linux 1.4.3 ? BLAG Linux And GNU 90001 ? Absolute Linux 12.1.05 ? Foresight Linux 2.0.4 ? LinuxGT 1.7 RC3 ? Topologilinux 7.0.0 ? Devil-Linux 1.2.15 ? Ultima Linux 8.4 Beta 1 ? Parted Magic 3.0