14 DAY TRIAL // Ikey Doherty has just announced that the eighth Alpha version of the upcoming SolusOS 2 Linux operating system is now available for download and testing.
SolusOS 2 Alpha 8 has been launched in order to demonstrate the Consort Desktop, which will be the flagship desktop of the final SolusOS 2. The first version of this distribution was based on the stable branch, but this latest one has been built from scratch.
“This image is directly bootable on hardware without virtualisation, and is distributed as a LiveCD Hybrid ISO. It is recommended that you use dd to write the image directly to a USB stick for better performance.
“In this release we have decided to temporarily use Xfce, to accelerate the development process of the base system. A very small selection of software is preinstalled in the image, mainly so that we can gain a usable set of results from our users. Please also note that we use the PiSi package manager, adapted for SolusOS,” reads the official announcement.
Users who decide to test this distribution should know that the source repository is not available for direct access and it will transferred and fully opened in two weeks’ time.
As it stands right now, SolusOS 2 Alpha 8 is using a minimal Xfce 4.10 desktop environment and the majority of software in the SolusOS repositories is vanilla.
Other important packages used in the distribution include Linux kernel 3.10.6, glibc 2.17, systemd 206, dracut 029, libgtk-2: 2.24.17, libgtk-3: 3.9.6, LightDM 1.7.0, OpenSSL 1.0.1e, midori 0.5.2, Mesa 9.1.1, X.Org 1.14.0 with all FOSS drivers, Abiword 2.9.4, and much more.
Check the official announcement for a complete list of updated packages and improvements. Download SolusOS 2 Alpha 8 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is an alpha version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. Currently, only the 32-bit PAE ISO is available for testing.