14 DAY TRIAL // SparkyLinux 3.4, a lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized MATE, Xfce, and Base (CLI) desktops, has been released and is now available for download.
The SparkyLinux 3.4 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie,” and it’s no different from all the other versions that came before it in this branch. As usual, the developers have made some changes to the operating system and some of them are actually quite big.
“We have made a couple of successful testing installations of Sparky in EFI mode in a virtual environment. We can’t promise that installation on a physical machine is fine. We never tried this, because we don’t have any ‘normal’ machine with EFI.”
“New iso images can be used to make new, fresh Sparky installation. You don’t have to reinstall your system if you have Sparky installed on your machine. Just make full system upgrade and follow the enclosed upgrading guides,” reads the official announcement.
The developers have upgraded the Linux kernel to version 3.14, which is one of the latest builds available for download. In fact, this is not the most advanced stable kernel that can be found, but a lot of distros have implemented this 3.14 version.
SparkyLinux 3.4 “Annagerman” also uses the latest updates from the Debian testing repositories, at least until June 23, MATE 1.8, Openbox 3.5.2-6, and Xfce 4.10.
The UEFI support implemented in this version is one of the most important features added until now, along with the implementation of systemd, which was also adopted by the Debian base distro.
Other major changes in this SparkyLinux 3.4 edition includes a few extra scripts for the Openbox menu, a new package called hardinfo, and a new version of TeamViewer (the latest 9.x branch).
Users will also find a tool for creating bootable live USB disks (a GUI frontend for the “dd” command) called sparky-live-usb-creator, a tool for formatting USB disks and creating bootable live USB disks called mintstick, the Steam application and the steam-launcher, Skype 4.3, Seamonkey 2.26.1 (Internet suite), nightingale (audio player and web browser based on the Songbird media player source code), and numerous other fixes.
A complete list of changes, new features, new packages, and fixes can be found in the official announcement of the SparkyLinux distro. You can download SparkyLinux 3.4 Base, SparkyLinux 3.4 MATE, and SparkyLinux 3.4 Xfce right now from Softpedia.