The holidays are coming and the developers from Vector Linux thought about giving us a new version of their operating system as a present. Robert Lange and his team have just released Vector Linux 5.9 final GOLD edition.

After several months of work - coding, debugging and testing - by the core development team and the Vector community, the results are showing up. If you have used Vector Linux before, then you know that this is a very stable distribution, based upon Slackware 12. Another nice feature of Vector is the blazing speed on even low-end computers (I've managed to "revive" an old machine with an Intel PII processor at 400Mhz, and it worked like a charm!). The 5.9 final GOLD release continues this tradition and brings you more new features. Flash, java, mp3, real media, Windows media, pdf and Quick Time plugins are included, and thanks to them, you will fully enjoy your web browsing from now on, without any problems. Ah, by the way, you can choose from different Internet browsers, like Firefox 2.0.0.11, Opera 9.5.0 Beta 1 and SeaMonkey Internet Suite 1.1.7.

The Linux kernel used is 2.6.22.14, which is very stable from my point of view. Vector 5.9 is also packed up with X.org 7.3, fully customized Xfce 4.4.2, Jwm and Fluxbox. When you have some office tasks to do, you can use Abiword and Gnumeric, applications that can do their job well.

If you don't want to go in the console and configure your system from there, you can use the included suite of GUI configuration and support tools, such as Vasm, Vwifi and Gslapt. I've almost forgot to mention that you now have the latest wireless drivers in Vector! Also, the developers did their best to offer support for read and write to NTFS, via fuse and ntfs-3g.

If you are a playful person, there are lots and lots of games waiting for you in Vector. Printers, scanners and cameras are supported in 5.9, aspect that will increase your office productivity, will let you take pictures, put them on your computer, edit them, do whatever you want with them!

KDE 3.5.8 is not included by default, but it is - along with other popular applications like Amarok, OpenOffice, etc. - available for you in the Vector repository, which currently has more than a thousand of the best Linux apps and support software.

I know there are persons who want an easy way to package source code into usable binary packages. Vector Linux 5.9 comes equipped with VLPackager, which will do this job for you. VasmCC is the GUI control center included in VL, and a modified version of cruxports is available for you, if you want to easily build software that is not yet in the repository.

I hope you will enjoy Vector Linux 5.9 final GOLD edition, that's why you can download it right now from Softpedia!