14 DAY TRIAL // During the first days of November, we reported that the antiX MX-16 "Metamorphosis" Linux operating system entered development and that it would be based on Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 "Jessie."
Today, November 24, 2016, we're happy to report that the first Release Candidate is available for public testing, bringing numerous enhancements since the Beta milestone. However, it looks like this might just be the last RC released for antiX MX-16, which could be promoted to the stable channel very soon after this announcement.
"We have quashed many bugs and added improvements since the first public-beta1. The dev team hopes that, with additional feedback, the final should be ready very soon. Please help us by testing and reporting any issues that crop up," reads the release notes on the distribution's website.
Shipping with Firefox 50.0 and Thunderbird 45.5.0, uses Xfce 4.12 desktop
Now that the final release of antiX MX-16 "Metamorphosis" is just around the corner, we'd like to inform the readers about what they should expect from the upcoming Linux-based operating systems. First off, the default desktop environment will be the lightweight and highly customizable Xfce4.12.
antiX MX-16 is a modern distribution, which means that you'll enjoy all the latest software releases, including but not limited to Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.5.0 email and news client, LibreOffice 5.2.2 office suite, GIMP 2.8.18 image editor, VLC 2.2.4 video player, and Clementine 1.3.1 audio player.
Moreover, the distro will ship with the Shotwell 0.24.1 digital photo organizer and image viewer, Pepper Flash Player plugin for Mozilla Firefox, if you want to enjoy Adobe Flash content, Grub Customizer 5.0.6 to tweak the GRUB bootloader, gscan2pdf 1.5.1 PDF and DjVu creator, as well as OpenJDK 8 for out-of-the-box Java support.
antiX MX-16 "Metamorphosis" should also include Seahorse 3.14.0 for storing passwords and keys, the SMTube YouTube video player and browser, Samba for accessing Windows network shares, support for Japanese and Chinese fonts, and in-house built mx-clocky desktop-agnostic analog clock and mx-debian-backports-installer.
Last but not least, the distribution is shipping with two new tools. While the first one is called live-kernel-upgrader and can be used for upgrading the Linux kernel packages and remastering a running Live system, the second one is called live-usb-maker and helps users install antiX MX-16 to a USB flash drive that supports both UEFI and BIOS.