14 DAY TRIAL // Roberto J. Dohnert from Black Lab Software had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia earlier today, September 14, about the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta build of the upcoming Black Lab Linux 2015.12 OS.
Dubbed Black Lab NEXT 2015.9 Beta, the release is based on the latest point release of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system and uses its Linux 3.19 kernel packages. The LibreOffice 5.0 office suite, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5, as well as the Tracker, Tracker GUI, and GNOME Documents apps have been included.
Being built around the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, Black Lab NEXT 2015.9 Beta comes with numerous bug fixes that have been reported by users since the previous Beta release of the distribution. For example, wireless connections will no longer drop in and out, and the HTML5 black screen issue in Mozilla Firefox has been fixed.
Moreover, the boot manager has been updated to allow installations on UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) systems, thanks to Antoni Norman, the developer of the Pinguy OS Linux distribution. Also, when installing the Skype or Wine software, all the 32-bit dependency libraries will be installed automatically.
"Today we have released Black Lab NEXT 2015.9 which is our second beta for Black Lab Linux 2015.12. With this release we fixed many of the major issues that dealt with stability," says Roberto J. Dohnert in an email to Softpedia. "After the Beta release we will be releasing Black Lab Linux with XFCE and GNOME."
The last Beta will be available for 32-bit and 64-bit systems
Among other interesting features that landed in Black Lab NEXT 2015.9 Beta, we can mention that the new XFWM themes have been successfully ported, and some great wallpapers have been added. The development cycle of Black Lab Linux 2015.12 will continue with a third and last Beta build, scheduled for release next month.
In the meantime, if you're curious to know what new features will be added in the next major release of the Ubuntu-based Black Lab Linux operating system, we recommend downloading Black Lab NEXT 2015.9 Beta right now from Softpedia, where you will find a Live DVD ISO image for 64-bit computers. However, please note that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use!