A distro tailored for multimedia addicts

May 20, 2008 08:55 GMT  ·  By

Those of you that are passionate about music, video and high sound quality, will be glad to know that eAR OS 1.08 was launched by Acoustic Reality. This is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, with the aim to provide a complete media centre. It comes equipped with the advanced and easy to use eAR Media Center, which will enable you to watch TV shows, rip CDs, listen to Internet radio, view photos and much more.

eAR OS comes in two flavors, a freely downloadable version, "Free Edition", and a commercial one called "Enterprise", that sports many more features and performance improvements than the free version.

eAR OS Free Edition 1.08 can run on a computer with at least 256MB of RAM, but 512MB is the recommended amount for High Definition movies or HD TV playback. eAR OS comes with WINE, so you can run applications that were made for Windows only. The eAR Media Center has a brand new feature that will allow you to recover its database and options files without reinstalling anything at all. This is done through the ear-recovery application, which you will have to run to get everything back to normal.

The LiveCD now supports 20 extra sound cards working right out of the box, and proprietary hardware drivers can be easily installed. The language support has greatly increased, so you can install eAR OS 1.08 in more than 50 different languages. The Linux Real-Time kernel 2.6.24 is used so you can enjoy the best sound quality possible.

We could say that this is a Long Term Support release, as it comes with three years of automatic updates through the Internet. This is set to change only when the package system requires a large quantity of updates, so a new LiveCD will be released.

Download eAR OS 1.08 right now from Softpedia.