14 DAY TRIAL // The m23 project, an open-source network deployment and management system for Linux-based operating systems, recently announced the release and general availability of m23 Rock 16.3.
m23 Rock 16.3 is now the latest stable build of the project, and comes six months after version 16.2, which added support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) clients. It appears that there's no support for newer GNU/Linux distributions in m23 Rock 16.3, but there are a bunch of interesting improvements and new features.
For example, it is now possible to sign package sources when attempting to set up local package sources on the m23 server for installation of m23 clients using a fixed set of packages. Best of all, the new functionality also includes a GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) key management solution.
"The m23 interface now provides a dialog for managing your GPG keys and an option to add a signature in the package source architect and the package architect dialogs. The public key of the GPG key that was used for the signature will be imported to the m23 clients to allow them to verify the package authenticity," reads the announcement.
System-wide proxy settings, m23customPatch tool
Among other interesting improvements that landed in the m23 Rock 16.3 release, we can mention the implementation of easy-to-set system-wide proxy settings, which could be useful when trying to run an m23 server behind a proxy server, as well as support for modifying the m23 source code using the m23customPatch tool.
To enable secure, HTTPS-based access to package sources, the apt-transport-https package is now automatically included during the installation of an m23 client base system, and m23 will no longer fetch a non-existent base system archive. You can download m23 Rock 16.3 right now through our Linux portal.