14 DAY TRIAL // The developers behind the Debian-based Neptune Linux distribution announced today, April 7, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance update to the Neptune 4.5 stable series of the OS.
Neptune 4.5.4 is here four months after the release of Neptune 4.5.3, which was launched on the first day of 2017, and it includes lots of updated components, all the latest security fixes released upstream in the Debian GNU/Linux repositories, as well as various other improvements and bug fixes.
Among the updated components shipped with the new ISO snapshot of Neptune Linux, we can mention the LibreOffice 4.3.3 office suite, VirtualBox 5.1.4 virtualization software, Mesa 13.0.4 3D Graphics Library, Chromium 57 web browser, VLC 2.2.4 media player, and Icedove 45.6 email and news client.
"Chromium 57 brings better support for HTML5 video and Icedove 45.6 fixes several bugs when it comes to editing emails," reads the release announcement. "For best multimedia consumption we now updated to VLC 2.2.4 which gains better supports for newer Codecs like VP9 or FLAC."
Neptune is now powered by Linux kernel 3.18.48 LTS
Under the hood, Neptune 4.5.4 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 3.18.48 kernel, but it looks like users can also install the newer Linux 4.9.18 LTS kernel, which is available from the repositories. To improve hardware support, Neptune 4.5.4 ships with libmtp 1.1.12 with support for mounting the Jolla C smartphone.
The open-source AMD/ATI Radeon (xf86-video-ati) 7.8.0 graphics driver is included as well, along with the f2fs-tools 1.7.0 and btrfs-progs 4.9.1 utilities for providing out-of-the-box support for the Btrfs and Samsung's F2FS filesystems. Other than that, Neptune 4.5.4 enables the project's new secure software repository by default.
You can download the Neptune 4.5.4 64-bit Live ISO image with KDE4 or the latest KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS desktop environments right now from our website. However, existing users need only to update their installations using the default package manager and the official repositories of the operating system.