Porteus 3.2 Release Candidate 2 is available for download

May 8, 2016 23:45 GMT  ·  By

The Porteus Linux development team announced today, May 8, 2016, the immediate availability for download of the second RC (Release Candidate) build for the upcoming Porteus 3.2 operating system.

To be honest, we had no idea that the development cycle of Porteus 3.2 has started, as there was no official announcement for a first Release Candidate build, so we're as surprised as you are to see today the release of Porteus 3.2 RC2, which comes one and a half years after the previous version, Porteus 3.1, announced in the first week of December 2014.

"Porteus is over the moon to announce the release of Porteus-v3.2rc2. There have been some major changes since the 14.1 release," reads today's announcement. "Four desktops are available at this point: xfce4, mate, cinnamon and kde5. The base modules are a little larger than the previous release but contain a more complete set of packages for all round compatibility."

Porteus 3.2 seems to be based on Slackware 14.2

Powered by the latest Linux 4.5.3 kernel, Porteus 3.2 Release Candidate 2 includes many updated core components, such as the PulseAudio 8.0, eudev 3.1.5, ConsoleKit2 1.0.0, and a more complete 000-kernel firmware. Of course, Porteus 3.2 looks to be based on Slackware 14.2, as the previous release contained packages from the Slackware 14.1 operating system.

Another interesting fact about the upcoming Porteus 3.2 release, which doesn't yet have a release date, is that it will ship with four graphical desktop environments, namely Cinnamon, KDE Plasma 5, MATE, and Xfce 4.12. Unfortunately, there are no details about the version of the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, at least not at the moment of writing this article.

Users are being informed that in Porteus 3.2 it's possible to update specific components straight from a console using commands like update-chrome for updating the Google Chrome, update-opera for updating Opera, update-firefox for updating Mozilla Firefox, update-palemoon for updating Palemoon, update-wps-office for updating WPS Office, and update-LibreOffice for updating LibreOffice.

If you want to take Porteus 3.2 Release Candidate 2 for a test drive, we recommend downloading the ISO images for either 64-bit or 32-bit computers via our website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, which means that it might contain unknown or unresolved issues.