14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the Debian-based SolydX and SolydK GNU/Linux distributions announced today that the upcoming SolydXK 9 stable release entered Beta phase with Live ISO images available now for public testing.
Based on the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system, SolydXK 9 promises to add a new look and feel to both SolydX and SolydK variants by implementing light or dark themes that users can choose during first boot or afterward.
For SolydXK 9, the developers worked on a graphical user interface for the in-house built Solydxk Systems tool, which now lets users encrypt their partitions, select the closest repositories to their location, hold back packages from upgrade, localize or cleanup their system.
It also looks like SolydXK 9 won't ship with the backport repository by default, but users can enable it from the new SolydXK System application, and solydx/k-info packages are now obsolete as they've been integrated in the solydx/k-system-adjustments ones.
"After the release of SolydXK 9 I will keep the SolydXK 8 repository available for another year but I will not update any packages in that repository," says the dev. "If you want to keep your system based on Jessie, but you want to update Firefox and Thunderbird, you will need to do that from the SolydXK 9 repository at your own risk."
Several packages have been discontinued
Furthermore, the upcoming release replaces the Updatemanager utility with the new SolydXK System app and applications from Debian's repository that offer similar functionalities, as well as the SolydXK Softwaremanager tool. Device Driver Manager (DDM), SolydXK Conky, XKSudo and kcm-ufw were also discontinued.
Those who want to take the SolydXK 9 Beta release for a test drive on their personal computers can download the SolydX 9 Beta (shipping with the Xfce desktop) and SolydK 9 Beta (shipping with the KDE desktop) Live ISO images for 64-bit PCs right now from our website. Please try to keep in mind that these are pre-release versions, not to be used in production environments.