14 DAY TRIAL // The Polish developers behind the Debian-based SparkyLinux GNU/Linux distribution were proud to announce today the general availability of the final SparkyLinux 4.6 release codenamed Tyche.
SparkyLinux 4.6 is the latest stable and most advanced version of the distro, which was in development for the past several months, based on the Debian Testing (Stretch) repositories. But now that the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system has hit stable, the SparkyLinux devs were quick to promote their OS to the stable channel too.
"There are new live/install ISO images of SparkyLinux 4.6-STB "Tyche" available to download. This is the first SparkyLinux edition based on Debian stable line 9 codename "Stretch". SparkyLinux "Home" edition provides a fully featured operating system with two lightweight desktops: LXDE and Xfce," reads today's announcement.
What's new in SparkyLinux 4.6
Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9.30 kernel, SparkyLinux 4.6 "Tyche" is synced with the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system repositories as of June 19, 2017. It replaces the Icedove email client with Mozilla Thunderbird, adds a new theme called Sparky5 to improve the look of GTK+ apps, and two new boot options.
The first boot option implemented in SparkyLinux 4.6 is called "toram" and was designed to let users load the entire live system into your computer's RAM (2 GB or more is required) and run the operating system from there. The second boot option is called "text mode" and will allow you to run the OS in text mode in case normal boot or failsafe mode fail.
SparkyLinux 4.6 also includes the new in-house built tool that notifies users when updates are available for their systems. Other noteworthy changes are the availability of a new repository for install the latest Wine-Staging builds, though it's not enabled by default, and support for the Linux 4.10 and 4.11 kernels in the unstable repos.
A lot of cleaning was performed during the development of SparkyLinux 4.6, so you should see some performance improvements if you reinstall. Support for HTTPS (Secure HTTP) has been added to all of SparkyLinux services, including the repositories, for security reasons. Lastly, the SparkyLinux Openbox edition received three new keyboard shortcuts.
These are Super+T to open the default terminal emulator, Super+ R to open the run dialog, and Super+Q to quit the session. SparkyLinux 4.6 is available for download right now from our website as LXDE, Xfce, MinimalGUI, and MinimalCLI variants for both 32- and 64-bit architectures. Existing SparkyLinux 4.x users can also perform a full upgrade to version 4.6 using this tutorial.
