The operating system is now powered by Linux kernel 4.8.0-52

May 22, 2017 23:12 GMT  ·  By

Black Lab Software's Roberto J. Dohnert has informed Softpedia today about the availability of the first point release of the recently unveiled Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11 operating system series.

Coming about two weeks after the release of Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11, which is based on the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system using the HWE (hardware enablement) kernel from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11.0.1 appears to be an unexpected maintenance update addressing a few important issues reported by users lately.

"Today we issued an emergency release of Black Lab Enterprise Linux. During the past couple of weeks users have come to use with some issues that they were facing and we decided to go outside of our release schedule and issue an update as well as update our ISO's," said Roberto J. Dohnert, Black Lab Software CEO, in the release announcement.

MATE is now the default desktop environment for the main edition

The first thing users will notice when running the main Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11.0.1 edition is that the GNOME 3 desktop environment was replaced with MATE, a clone of the old-school GNOME 2 desktop designed for low-end computers or users who want to use a lightweight interface. This is a major change, and the decision was made because many users reported issues with GNOME 3.

Another interesting change is the replacement of the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client with GNOME's Evolution, which is now the default mail client. This decision was made because Google's sign-on dialog no longer works with Thunderbird. Under the hood, Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11.0.1 is powered by the Linux 4.8.0-52 kernel packages.

Of course, several issues were addressed in this first point release of Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11, improving wireless support on MacBook Air computers, the speed of the OpenVPN app, a blank screen problem when installing VirtualBox, installation hangs on HP Proliant servers at the "configuring hardware" step, and also restoring the build-essential package.

The Enterprise edition of Black Lab Linux 11.0.1 should now install well on SGI ICE servers without the GRUB bootloader becoming corrupted and not booting the system after installation. This release is distributed as Enterprise, Education, Studio and IoT editions, which you can download right now from our website, but existing users need only to update their systems to receive all these improvements.