The distro will receive support until April 2019

Apr 25, 2016 03:48 GMT  ·  By

Roberto J. Dohnert, CEO of Black Lab Software, informs Softpedia today, April 25, 2016, about the release and immediate availability for download of the Black Lab Linux 7.6 operating system.

Powered by Linux kernel 3.19.0-58, the same version that is available upstream in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), on which the long-term supported Black Lab Linux 7.x series is based, and built around the lightweight Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, Black Lab Linux 7.6 is a maintenance build to keep the branch stable and reliable at all times.

"Black Lab Linux 7.6 is the latest release of our stable 7.x series of OS's. Black Lab Linux 7.6 is supported long term until April 2019," said Roberto J. Dohnert in the announcement. "Black Lab Linux 64 bit can boot on either UEFI or BIOS devices (we recommend turning off secure-boot if not necessary). Black Lab Linux 32 bit can boot only on BIOS devices."

What's new in Black Lab Linux 7.6

Release highlights include the LibreOffice 5.1.2 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 45.0.2 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 38.6.0 email and news client, Gmusicbrowser music player, GNOME Documents document viewer and organizer, Tracker fast search engine, HexChat IRC client, Steam for Linux, Spotify client, and Skippy-XD Expose-style task switcher.

As expected, Black Lab Linux 7.6 includes all the security patches and software updates that have been released upstream in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) software repositories until April 18, 2016, and if you're currently using a release from the 7.x series, you don't need to download the new ISOs, just make sure you have all the updates installed.

Black Lab Linux 7.6 comes with a warning for users of Nvidia GeForce graphics cards, as these won't work well with the included open-source video driver provided in the Black Lab Linux kernel, so if the system freezes during boot, you'll need to add the "nomodeset" boot option in the GRUB bootloader. You can download the 64-bit and 32-bit Black Lab Linux 7.6 Live ISO images right now via our website.