14 DAY TRIAL // 4MLinux Rescue Edition 9.0 Beta, a special distribution that includes a wide set of system maintenance and recovery applications, is now available for testing and download.
All the 4MLinux operating systems are usually very small, but the Rescue Edition is actually one of the heftiest, mostly because it comes with numerous packages and applications.
The name of this particular flavor of 4MLinux says pretty much everything there is to know about its purpose. It's built to take care of problems that usually show up when other operating systems crash and it's likely that users will find at least one application that can solve that particular issue.
“The main features in this release are antivirus protection (Clam AntiVirus 0.98.3 with ClamWin), system backup (4MLinux Backup Scripts 9.0), data recovery (GNU ddrescue 1.17, TestDisk 6.14 with QPhotoRec), disk partitioning (cfdisk 2.24.2, cgdisk 0.8.10, GNU Parted 3.1), and partition imaging (Partimage 0.6.9, Partclone 0.2.69).”
“Many archive formats can be managed via 7-Zip 9.20, FreeArc 0.666, and PeaZip 5.3.1. File managers (Midnight Commander 4.8.11, X File Explorer 1.37, muCommander 0.9.0), CD/DVD burners (cdw 0.7.1, InfraRecorder 0.53), and UNetbootin 603 are also included,” said the developer on his blog.
This is just a small part of the applications and features that users will find integrated in the Linux distribution. They will also be able to install this 4MLinux flavor, although they might consider waiting a little while before doing that.
The development cycle of these distributions is pretty short and this means that a stable and final version should be available in a few weeks. Until then, users might consider running it in a virtual machine or just as a Live CD.
Also, unlike previous versions of the 4M Linux distros, users won't have to manually run the startx command in order to initialize the desktop. Still, it's possible to stop the initialization of the X server and use the command line version of the operating system right before the boot.
4MLinux is actually a series of mini Linux distributions focusing on the following four Ms: Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g. playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (a collection of Linux games).
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download 4MLinux Rescue Edition 9.0 Beta right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.