14 DAY TRIAL // It's been a long time since we last wrote something about Ryan Finnie's unique Linux distribution, Finnix, but it would appear that it is pretty much alive and kicking as version 111 is now available for download.
The fact of the matter is that Ryan Finnie released two versions of his Finnix distro, as the 110 milestone was announced on June 1, 2015, and it introduced Linux kernel 3.13, an updated package from the upstream Debian repositories, as well as bug fixes and general improvements.
Three days later, Ryan Finnie made a second announcement, this time for Finnix 111, which is the first ever version of the Debian-based distribution to support the ARM hardware architecture. Additionally, the new release adds support for OverlayFS, and the usual performance improvements and bugfixes.
"Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing," says Ryan Finnie. "Finnix 111 includes support for the ARM architecture, OverlayFS support, as well as other features and bugfixes."
ARM and OverlayFS support in Finnix Linux
Until today, Finnix supported only the 32-bit (x86) and PPC (PowerPC) architectures. Starting with version 111, you will be able to download Finnix for ARM (armhf) hardware architectures as well. However, the current ARM ISO image is tagged as a TP (Technology Preview) and its primarily target is the Versatile Express A9 platform.
Ryan Finnie and his team have also announced that they have successfully tested the ARM version of Finnix on the Raspberry Pi 2 computer board, and that support for more ARM platforms will come in the next updates of the distribution. Furthermore, Finnix 111 is now powered by Linux kernel 4.0, which means that it offers support for OverlayFS and that support for AUFS has been dropped.
For those of you who are not in the loop, Finnix is a small and self-contained Live Linux distro based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and designed to be used by system administators. It is currently based on Debian Testing. Download Finnix 111 right now from Softpedia.