14 DAY TRIAL // Trisquel 4.5 "Slaine" has been released. The latest version is based on Ubuntu 10.10 and comes with plenty of updated packages, on top of the improvements from the upstream distro, along with several changes and new features.
The new release comes with a brand new boot manager useful for the live images, newly introduced packages like the Remmina remote desktop client and the Gwibber social networking client, from Ubuntu.
"Our latest version is ready for download. It includes a lot of updates, along with an overhaul of the development process -compilation scripts and build jails- which was largely upgraded to simplify automation," Rubén Rodríguez writes in the official announcement.
"This improvements made it easier to apply changes to the upstream packages, leading to a much more polished result," he explained.
One of the areas that got attention for Trisquel 4.5 is the browser which received several enhancements to "improve speed - enabling http pipelining and other methods, privacy - blocking third party cookies by default, and moving to Duck Duck Go as default search engine, and usability - the preinstalled FlashVideoReplacer plugin allows [you] to watch videos from YouTube, Vimeo and many others."
Also new in Trisquel 4.5 is support for the open-source Noveau driver for Nvidia video cards. Noveau can offer 3D acceleration, a 2D open-source driver has been available for a long time, but is still a work in progress. As such, it is not the default driver used in Trisquel 4.5, but it is built-in.
Highlights of Trisquel 4.5:
· Linux-libre 2.6.35; · Xorg 7.5; · GNOME 2.32; · Mozilla based web browser 3.6.15; · OpenOffice.org 3.2.
Users of Trisquel 4.0 LTS, based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, can upgrade to Trisquel 4.5, but they can choose to stick with their existing install as well, which will be supported until 2013. Many of the improvements in Trisquel 4.5 have been backported to the LTS release.
Trisquel 4.5 is available for download here on Softpedia.