14 DAY TRIAL // After a long break, the development of the Debian-based antiX MX operating system continues, and it looks like we need to get ready for a new major release, simply versioned as 16.
The current stable release of antiX MX is 15, and it landed on Christmas 2015 based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 "Jessie" operating system, which means that the time has come for the development cycle of antiX MX-16 to start, and the first Beta release arrived for public testing on the first day of November 2016, as noted on the project's website.
Dubbed "Metamorphosis," antiX MX-16 will be based on the stable Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 "Jessie" operating system, ship with Linux kernel 3.16 for the 32-bit PAE and non-PAE ISO images, as well as Linux kernel 4.7 for 64-bit ISOs targeting modern hardware. As expected, both kernels are fully patched against the "Dirty COW" exploit.
Xfce 4.12 is the default desktop environment, LibreOffice 5.2.2 pre-installed
Now that you know what's under the hood of the antiX MX-16 GNU/Linux distro, it's time to take a look at the end-user changes, as the upcoming OS is built around the lightweight Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, and comes with a great collection of open source applications, most of which are at their latest versions.
For example, you'll find the complete LibreOffice 5.2.2 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 49.0 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.4.0 email and news client, VLC Media Player 2.2.4 video playback tool, Clementine 1.3.1 music player, Shotwell 0.24.1 digital photo organizer and image viewer, and GIMP 2.8.18 image editor.
gscan2pdf 1.5.1 is also present if you want to create a multipage PDF or DjVu documents from scans, Grub Customizer 5.0.6 lets you fully customize the GRUB2 bootloader, Pepper Flash Player is installed by default for Adobe Flash web content, along with OpenJDK 8 for better Java support.
Users will also find the Seahorse 3.14.0 GnuPG frontend for keeping their passwords and keys safe and secure, the SMTube YouTube video browser and playback tool, Chinese and Japanese fonts, Samba shares, as well as two new in-house built tools, namely mx-debian-backports-installer and mx-clocky, an attractive analog clock for your desktop.
antiX MX-16 Beta 1 is now available for download from our website, and it supports both 64-bit and 32-bit hardware platforms. You can take it for a test drive as we speak, but try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version and some unresolved bugs are still present, which means that it's not yet ready for everyday use.
