14 DAY TRIAL // The second point release of the Debian-based antiX 17 "Heather Heyer" systemd-free operating system series has arrived this past weekend with latest security and software updates.
Coming more than half a year after the first point release of the antiX 17 "Heather Heyer" Linux-based operating system series, the antiX 17.2 point release is now available for downoad and it's based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 "Stretch" operating system, which means that it includes all its package and security updates.
antiX 17.2 ships with a newer version of the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series used by Debian Stretch, v4.9.126, which is fully patched against the latest Meltdown and Spectre exploits, aas well as the L1TF (L1 Terminal Fault) a.k.a. Foreshadow speculative execution side channel cache timing security vulnerability.
"This is primarily a point-release upgrade of antiX-17.1 (Heather Heyer) with a new L1TF/Foreshadow and Meltdown/Spectre patched kernel, various bugfixes, updated translations and some upgraded packages. As usual we offer the following completely systemd-free flavours for both 32 and 64 bit architecture," reads the release announcement.
What's new in antiX 17.2
Apart from the new L1TF/Foreshadow, Meltdown, and Spectre patched kernel, the antiX 17.2 point release updates various components and apps to their latest version from the Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 "Stretch" repositories. For example, antiX 17.2 updates the eudev device manager to version 3.6 and the Mozilla Firefox web browser to version 60.2.2.
This release also ships with the no-systemd version of PulseAudio sound server, gz compression for the antiX-full live ISO images to make them faster to boot, yet bigger in size, better localization as several language traslations have been updated. Also, with this release, the devs moved the non free debs from the main archive to the "nonfree" one in the antiX repositories.
You can download antiX 17.2 right now from our web portal if you want to install this Debian-based, systemd-free, fast, and flexible GNU/Linux distribution on your personal computer. The antiX 17.2 release is available as antiX-full, antiX-base, antiX-core, and antiX-net editions for both 64-bit and 32-bit hardware architectures, but the The 32-bit versions don't use a non-PAE kernel.