New SparkyLinux 5.5 "Nibiru" ISOs Released with Latest Debian Buster Updates

A new respin of the SparkyLinux 5.5 "Nibiru" Rolling images released in July 2018, are now available to download with all the latest software and security updates from the Debian Testing repositories.

The new SparkyLinux 5.5 "Nibiru" Rolling images are now synced with the Debian Testing (soon to become Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster") software repositories as of September 17, 2018, which means that they are now shipping the Linux 4.18.6 kernel, the Calamares 3.2.1 installer, as well as the latest GCC 8 system compiler by default aas GCC 7 has been completely removed.

"There are new live/install iso images of SparkyLinux 5.5 “Nibiru” available to download. The live system of MinimalGUI/CLI uses Debian’s Linux kernel 4.18.6 as default. The live system of LXQt, due to a problem with long loading the desktop, features Sparky’s Linux kernel 4.18.8 (32bit pae/64bit amd64) as default; and the Debian’s one as well," reads the release announcement.

Here's what else is new in the  SparkyLinux 5.5 "Nibiru" respins

The SparkyLinux 5.5 "Nibiru" respins also adds several new packages, including Seahorse, rxvt-unicode for Openbox users, as well as FeatherPad and qps (Qt process manager) for LXQt users, and removes many others, among which we can mention the XTerm terminal emulator from the Openbox edition, as well as Notepadqq, Leafpad, and LXTask from the LXQt edition.

Also removed, from all images, are the ImageMagick, Vim, systemd-ui, libpam-gnome-keyring, and sparky-gexec packages. Furthermore, this release disables the Thunar daemon in the MinimalGUI (Openbox) edition due to issues with automatic mounting of new partitions created by the Calamares installer, which now removes the Cryptsetup packages if the system isn't encrypted.

The SparkyLinux 5.5 "Nibiru" Rolling respin ISO images are now available to download as MinimalCLI, MinimalGUI (Openbox), and LXQt editions for both 64-bit and 32-bit architectures. They are intended for new deployments as existing SparkyLinux 5 users will only have to update their installations to receive the above changes by running the command listed below in a terminal emulator.