14 DAY TRIAL // Patrick Verner is kicking off 2018 with a new release of his commercial GNU/Linux distribution Parted Magic, which brings up-to-date components and the most recent security fixes.
Coming four months after version 2017_09_05, which was the most successful release to date, Parted Magic 2018_01_08 ships with Linux kernel 4.14.11, a version that includes patches for the newly discovered Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, as well as better support for newer graphics cards.
"The 2017_09_05 release was our most successful release to date with very little complaints. Instead of changing a bunch of stuff for the sake of changing a bunch of stuff, we basically kept it the way it was," says developer Patrick Verner in the release announcement. "We only addressed the little issues and updated relevant software."
Here's what's new in Parted Magic 2018_01_08
Among the updated packages included in the Parted Magic 2018_01_08 release, we can mention Gparted 0.30.0, Mozilla Firefox 52.5.3 ESR, X.Org Server 1.19.6, Mesa 17.2.8, Adobe Flash Player 28.0.0.126, Samba 4.4.16, NetworkManager 1.8.4, network-manager-applet 1.8.10, wpa_supplicant 2.6, Bash 4.3.048, and BlueZ 5.47.
Additionally, the kernel-firmware 20171213, libdrm 2.4.89, e2fsprogs 1.43.8, btrfs-progs 4.13.3, zfs-on-linux 0.7.5, spl-solaris 0.7.5, libXcursor 1.1.15, libtiff 4.0.9, OpenSSL 1.0.2n, libXfont 1.5.4, nwipe 0.24, libxml2 2.9.5, openjpeg 2.3.0, mozilla-nss 3.31.1, dnsmasq 2.78, libmbim 1.14.2, libqmi 1.18.0, and libgcrypt 1.7.9 are also included.
The list of updated components continues with GNU wget 1.19.2, Ruby 2.2.8, Python 2.7.14, cURL 7.56.1, libXres 1.2.0, smartcontrol 1.1.1, hdparm 9.52, nvme-cli 1.4, glibc-zoneinfo 2017c, xf86-video-amdgpu-1.4.0, and xf86-video-ati-7.10.0. Also the xf86-video-fbdev 0.4.4, xf86-video-vboxvideo 1.0.0 and libnfsidmap 0.25 packages were added.
Parted Magic 2018_01_08 is available for purchase right now from the project's homepage for newcomers, and it's available as a free download for those who have a 1-year subscription. You can also purchase Live USB and DVD media with Parted Magic pre-installed from the official website.