14 DAY TRIAL // The March 2020 snapshot of Sparky Linux is now available for download, providing users with a series of welcome changes and improvements for the pre-loaded apps.
First and foremost, Sparky 2020.03 “Po Tolo” is based on Debian Bullseye, and it upgrades the system from the Debian testing repos used on March 7 this year.
The most notable improvements in this update is the update to Linux kernel 5.4.19 as default, but the unstable repos are now using kernel version 5.5.8 and 5.6-rc4.
There are also several worthy app updates, starting with the Calamares installer, which is now at version 3.2.20, and ending with the most popular apps that we use on Sparky Linux. For example, Firefox has been updated to version 73.0.1, Thunderbird is now version 685.0, while LibreOffice 6.4.1.2 is now pre-loaded by default.
The developing team has also made changes to a number of packages bundled with Sparky 2020.03. For example, the qCamera webcam application has been replaced by Cheese, while the Vokoscreen package was changed to Vokoscreen-NG. There are two removed packages in this release, namely radiotray and imagemagic.
How to install it
Sparky 2020.03 comes with GCC 10 preinstalled, but the default version continues to be GCC 9.
Installing the latest version is quite piece of cake, as you can simply use the Sparky Upgrade GUI tool that comes built-in to download the new packages and deploy them on their devices. Additionally, you can also install the new release using the following command:
sparky-upgrade
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade