Distro watch
What’s behind the free software sofa?
UBUNTU 24.04 LTS
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat is currently scheduled for release on 25th April. At the time of writing, we’re working with a daily build and expect a full review next issue. Nevertheless, we discovered that Canonical has announced this LTS release will be supported for up to 12 years, assuming users opt for an Ubuntu Pro subscription. The Ubuntu installer now defaults to Minimal, but you can still choose Full as well as third-party codecs. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com.
FREEBSD 13.3
Despite moving away from 32-bit architectures in future versions (see news story, opposite page), this fourth release of the FreeBSD stable branch is still very much i386 compatible and brimming with updates. ZFS has been upgraded to OpenZFS 2.1.14. LLVM and the Clang compiler have also been updated to version 17.0.6. FreeBSD now ships with OpenSSH v9.6p1 and Sendmail v8.18.1. For a complete list of all the new FreeBSD features, pay a visit: www.FreeBSD.org/releases/13.3R/relnotes/.
LINUX FROM SCRATCH 12.1
The Linux From Scratch Project is both a Linux installation and a book that explains how to build a custom Linux system from scratch. For version 12.1, a total of 43 packages have been upgraded, such as Binutils 2.42 and glibc 2.39. A number of revisions have also been made to the book itself to improve readability. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.7.4, too. You can discover more at: https://linuxfromscratch.org.
KALI LINUX 2024.01
Beloved by penetration-testers everywhere, Kali’s latest iteration, v2024.01, comes with a number of visual tweaks including the obligatory manual wallpaper and GRUB boot loader refresh. Kali is now easier to download as well, thanks to the addition of 32 new mirrors. As part of the continuing transition to GTK4 apps, the Eye of Gnome viewer has now been replaced by Loupe. The latest version of Nautilus also considerably speeds up file search times. Find out more at www.kali.org.
KDE NEON 20240228
This updated build of KDE Neon is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS but includes brand new KDE releases including Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and all programs included with KDE Gear 24.02. Existing users can upgrade via Discover. New users can download the latest ISO or Docker images. There are some bugs in the latest so-called megarelease but developers assure users they’re working on fixing them. Read more at https://neon.kde.org.