ROSA Fresh R8.1 Linux OS Launches with Kernel 4.9 LTS Patched for Intel Skylake

[CrAKeN]

 

ROSA Fresh R8.1 released

 

The developers of the ROSA GNU/Linux distribution derived from Mandriva announced the general availability of the R8.1 maintenance update for the ROSA Fresh 2014.1 stable series of the operating system.

 

ROSA Fresh R8.1 is a point release that comes more than six months after the release of the ROSA Fresh R8 series, and brings with it the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel fully patched to work out-of-the-box on computer powered by the latest Intel Skylake chipsets.

 

"This ROSA Fresh R8.1 release is primarily purposed for users who need stable LTS platform on modern hardware," reads today's announcement. "This release contains all patches and software updates for Intel Skylake chipset and similar modern chipsets, also kernel 4.9.x is available just right out of the box."

 

Includes Mozilla Firefox ESR, Mesa 13.0.2 with OpenGL 4.5 support

Among other interesting changes included in the ROSA Fresh R8.1 release, we can mention the implementation of an ESR (Extended Support Release) branch of the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser, the latest CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) printing drivers, and the Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library with OpenGL 4.5 support.

 

The NetworkManager network connection manager and NTPD (Network Time Protocol daemon) services have been improved, a new OpenSSL version was implemented to offer support for GOST cipher algorithms, and it looks like hardware acceleration was enabled by default to improve the performance of some video editing applications.

 

The SANE packages were updated in the ROSA Fresh R8.1 release to offer better support for Epson scanners, the default ROSA theme was improved to work better when there are no desktop effects enabled, VirtualBox shared folder should now work out-of-the-box, and support for new modems has been implemented in modemmanager.

 

Of course, various security issues and other annoying bugs were patched, including an installation and booting problem with the live ISOs and a security flaw for the ~/.gvfs directory. Other than that, it looks like rsyslog is now disabled by default to boost the booting performance. Download ROSA Desktop Fresh R8.1 right now.

 

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