A security-oriented computer operating system

Apr 27, 2015 00:08 GMT  ·  By

Joanna Rutkowska announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate version of the forthcoming Qubes OS 3.0 computer operating system based on the Fedora Linux distribution.

According to the release notes, Qubes OS 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) comes with a number of new features, such as the implementation of the brand-new hypervisor-abstracted architecture, which is also known as HAL, the addition of Xen 4.4, and new qrexec.

Additionally, several new virtual machine templates have been integrated in Qubes OS 3.0 RC1, supporting well-known Linux kernel-based operating systems like Debian 8.0 (Jessie), Debian 7.0 (Wheezy), Whonix 9, and many others.

"A lot of important news today. Finally, we're releasing the first installable ISO for Qubes 3.0, the Release Candidate 1 (3.0-rc1)," says Joanna Rutkowska. "Compared to Qubes R2, which we released last year, Qubes OS 3.0 brings major improvements in two distinct areas."

The build system saw a lot of changes and improvements

In addition to the features mentioned above, the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Qubes 3.0 operating system also provides important improvements and under-the-hood modifications to the internal build system.

Among these, we can mention support for creating templates in disposable virtual machines (a.k.a. sandboxed builds), support for using TorVM as a default netvm for all virtual machines, and simplified template packaging.

In a lengthy article, the Qubes OS developers explain the reasons for the numerous under-the-hood changes of their build system, which needs to be extremely reliable and secure, so they can safely build Qubes binaries.

As usual, you can download the Qubes OS 3.0 Release Candidate 1 distribution right now via Softpedia, but we remind you that it is a pre-release version that might contain unresolved issues. Thus, it is not recommended for deployment on production environments.