All the latest packages have been added to the OS

Oct 19, 2014 16:30 GMT  ·  By

The developers of Porteus, a portable Linux distro that can run from a USB device, CD ROM, SD card, or hard drive, have announced that the first Release Candidate for the 3.1 version is out.

Porteus is a special operating system that is designed to be very fast and sport all kinds of bleeding edge features. It's also optimized to run from all sorts of media, not just hard disks. It's built on Slackware and it's extremely small, a characteristic that is determined by the fact that it's always loaded completely in the memory.

Another interesting aspect of the distro is the fact that it uses modules instead of a package manager. These modules can be precompiled for the operating system and users can just activate and deactivate them. Also, installing modules in Porteus works very intuitively and it can be done by double clicking on the modules.

Porteus 3.1 RC1 has bleeding edge packages

The Porteus 3.0.1 Desktop Edition was a very impressive release and it incorporated a large number of improvements, including some of the latest packages available at that time. That was back in August and many things have changed since then, including the Linux kernel.

"You may have found the solution in Porteus. Porteus is a member of the Linux flavour of operating systems which is designed to be portable and lightning fast. It started out as a bleeding edge version of 'Slax' called the 'slax remix' headed by 'Fanthom' and from there 'changed it's form' into Porteus (God of the sea)."

"The Porteus Community is stoked to announce the candidate release of Porteus Desktop Edition 3.1rc1 is ready for download. As usual we have available prepackaged modules for Google-Chrome, Opera, LibreOffice, Abiword, Skype and printing/scanning software, which can be dropped in place to get out-of-the-box functionality!," reads the official announcement.

One of the most important components of a Linux distribution is the Linux kernel. This being a bleeding edge distro, the developers had to add the latest kernel available, and that is the 3.17.x branch.

Also, the cryptsetup has been updated to version 1.6.6, the "polyglot" online translator has been added, the freeware video default drivers have been updated, the latest KDE 4.14.1 desktop environment has been implemented by default, the Claws email client has been removed, along with evince, and the latest LibreOffice 4.3.2 has been added. Users will also find that Skype 4.3.0.37 is available by default.

A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement. You can download Porteus 3.1 RC1 ISO from Softpedia.