The distribution was previously based on Debian

Jun 1, 2015 01:43 GMT  ·  By

Biff Baxter from the wattOS team had the pleasure of announcing this past weekend that the ninth release of their Ubuntu-based operating system is available for download.

Approximately one year ago, the team announced that the wattOS distribution would ditch the Ubuntu Linux operating system for Debian GNU/Linux, which was the base of the wattOS R8 release unveiled on May 12, 2014.

Apparently, something was not right, so the wattOS developers decided that it was time to switch back to Ubuntu as the base of the distributions. Therefore, we're announcing today that wattOS R9 is now available for download, based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).

"We have simplified things this time around with wattOS and are only releasing two types of desktops," says Biff Baxter. "Previously having the extra desktop versions created additional work. This time we are more focused and have released only two desktop versions."

Looking at the changelog, we can notice that wattOS R9 is powered by Linux kernel 3.13.0.53 and updates all the core components and applications to their latest version available, including PCManFM 1.2.0, Shotwell 0.18.0, Mozilla Firefox 38.0, Filezilla 3.7.3, Transmission 2.82, Evince 3.10.3, Audacious 3.4.3, and GNOME MPlayer 1.0.8.

On the other hand, the Microwatt edition of wattOS R9 is built around the i3 4.10.2 tiling window manager, uses the Midori 0.4.3 web browser (which offers Flash support), includes various command-line tools like htop, and offers installation options for the applications mentioned above, which are included by default only in the LXDE flavor.

The MATE flavor has been dropped

wattOS R9 is distributed only in two editions, LXDE and Microwatt, as the MATE flavor has been dropped in order to simplify the development process of the distribution and concentrate better on the popular versions of the lightweight operating system.

Last but not least, wattOS Release 9 brings support for more hardware components, especially Wireless cards, the Powertop power management utility that lets users further optimize their installations, and several management features of laptops. Download wattOS R9 LXDE and wattOS R9 Microwatt right now from Softpedia.