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Ryan Finnie announced today the release and general availability of the Debian-based Finnix 121 live Linux distro for system administrators.
In early May, the Finnix developers celebrated the project’s 20th anniversary with the release of Finnix 120, making Finnix one of the oldest LiveCDs for system administrators that’s still being maintained and kept up to date with the latest GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies.
It’s actually good to see people still maintaining older distributions, and the new release, Finnix 121, brings a bag of goodies that include a new base from the Debian Testing repositories, where the Debian Project currently develops the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series.
A bunch of new tools are also present in this release, including ranger, cpu-checker, edid-decode, ipmitool, lldpd, oathtool, sdparm, sipcalc, socat, xorriso and zfs-fuse. But the sl, cdbackup, dvd+rw-tools, wodim (replaced by xorriso), lilo and udisks2-vdo packages are no more.
And there are also several enhancements, such as zram swap compression, support for displaying non-zero exit codes in PS1, easier access to keyboard configuration thanks to a new “0” command, and GRUB as default bootloader for both BIOS and UEFI systems.
Among other noteworthy changes, Finnix 121 improves SSH remote access and reimplements shared per-user SSH agents, makes serial-getty consoles usable, removes the beep sound during the initial boot, and optimizes the ISO’s layout for CD-ROMs.
You can download Finnix 121 right now from the official website or using the direct download button below. Since it’s targeted mainly at system administrators, Finnix doesn’t uses a graphical environment. Under the hood, this release is powered by the Linux 5.7 kernel series.
Last updated 4 years ago
