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Ryan Finnie announced today the release of Finnix 124 as the newest stable version of his Debian-based live Linux distro targeting casual system administrators with hundreds of utilities for system recovery, maintenance, testing, and more.
Coming almost seven months after Finnix 123, the Finnix 124 “Sturgeon Bay” release is here to celebrate 22 years from the first public release of Finnix on March 22nd, 2000, by adding new features and several improvements to existing tools, as well as updated and new components and improved hardware support.
Powered by the Linux 5.16 kernel series, Finnix 124 is the first release of the Debian-based distribution to add support for the RISC-V (riscv64) architecture. However, this is an unofficial port alongside 32-bit (i386), AArch64 (ARM64), ARMhf, PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64el), and IBM System/390 (s390), as 64-bit (amd64) is the only officially supported architecture for Finnix.
Another interesting change in this release is an implementation of GNU Binutils’ strings utility in pure Python, which can be used for casual binary checking. However, users should be aware of the fact that this is not a full implementation of the strings utility from the GNU Binutils project.
strings, but is fine for casual binary checking. This is also set up so that if you do apt install binutils in the live environment, its strings will take precedence over the Python version, ” said Ryan Finnie.Several new packages made their way into the live ISO image, namely the gdu disk usage analyzer, inxi system information tool, lz4 fast lossless LZ compressor, lzip LZMA-based lossless data compressor, lzop fast compression program, nwipe secure disk erasing utility, pwgen, rename bath renaming utility, rmlint file system lint removing tool, sntp NTP client, and zstd fast lossless compressor.
Among other noteworthy changes, the Finnix 124 release updates the wifi-connect helper utility to display nearby APs when it’s invoked without any command-line arguments, replaces the running systemd finnix.target with the more traditional multi-user.target, updates the ip= kernel command-line network configuration with support for netmasks in addition to prefix lengths, and removes the pppoeconf and crda packages.
Various other minor fixes and improvements are present as well. along with all the latest package and security updates from the upstream Debian GNU/Linux repositories. You can download Finnix 124 right now from the official website or via the direct download button below.
Last updated 2 years ago
