Slackware-Based Porteus Linux 5.0 Released with Eight Desktop Flavors, Linux 5.18

Porteus Linux 5.0

The Porteus Linux team announced today the release and general availability of Porteus Linux 5.0 as the latest stable release of this portable, complete, and fast GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware Linux.

Based on Slackware 15.0 and powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.18 kernel series and BusyBox 1.35, Porteus Linux 5.0 is here more than four years after version 4.0 to offer you more recent GNU/Linux technologies and a choice of no less than eight desktop flavors as standalone and live ISO editions.

These eight flavors include some newer desktop environment releases like Xfce 4.16, LXQt 1.1.0, Cinnamon 5.2.7, and MATE 1.26, but also some older ones like the KDE Plasma 5.23.5 and GNOME 41.5. In addition, you’ll find live editions with the older LXDE desktop environment and the lighter Openbox window manager.

Package management has been improved in this release thanks to the addition of slackpkg and slpkg Slackware package managers, as well as the pmod simple wrapper for slackpkg to produce modules for packages, as well as pkginfo, a small script to provide various information about installed packages.

Other interesting changes include in this release are the move of Perl to the 05-devel repository to make it easier to install it and support for NMVe installations in the syslinux bootloader. Of course, there are also numerous tweaks and optimizations to core scripts that make Porteus Linux faster and smoother.

If you want to try Porteus Linux 5.0 on your personal computer, you can download any of the eight live ISO editions right now from the official mirrors (HTTP not secure website warning). Seven of them are also supported on older 32-bit (i586) computers.

All ISO editions are installable, and the developers recommend that you choose the fastest mirror for downloading packages after installation by running the fastest-mirror command in a root console, set a default password for the guest user and the root account, and install a web browser of your choice using the Browser Selection and Update Tool utility.

Last updated 2 years ago

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