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The Porteus Linux team announced the release and general availability of Porteus Linux 5.01 as a minor update to last year’s Porteus 5.0 release of this portable GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware Linux.
Based on the Slackware 15.0 repositories from Slackware-15.0-patches as of September 21st, 2023, Porteus 5.01 received a major kernel bump compared to Porteus 5.0, which was powered by Linux kernel 5.18, namely the latest and greatest Linux 6.5 kernel. This will provide users who want to install Porteus on newer devices with better hardware support.
Porteus 5.01 also comes with a new script called convertz to allow the conversion of a folder of xz compressed modules to zstd compressed modules for a performance boost, prebuilt NVIDIA 535 and 470 driver modules with multilib support, and a new boot splash theme.
Just like Porteus 5.0, the Porteus 5.01 release is available in eight desktop flavors featuring KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, LXDE, and Openbox graphical environments. However, only the LXQt variant has been updated to the latest LXQt 1.3 release.
The rest of the flavors remain at their versions from a few years ago and only received small interface changes. These include GNOME 41.5, Cinnamon 5.2.7, MATE 1.26, Xfce 4.16, as well as KDE Plasma 5.23.5, which is accompanied by the KDE Frameworks 5.90 and KDE Gear 21.12.1 software suites.
Under the hood, BusyBox has been updated from version 1.35 to 1.36.1, along with the other libs and bins, the SysVinit static binary has been updated to version 3.07, along with the corresponding Slackware package to match, and the xcb-util stack was moved to 002-xorg for VirtualBox support and to provide more seamless use of the Qt5 module with non-Qt desktop environments.
Last but not least, Porteus 5.01 includes the latest MPV 0.36.0 media player and updated onboard FAQ documentation regarding package management.
Porteus Linux 5.01 is available for download right now from the official website. Seven of the eight available flavors are also supported on older 32-bit (i586) computers.
Last updated 7 months ago
