Difference between revisions of "ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 Release Notes"

Latest revision as of 12:34, 24 July 2015

ROSA presents the Desktop Fresh R6 Distribution

The ROSA company gladly presents ROSA Desktop Fresh R6, the number 6 in the "R" lineup of the free ROSA distros with the KDE desktop as a main graphical environment.

As always, the distro presents a vast collection of games and emulators and the Steam platform package along with standard suite of audio and video communications software including the newest version of Skype. All modern video formats are supported. The distribution includes the fresh LibreOffice version, the full TeX suite for true nerds as well, along with best Linux desktop publishing, text editing and polygraphy WYSISYG software. The LAMP/C++/… environment packages are waiting to be installed by true hackers.

The distribution is based on the rosa2014.1 platform which includes two years support (till the autumn of 2016). Few more releases based on this platform are expected to be presented for the users in the future, as it was with the rosa2012.1 platform.

Download

32bit ISO

64bit ISO

Torrents

ROSA.FRESH.KDE.R6.i586.iso

ROSA.FRESH.KDE.R6.x86_64.iso

Technical part changes in comparison to the previous release:

Changes in the default applications list on KDE4 ISOs. Were included by default: GIMP, Audacity, Kdenlive, EasyTag, Filelight. Chromium browser was added as the second default browser, being FireFox the first. The GUI was added for the hw-probe, the ROSA hardware database client.

The default settings of the SimpleWelcome menu and the RocketBar were changed, some seldomly started from the menu applications were combined into groups. In the Live mode the '/home/live' directory and some others are now mounted into tmpfs, since the tmpfs provides increased performance for file write operations and at lower cost. The amount of memory for storing the write operations is now optional (with only 512MB earlier) and can be set during the Live mode boot process, so the live sessions are now more vital and more prolonged than before the R6 release.

The default LTS kernel is now 3.14.44 (the 4.1.x kernel x86_64 and i586 builds are available in repos)

Some recent updates:

• Mesa 10.5.3.
• PulseAudio 6.0
• Chromium 43.0.2357.134
• Firefox 39.0 (classical interface Firefox ESR 24.8.0 also available from the repos)
• Thunderbird 38.0.1, with Lightning Calendar add-on coming by default
• LibreOffice 4.4.3 with pager extension by default
• Audacity 2.1.0
• Kdenlive 15.04.3
• Kmix updated to the v.15.04.3 (fixes the low system boot time issue with pulseaudio-module-x11 installed)
• Qt4 4.8.7, Qt5 5.4.2
• tcl/tk 8.6.4 (fixes the program crush issue because of only partial PNG support)
• ffmpeg 2.5.6
• nvidia-340 proprietary drivers v.340.76, nvidia-346 v.346.47
• AMD (fglrx) 15.101 (which corresponds to the AMD Catalyst 15.5)
• Hw-probe 0.9.2, more useful options added with increased number of logs gathered
• Qt Creator 3.4.1 with qtc-cppcheck by default (needs to be activated in the settings menu)

DE and system:

KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 packages were added to the repos. Some programs now use KF5 (kdenlive and partitionmanager), also the framework integration package may help in Qt5 software integration into the KDE4.

Number of issues were fixed, including:

• partial support for the cursors themes in the Qt5 applications
• Qt5 applications crush on the VirtualBox machines with 3D activated
• Automatic audio profiles/devices switch issue while connecting the headphones
• MUltiple Authentication request Firefox issue while connecting through NTLM proxy

Also:

• Wine is now build with the Staging and Gallium Nine patchsets by default (earlier only with Staging patchset)
• Some popular Realtek WiFi drivers (RTL8723BE, RTL8812AU etc) packages are now available for the kernel 3.14
• XFdrake settings menu for the free graphical drivers was 'cleaned' and made more simple from the user experience point
• Some possible issues which could be caused by switching from the free graphical drivers to proprietary
• XFdrake automatic detection and configuration of the current graphical system settings
• Better NVidia Optimus and Primus support
• Some cups-filters issues were fixed, thus improving the legacy printers support
• HPLIP was updated to the version 3.15.6 with Python3 environment support
• The issue of PDF documents with cyrillic fonts not printing from applications (Ocular, etc) was fixed

Installer:

• Users who installed ROSA on pen-drive earlier now can boot into it using the menu option, which is useful for booting directly into the working system instead of Live mode
• Links in the GRUB2 menu: added the GRUB_OS_PROBER_LINKED option, eliminating the multiple 'Advanced options' entries by only one menu entry which redirects user to the corresponding config
• Multiple fixes for UEFI, Secure Boot and GPT disks support

Minimal system requirements:

2GB RAM for 64-bit systems

1280Mb RAM for 32-bit systems

10Gb HDD