Articles

LXLE 14.04.1 & 12.04.5 released.

The official release of the incremental update to LXLE 14.04 and 12.04.4 has undergone minor changes and a few bug fixes which is as follows:

  • Panel and menu layout adjustments were made to encourage checking for updates in addition to the automatically installed security updates.
  • Gnome 2 (G2) Paradigm has been corrected, in the last release an oversight of the bottom panel was not transparent by default, now fixed.
  • Bash has been updated with all the latest security adjustments available.
  • Desktop Pager has been updated to allow movement of programs between active desktops and show icons of open windows.
  • 32bit 'printscreen' keyboard omission/error has been corrected to reflect the 14.04 version.
  • 64bit double network icon in the panel was fixed as well, this was due to a upstream bug in nm-applet and lxsession.
  • BlueTooth pairing bug fixed and updated through the LXLE PPA.
  • Arista Trancoder issue corrected using backported gstreamer codec.
  • Brightness control has been updated to auto config per machine.
  • Additional monitor settings tool to better support stubborn hardware.
  • uTox, a tox client, replaced Linphone to provide an easy to use/private alternative to Skype. It was also backported to support 12.04.5.
  • BitSync was replaced with Syncthing (now pulse) to provide an opensource alternative to cloudless file sharing among devices.
  • PhotoPrint was added to provide a quick easy way to print photos which garners some nice image tools to customize different print options.
  • SystemBack was added allowing users to back up their desktop, create a custom version of their system and a way to go back to previous states of the OS.
  • Editor note: xZoom is a strange zoom tool provided with LXLE, to use it simply 'click and hold' within its window and move your cursor to any area you want to zoom in on, this was a common question.
  • All system software and end user software has been updated to their latest stable version.

LXLEs' only official social networking platform Diaspora has been given the Domain name TechTyranny.com which is used as a tech news post focussing on the shadier side of todays technical landscape.

UEFI is still unavailable by default, which currently has three reasons for the lack of support.

  1. LXLE is geared for aging computers, many of which didn't have any UEFI boot process to begin with making the necessity, at least for now, a moot point.
  2. I simply don't have a machine with UEFI in which to test/build an ISO with native support of the boot process. Most likely UEFI will be addressed in 15.04.
  3. And most importantly; Many claim UEFI and Secure Boot are two different processes and while technically true consider the following. Linus Torvalds quote“… the problem with UEFI is that it actually superficially looks much better than the BIOS, but in practice it ends up being one of those things where it has few real advantages, and often just a lot of extra complexity because of the ‘new and improved’ interfaces that were largely defined by a committee.” Microsoft will be requiring that all Windows 8 devices have the hardened boot, which means a certificate-signed operating system is the only thing that will run on such a system. You can’t replace the UEFI system on the device with other, unencrypted, firmware. If all parts of the chain need to have a CA signature, then swapping out a machine’s signed UEFI layer with, say, an unsigned BIOS or UEFI would not work.

So to me, for the most part anyway, they are one in the same at least as far as supporting it is concerned since most PCs are still built with Windows in mind. Currently distributions have to pay Microsoft for a special certificate to boot, in essence getting paid for Linux installs. Plain UEFI support however is planned for future releases.

As a final note, release doesn't mean bug free, perhaps close but never perfect as proven often.

Go to Downloads

<< Go back to the previous page

What others are saying

"Very good, installed on old XP machine. Running well, still testing." ~Traditionalist


Hosted By iPage