The distribution is now powered by Linux kernel 4.14.13

Jan 18, 2018 20:02 GMT  ·  By

Bodhi-based, educational-oriented Escuelas Linux GNU/Linux distribution has been updated today to version 5.6, as developer Alejandro Diaz informed us a few moments ago.

Based on the latest release of the Ubuntu-based and Enlightenment-focused Bodhi Linux operating system, Escuelas Linux 5.6 is powered by the Linux 4.14.13 kernel, which includes patches against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, and comes with a bunch of up-to-date educational apps.

These include the OnlyOffice 4.8.6 office suite (only for the 64-bit edition), Vivaldi 1.13, Chromium 63, Google Chrome 63, and Mozilla Firefox 57 "Quantum" web browsers, Geogebra 5.0.414 geometry, algebra, statistics, and calculus app, latest Adobe Flash Player 28 plugin, and the upcoming LibreOffice 6.0 open-source office suite.

"This new LibreOffice version has a spreadsheet with multithread calculations, new OpenGL transitions for the presentations app, many changes to the user interface, new default table styles, and filter improvements to read/write MS Office files," said Alejandro Diaz in the release notes.

New apps, bug fixes

Escuelas Linux 5.6 also introduces a handful of new apps, such as the GCompris-qt open-source and cross-platform educational suite, the Zotero open-source reference management software for managing bibliographic data and related materials, as well as GNU PSPP, a free IBM SPSS Statistics alternative.

A few bugs reported by users from previous releases were fixed as well in this release, including a dialog box that appeared after upgrading Firefox asking users to select a profile to use, an issue in the distro's custom LibreOffice Image Gallery causing image categories to not be displayed, and a bug in the RestoreUser program causing some KDE apps to not be restored.

You can download Escuelas Linux 5.6 right now through our software portal for new installations. The operating system is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Existing Escuelas Linux users need only to apply all the available updates from the distro's repositories if they want to receive the new features and improvements implemented in version 5.6.