Finnix 123 Linux Distro for System Administrators Is Out Based on Debian Bullseye

Finnix 123

Ryan Finnie released today Finnix 123 as the newest version of his Debian-based live Linux distro for system administrators.

Finnix 123 is here almost seven months after Finnix 122 and brings a major change, namely the fact that the sysadmin-oriented distro is now based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series rather than tracking the Debian Testing repositories.

While the distribution is still powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, the Finnix 123 release adds several goodies for system administrators, such as the sshd and passwd kernel command-line options (e.g. sshd passwd=foo or sshd passwd=root:foo or passwd=finnix:bar), as well as a basic “command-not-found” handler that provides users with explicit instructions on how to install certain packages.

On top of that, this release updates the finnix command to instruct users on how to enable support for the ZFS file system, introduces a new package called jove (Jonathan’s Own Version of Emacs), which is a compact, yet powerful Emacs-style text editor, and adds man-pages for several Finnix-specific commands, including wifi-connect and locale-config.

In addition to these changes, Finnix 123 removes the ftp, ftp-ssl, and zile packages, improves the build system, and fixes many bugs present in previous releases. Another interesting change is the fact that the machine ID is now stable across reboots and it’s automatically generated from the DMI.

“This is used for e.g. the DHCP client ID, so multiple reboots should no longer cycle through dynamic IPs on a network,” explained the developer in the release notes.

You can download Finnix 123 right now from the official website. This release contains a total of 575 packages and it’s only supported on 64-bit (amd64) systems. If you want to use Finnix on 32-bit (586/686/PowerPC) systems, you’ll have to download a much older version.

Last updated 3 years ago

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