Fuduntu 2012.3 Release

I would like to announce the immediate availability of Fuduntu 2012.3, our third quarterly release for 2012. Like all previous Fuduntu releases, this release follows our tradition of making small incremental distribution improvements that don’t sacrifice the stability of our Linux distribution. Existing Fuduntu users have already rolled up to 2012.3, as all of the updates available are released to our stable repository.

New Features:

This cycle focused on many improvements under the hood, including core platform updates like GCC 4.6.3 and Anaconda 16. In addition we would like to announce the following new features.

GRUB 2 - Fuduntu now ships GRUB 2 as our default bootloader. This change allows better compatibility when dual booting alternate Linux distributions and also helps us prepare for future UEFI support.

For new users GRUB 2 will be installed and configured automatically, however existing Fuduntu users will receive the GRUB 2 software update but the boot loader will not be upgraded automatically. We have documented an optional procedure that will allow you to manually upgrade your bootloader. This documentation is available on our WIKI.

Terminal Font - With 2012.3 we are shipping the latest revision of Infinality Freetype. This improvement allows us to replace our default Terminal font with Droid Sans Mono. This improves the appearance of our terminal for those that spend much of their time using it. This change will be available to all new installations but will not be automatically configured for existing users. To make the change, simply configure the Fixed Width font in Appearance Preferences.

Major package updates this cycle:

• Kernel 3.4.4
• Chromium 19.0.1084.56
• Firefox 13.0.1
• Thunderbird 13.0.1
• LibreOffice 3.5.4.2
• GIMP 2.8
• Pidgin 2.10.4
• Grub2 2.0-0.27
• VirtualBox OSE 4.1.16 New Package!
• GCC 4.6.3
• Infinality Freetype 2.4.10
• WINE 1.4.1

Please note that some of the packages listed above are available for installation from our package repository, but are not installed by default. Many additional updates have been made but are too numerous to list. Nearly 2,000 package updates have been shipped since the release of Fuduntu 2012.2 in April.

Hosting Update:

Fuduntu has partnered with several providers who have graciously offered to provide mirroring services for the project including HEAnet, Indiana University, GIGENET, and Pair Networks.

To complement our partnership with ELDnet who provides the excellent VDS service that hosts our primary package repository, we would like to announce an additional partnership with Linode to provide hosting of our Forum, Blog, WIKI, and Website.

With our steadily increasing growth into the tens of thousands of users, it has become far more critical to the project to continue to add additional mirrors. If you host an open source project mirroring service and would like to help the project by hosting Fuduntu it couldn’t be simpler to get started. All the documentation necessary is available on our WIKI.

Driver Support:

For your convenience, Fuduntu hosts multiple kmod packages in our repository. These packages make it simple to enable a proprietary video driver, or WIFI adapter. To enable, it is usually as simple as installing the needed kmod, and restarting your computer.

Included in the repository:

• NVidia display driver 290.10 (nvidia-kmod)
• ATI Catalyst display driver 12.4 (catalyst-kmod)
• Broadcom WIFI Adapter driver 5.100.82.112 (wl-kmod)
• VirtualBox OSE (kmod-VirtualBox-OSE) New Package!

An additional staging kmod pack is available (kmod-staging) containing drivers for many devices not supported by default.

One concern some of our users have brought to our attention is the pain in getting access to the staging kmod package sometimes needed to enable a few WIFI adapters. We are pleased to announce that beginning with 2012.3, the kmod-staging package is now included in the default install. These packages are not installed by default but can be found in the /kmods directory after installing. Instructions for installing these packages can be found on our WIKI.

Community:

Leaps .. and .. bounds. That’s the only way to describe our growth this year. We have implemented a few tools to help estimate the number of users of the Fuduntu Linux distribution and we estimate that number to be between 30,000 – 40,000 active Fuduntu installations.

It amazes me to think that just last December, we were only able to estimate around 1,400 users.

It certainly shows too. Our primary package repository, http://packages.fuduntu.org moves an average of 1.5TB of data every month. To put that into perspective, we spread traffic across 7 providers which by our estimates means that we are serving over 10TB of package updates and ISO downloads per month.

It is no wonder that we are currently in the top 25 in the Distrowatch yearly statistic, and one of the most popular projects on SourceForge.

We sincerely hope that everyone continues to use and enjoy Fuduntu.

Fuduntu Website – Fuduntu.org
Fuduntu Community – Fuduntu Forum
Distrowatch – Fuduntu
IRC: #fuduntu @ Freenode

Download: 2012.3 – 32Bit: [ Download | Torrent ] 64Bit: [ Download | Torrent ]

SHA1 sums:

32bit: 9bfac58127d3d266b36ecac78c588d674287a697

64bit: 55f497bb729e2c31e4d5b7bc7a47a3af13d45d93