ROSA Desktop Fresh R5 Release Notes
The ROSA company is happy to present the long waited ROSA Desktop Fresh R5, the number 5 in the "R" lineup of the free ROSA distros with the KDE desktop as a main graphical environment. 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 v4.3.3, 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 R5 distribution is recommended for both the home users who want to communicate and surf the web and for the experienced ones who'd like to tweak the system their own way. Users who already work in ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 are able to update their systems to ROSA Desktop Fresh R5 from official repositories.
Contents
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Changes In Technical Part In Comparison With Previous Release
Desktop Environment And User-level Software
- KDE4 desktop environment has been updated to version 4.14.3.
- Firefox has been updated to version 34.0. ROSA repositories also provide Firefox ESR 24.8.0 with classical UI theme.
- Fixed video playback problems in KLook and TimeFrame caused by migration to GStreamer 1.0 API.
- Fixed issues with video preview in Dolphin (fixes have been developed for KDE upstream bugs: #334924, #339882, #337033, #337107).
- Fixed problem with copying large files (>2Gb) by means of kamera KIO slave (KDE upstream bug #340908).
- K3b settings in "Configure Your Desktop" have been moved to the root section.
- A new section named "Games->Emulators" has been added to kickstart menu. All game emulators have been moved to these category.
Kernel and System Components
- Added support for booting with Secure Boot mode enabled (how to turn Secure Boot on without reinstalling).
- The LTS kernel used by default has been updated to version 3.14.25. Users can also find the new 3.17.6 kernel in a separate repository.
- OpenCV libraries have been updated to version 2.4.10 and switched to GStreamer 1.0 API. This allowed to eliminate Digikam crashes caused by simultaneous usage of GStreamer 1.0 and 0.10.
- Support for "status notifier item" mode for systray elements has been added to Qt4. In order to activate this mode, one should install sni-qt package which provides systemtrayicon plugin for Qt4.
- Python3 bindings have been added for Qt4 and Qt5.
- Users can now setup automated launch of TRIM for SSD drives by installing ssd-utils package. By default, TRIM will be launched once a week.
- Fixed work of Samba on machines with long names.
- Fixed issue with printing on Samba printers.
- Fixed automated launch of Shorewall with default settings.
- Added installer option to skip bootloader installation (for those who wish to keep their existing bootloader).
Graphics
- Mesa has been updated to version 10.3.3.
- NVidia proprietary video drivers (nvidia340) have been updated to version 340.65.
- AMD proprietary video drivers (fglrx) have been updated to version 14.301.1001 (corresponds to AMD Catalyst 14.9).
- Support for video cards with hybrid Intel+AMD graphics has been added. We have also fixed issues with configuring of Intel+NVidia hybrid graphics on several video cards.
- Optimizations in Nvidia proprietary video driver that perform on-the-fly modifications of the executable code are now disabled by default since with current versions of drivers they lead to application crash (for example, in case of Pipelight and FS-UAE programs).
- A lot of issues have been fixed in configuration tools for AMD Radeon video cards.
System Requirements
Starting with this release, for KDE edition we recommend to use at least 2GB of RAM for 64bit version and 1.2 GB for 32bit version. Users who want to run ROSA Desktop Fresh R5 on weaker machines, are encouraged to read our Optimization Advises.
