2017-04-07 08:54 by Leszek

We are happy to announce the 4th Maintenancerelease of Neptune 4.5. This comes with a updated LTS Kernel 3.18.48 with dozens of security fixes and support for new hardware.

For best multimedia consumption we now updated to VLC 2.2.4 which gains better supports for newer Codecs like VP9 or FLAC. The Phonon base for playing sounds in KDE Plasma got an update to version 4.9.0 for better reliability together with the updated VLC Backend which builds upon the improvements of VLC 2.2.4.

Our Internetsuite got improved with Chromium 57 and Icedove 45.6 to provide the best in terms of surfing the web or writing emails. Chromium 57 brings better support for HTML5 video and Icedove 45.6 fixes several bugs when it comes to editing emails.

Mesa Version 13.0.4 fixes several bugs and improves graphics hardware support.

The Radeon(ATI/AMD) driver got an update to Version 7.8.0 with better support for several amd graphicscards and some bugfixes.

Fresh and new is the improvement for the flash filesystem f2fs. We now allow mounting those partitions directly on the desktop with udisks. Besides that we also updated the f2fs-tools to version 1.7.0 including several improvements for creating and checking the filesystem.

We also improved the Btrfs filesystem with btrfs-progs 4.9.1 and plenty of improvements for filesystemchecks and better handling of low memory situations.

Neptune 4.5.4 now uses our new secure software repository by default. Additionally we include several security fixes in packages like eject.

LibreOffice got an update to version 4.3.3, libmtp 1.1.12 now supports mounting of the Jolla C smartphone and Encode got a fix for FullHD resolution.

VirtualBox 5.1.4 Guest Additions are available by default now on our ISO improving the support for newer VirtualBox versions. Besides that it also allows using the newer LTS Kernel 4.9.18 which is included in our repository without any problems.

Neptune 4.5.4 is available as 2 GiB ISO on our Downloadpage.

Users of Neptune 4.5 can upgrade with a normal update from within the update manager.

Neptune Plasma 5 April Update

We also updated our Plasma 5 ISO with new Updates and several improvements.

KDE Frameworks version 5.32 includes improvements in KArchive, KIO, KPackage and more. KDE Applications 16.12.3 is available and we also improved Dolphin with smooth scrolling aswell as better support for service menus. Ark, Kate and Kdenlive were updated with several fixes and improvements.

Yakuake the slide down terminal got an update to version 3.0.4 with appearance improvements.

Within the scope of our improvement campaign we also improved our Plasma 5 Desktop. By default this now includes a new default application menu called Excalibur which strives to take the best from the old Lancelot menu. This includes a two column view with favorites and application categories. You can set and move favorites freely around. Also available is the option to move and set logout, reboot and shutdown buttons freely.

The new Plasma 5 April ISO of Neptune includes the LTS Kernel 4.9.18 with security fixes and better support for newer hardware.

Just like on Neptune 4.5.4 we are also now using our new secure softwarepository.

You can get the new Plasma 5 ISO from our downloadpage.

Existing Plasma 5 Neptune User can update with a normal update in the update manager. The new Excalibur menu needs manual adding however to the panel. You can use the right click context menus alternative entry to switch from Kickoff to Excalibur.