Download Ark Linux 2005.1 SR1

With the growing popularity of GNU/Linux for home desktop systems, several distributions have been developed that target people with no knowledge of Linux. Ark Linux is one of these and uses KDE as the desktop environment. All settings can be adjusted via Mission Control that you click on this page can see better. The developers have recently completed the first service release of version 2005.1 with the following release notes:

Ark Linux 2005.1-SR1, a bugfix release of Ark Linux 2005.1, has been released.

Mostly due to our lack of test hardware (donations welcome 😉 ) and testers (volunteers welcome 😉 ), a couple of bugs worth fixing immediately managed to get into Ark Linux 2005.1 — based on user feedback, we have made a Service Release to address them and add some commonly requested features.

Ark Linux 2005.1-SR1 fixes the following problems:

• In some configurations, USB drivers were not loaded on startup
• In some configurations, stored network settings were not re-activated on startup
• kuser complained about /etc/gshadow not being present when creating new users
• ndiswrapper drivers failed to load due to a wrongly tagged version
• Some SATA controllers using Silicon Image chipsets were not recognized during installation
• The delete key created a tilde rather than deleting a character in root konsole sessions
• The Python interpreter has been updated to 2.4.1 to fix a security bug
• Several minor bugs have been fixed

The following features have been added:

• Newly installed machines automatically retrieve network settings from DHCP servers (if there is one)
• DHCP-Enabled network interfaces no longer delay the bootup process if no DHCP server is found
• Support for Zeroconf (better known as RendezvousTM to people familiar with MacOS) support has been added.
• The X.Org Composite extension, allowing to use real transparent windows, is now enabled (but not used by default).
• Detection for NTFS filesystems on USB harddisks/memory sticks has been improved
• Support for TI ACX100 based wireless cards has been added [for this to work, you have to install the firmware-acx100 package from our package repository after installation — the firmware files are not Open Source and therefore not included in the base OS]

Existing users of Ark Linux 2005.1 can update to 2005.1-SR1 using the “Install Software” tool in Mission control (select, in that order, Refresh package information from repositories, Upgrade all packages, and Commit changes to the system), or on the command line using apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.

We hope you enjoy the new release.