Software Update: Ark Linux 2005.2

With GNU/Linux becoming increasingly popular for desktop systems in people’s homes, 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, which is available together with other screenshots this page can be viewed. The developers recently released version 2005.2 of Ark Linux with the following changes:

The Ark Linux team is pleased to announce the release of Ark Linux 2005.2 — a bit later than expected, but we think it was worth the wait. The highlights of this release include:

• An upgrade to the KDE 3.5 desktop. KDE 3.5 improves the usability and speed of the desktop, and includes many useful additions and bug fixes. The included “Konqueror” browser passes the Acid2 CSS test – ahead of Internet Explorer and Firefox.
• OpenOffice.org has been upgraded to version 2.0 – making many improvements to usability, stability and format support, and overall integration into the desktop. The Ark Linux version of OpenOffice.org is fully integrated with the KDE desktop, including accessing KDE’s address book.
• 3D Acceleration on ATI Radeon 9600 and 9800 based hardware is now supported. To our knowledge, Ark Linux 2005.2 is the first fully Open Source OS to support this hardware.
• Handling of auto running inserted CDs and DVDs has been improved.
• Hardware support has been improved – the installer can now handle i810 graphics chipsets and (through the addition of a legacy 640×480, 16 colors mode) graphics chipsets that aren’t VESA 2.0 compliant.
  Unsupported PCI Network/Wireless network cards can now automatically be configured to use a Windows XP driver through the ndiswrapper emulation layer.
  Some USB printers are configured fully automatically – plug them in and they show up in the applications’ print dialogs. (This is limited to printers listed in the hardware database — other printers can still be configured the traditional way).
• The Wine Windows emulator has been added to the default installation, allowing users to continue using many of their existing Windows applications.
• The Krita image manipulation program has been added.
• For power users, an Expert Mode installer that allows custom partitioning has been added. For people who are happy to go with the defaults, our “4 mouse clicks to install the system” installer remains.
• We have made many improvements to the speed and size of the operating system. Ark Linux 2005.2 has been tested to work on low-end hardware such as a Pentium MMX 233 MHz with 128 MB RAM.
• Power users will be happy with the inclusion of the “bash” shell in its new version 3.1.

There have been many improvements to the Ark Linux extra CD sets as well.Ark Server Software has been upgraded to include the current state of artserver software, such as Apache Httpd 2.2.0, PHP 5.1.1, Postfix 2.2.6 and thePostgreSQL 8.1 and MySQL 5.0.16 database systems, as well as server applications for less common protocols such as video and audio streaming, and IRC.

Ark Extra Software includes many additional games (including highlights such as The Battle for Wesnoth, Frozen Bubble, and the Lincity NG city simulator),Emulators for DOS and C64 applications, graphical tools for creating websites,improved multimedia support (such as music score editors, sequencers and wavetable emulation for cheap soundcards/onboard chips), the Firefox 1.5browser, additional themes, and more.

For developers, the Ark Development Suite now includes support for more programming languages ​​and libraries — the Ark Development Suite now includes compilers for the C, C++, Java, D, Perl, Python, Assembly, Perl, Python,BASIC, Objective C, C#, Objective CAML, Fortran and ADA languages ​​- and many libraries, including (in addition to the “normal” development environment provided by most Linux distributions) the Qt 4.x and FOX GUI toolkits.

The release of Ark Linux 2005.2 also starts the development cycle of Ark Linux2006.1 – improvements being planned for this version include upgrading the toolchain to gcc 4.1.x, creating a better configuration tool for wireless networking, improving the init system to make the system start up faster, more hardware detection/support improvements, and improving our build system to allow ports to other architectures, such as native 64 bit on x86_64. New developers to help with these and other projects are always welcome.[break]The following iso files can be downloaded:
Ark Linux 2005.2 (ftp – bittorrent)
Ark Extra Software 2005.2 (ftp – bittorrent)
Ark Development Suite 2005.2 (ftp – bittorrent)
Ark Server Software 2005.2 (ftp – bittorrent)
Ark Extra Languages ​​2005.2 (ftp – bittorrent)