wattOS R13 screenshot
The launch of the new version of “wattOS R13”, which arrives shortly after a year of development and in which some changes have been made to the base of the system, since unlike the previous release (wattOS 12) which was built under the stable Debian 11 branch and the Linux kernel 5.10.149, wattOS 13 arrives based on Debian 12 and Linux 6.1.
For those who do not know about wattOS, you should know that this It is a Linux distribution that is built on the basis of Debian packages. and equipped with the LXDE graphical environment, the Openbox window manager and the PCManFM file manager. The distribution attempts to be simple, fast, minimalist, and suitable for running on outdated hardware.
The project was founded in 2008 and was initially developed as a minimalist edition of Ubuntu, since until the previous release (wattOS 12) it was based on Ubuntu and for some years the project was on hiatus. The lack of development that the distribution had was approximately 6 years, since R10 was launched in 2016 and R12 in 2022 (R11 was omitted). This pause is due to the fact that wattOS has been built and supported primarily by a single person.
Main new features of wattOS R13
In this new version of wattOS R13 that is presented, as we already mentioned at the beginning, one of its main new features is the system base change to the new version of Debian 12 Bookworm, with which wattOS R13 has all the features and improvements of this version of Debian.
For the heart of the system, wattOS R13 presents el Linux kernel 6.1 LTS (6.1.67) version that provides support for the development of drivers and modules in the Rust language, modernization of the mechanism for determining used memory pages, a special memory manager for BPF programs, the system for diagnosing memory problems KMSAN, the KCFI (Kernel Control -Flow Integrity) protection mechanism, the introduction of the maple structure tree.
In quantor to the applications offered by the distribution, it is worth mentioning that it keeps things simple and leaves the configuration part to the user's taste, that is, it only has the basics so that the user can personalize the system with their personal applications.
In wattOS R13 we can find systemd 255, OpenSSH 9.2, OpenSSL 3.0.11, QT 5.5, xorg 21.1.7 and for the graphics part they offer us the Mesa 22.3 controllers. For the packaging part we can find that the distribution has the Firefox ESR version 115.6.0 with the possibility of moving to Firefox 121, the document viewer Evince 43.1, PCManFM 1.3.2 file manager, the BitTorrent Transmission 3.0 client and the basic packaging offered by the LXDE desktop environment (LXTerminal, LXPanel, LXPanel, etc.)
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Support improvements
- Calamares is used as an installer.
- There is support for packages in Flatpak format
- Additional settings to improve the out-of-the-box experience
- Ability to install deb packages using the gdebi utility
Finally If you are interested in knowing more about it, You can check the details in the launch announcement and where you can also find the links to the distribution forum and also to the Discord. The link is this.
Download and get wattOS R13
For those interested in being able to try or install this distribution on their computer or under a virtual machine, they should know that they can obtain the system image from the distribution's official website. The link is this.
The size of the installation iso image is 1.4 GB and supports both work in Live mode and installation on a hard drive.
The system image can be recorded by:
- Windows: They can use Etcher, Universal USB Installer or LinuxLive USB Creator, both are easy to use.
- Linux: The recommended option is to use the dd command, with which we define in which path we have the Manjaro image and also in which mount point we have our usb:
dd bs=4M if=/ruta/a/imagen.iso of=/dev/sdx && sync