Vlogcanic

GoblinX mini is the ultraportable edition of the Brazilian distro GoblinX (standard and premium are the other editions). It’s a LiveCD based on Slackware with Xfce in the desktop.

The mini latest version, 2.5, was released today, about three weeks after the last release candidate and, most appropriately, in Halloween.

The release notice offers no info on the kernel version, system requirements nor other usual bits one usually expects to find along with announcements, but given the name, the .iso images’ size (about 160 MB), the fact that this is based on Slackware and the presence of the Xfce desktop environment, I think it’s kind of safe to assume it can run with relatively low amounts of RAM memory and in old (but not too old processors… say, Pentium III).

Here’s the webpage with download links to GloblinX mini 2.5 as well as the GoblinX standard 2.00 which was released earlier these year, on April 30th.

GoblinX is not a terribly famous Linux distro but I like small distros –you can download them fast, burn them quickly and have a bunch of them sitting around in order to perform one or two special tricks and also have a look to many Linux kernel versions without the compilation, configuration and update hassle. So, I’ll have a look at this one and maybe report back.

October was a very generous month as far as the delivery of new releases Linux releases of every kind is concerned: big and small, old and new, desktop, service or maintenance use. Every party was represented.

Among the major players updated this last month were OpenSuse, Mandriva and the much anticipated Ubuntu which came along introducing Gobuntu, a new free-software-only family member.

The minidistro scene was just as busy with Puppy Linux 3.0 and Damn Small Linux 4.0 as well as high efficiency oriented distros for legacy hardware such as Absolute Linux 12.0.7, ZenWalk 4.8 and Mepis Antix 7.0.

Architecture oriented distros had a few field days of their own with Yoper Linux 3.0.1 released in the 32-bit front and Slam64 on the 64-bit.

And there was no shortage of brand new distros: Gobuntu, Granular Fireworks 2007.

The month was fraught with great Linux news. Quality, quantity, variety, there was something for every taste, even disappointments as it turned out that the countdown in the Fluxbuntu website as for site redesign instead of release.

But, alas, October is over and with no other major release in schedule for the near future (excepting one) all I can say is: I’m waiting for Fedora 8 to be released the next Nov. 8th.