On the first day of October, Joanna Rutkowska comes with news about the release and immediate availability for download of the final build of the Qubes 3.0 Linux kernel-based computer operating system.
According to the announcement, Qubes 3.0 is a major release that brings a host of new features, under-the-hood improvements, and bugfixes, all in order to keep the Qubes OS distribution reliable, stable, and useful to users worldwide. The new version is now based on HAL (Hypervisor Abstraction Layer), which lets Qubes OS developers to switch the underlying hypervisors more easily, even at installation time.
Furthermore, Qubes OS 3.0 updates the Xen open-source hypervisor software to version 4.4, a release that introduces better hardware support and performance, optimizes the performance of the Qubes’ qrexec framework for inter-VM services, adds the officially supported Debian templates, and integrates the Whonix templates for optimizing Tor workflows.
“About 5 months after the initial release of Qubes 3.0-rc1, we’re now releasing the final 3.0 today,” says Joanna Rutkowska. “As previously announced earlier this summer, we have decided to dedicate this release of Qubes OS to the memory of Caspar Bowden. Caspar has been a proud user, supporter, and advocate for Qubes OS, and also a friend. I think he would have liked that dedication.”
Qubes 3.1 coming at the end of the month
The Qubes OS developers inform us that no new features have been added since the release of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of Qubes 3.0, five months ago. Only critical bugs have been squashed and various core components optimized. Qubes 3.0 is dedicated to Caspar Bowden, a British privacy advocate, formerly chief privacy adviser at Microsoft.
In some happier news, the first point release of Qubes 3 is scheduled for deployment at the end of the month, bringing more new features, such as UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support, a Live USB edition, as well as the big killer feature: pre-configuration and management stack. In the meantime, you can download Qubes 3.0 right now from Softpedia.
Via Softpedia