After more than a year of silence, the Wifislax development team is very happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Wifislax 4.12 GNU/Linux distribution.
Based on the recently released Slackware 14.2 operating system and shipping with two of the most popular desktop environments, namely the lightweight Xfce 4.12 and the modern KDE 4.14.3, Wifislax 4.12 maintains its philosophy of using two kernels, one that's best to use on 486 (32-bit) hardware, and another one modern, SMP-enabled machines.
Wifislax 4.12 is now one of the best GNU/Linux distributions to come with an arsenal of the most used tools for network auditing operations. As expected, it's a 32-bit only operating system shipping with Mozilla Firefox as default web browser, as Google no longer offers a 32-bit version of its popular Chrome browser.
Numerous of the core components have also been updated in this release, and among the most important ones we can mention Python 3, Qt 5.6.1, NetworkManager 1.2, and a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 branch (version 4.4.16 at the moment of writing this article).
Next Wifislax release will be available only for 64-bit systems
Also new in Wifislax 4.12 is a set of handy scripts that let you update existing packages in the system or add new ones, depending on your needs. For example, with a single mouse click you'll be able to add the latest version of the poweful and complex LibreOffice office suite, or use the Apache OpenOffice alternative.
The choice is yours, you can add any graphical application or command-line program that's also available upstream, in the Slackware 14.2 repositories. Additionally, Wifislax lets you install any other third-party software that's not available in the repos, just by downloading and compile its sources.
Another interesting change in Wifislax 4.12 is that support for the Hashcat CPU-based password recovery tool has been halted because AMD hasn't updated their Catalyst graphics driver for GNU/Linux systems for a long time now and Wifislax 4.12 ships with the latest X.Org Server 1.18 display driver.
In some good news, the Wifislax team reports that Wifislax 4.12 will be the last version to offer 32-bit support. The next major release will be available only for modern, 64-bit computers, as well as full UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support, which was not available in the 32-bit version, of course. Download Wifislax 4.12 right now via our website.
