ROSA Desktop 2012 is out!

ROSA Linux Desktop.Fresh 2012 Free and Extended Edition download

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 is out!

This release will be supported 1.5 years.

 ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 Operating System: the Experiment Has Succeeded!

 

Source:
ROSA Blog

 

ROSA company is pleased to announce a new operating system for desktops - ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012. The product is targeted at enthusiasts who are likely to appreciate the wide choice of fresh software components. ROSA Fresh edition is a non-commercial product distributed free of charge.

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 is a new name for a line of non-commercial desktop operating systems developed by ROSA. The name underlines the fact that the system contains "fresh" versions of user software and system components (compared to enterprise editions of ROSA). The system is compatible with a wide range of modern hardware.

While working on ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012, the ROSA team (which includes engineers from Russia, Ukraine, Italy, Romania, USA, Brazil and other countries) have done great work. More than 1 million of source code lines were added or modified. We have even prepared a video clip that visualizes that process:

Among major Fresh advantages one should mention excellent state of all repositories, stable work and fast boot of the system as a whole. As experiments show, the system now boots two times faster on averageis than its predecessor. It was achieved mainly due to improvements in ROSA ABF (software build and development infrastructure) and active use of international testing and verification practices. Besides, the developers accomplished migration to a new version of the package manager, carried out much work on adapting distribution package base to new system components and fixed a lot of issues with inter-package dependencies.

In addition, almost all user-level software was updated to the fresh versions. Nearly 16 thousand packages were updated in our repositories.

In ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 we continued development of ROSA brand-name products:

TimeFrame, as well as SimpleWelcome, was completely rewritten from scratch using the QML technology which allowed to improve their performance.
Developers abandoned use of Plasma in SimpleWelcome, and this allowed to decrease memory usage and significantly improved speed and stability.
The main new feature of TimeFrame is support for social network services. Now it is possible to use Facebook and VKontakte without a browser. In addition, possibility to scroll time feed was implemented which can be performed also by means of multi-gestures.

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012

The new major feature in SimpleWelcome is possibility to group icons and preview of applications included in the group. The "Welcome" tab got the possibility to pin icons to their positions. And the icon size will be definitely appreciated by touchpad users.

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012

The KLook tool was extended with possibility to work with remote file systems using SMB, FTP, WebDav and other popular protocols. The image rendering quality was significantly improved.

A memory leak was eliminated in StackFolder when working with large images. Detailed documentation was added which describes stack features and integration with KLook.
Several issues affecting stability were fixed in ROSA Media Player. The application got a new theme that made it even more attractive.

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012


To popularize original developments of the company we have prepared a video with demonstration of the next generation of ROSA brand-name applications.

Original design has always been one of the key features of ROSA products. Specifically for ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012, the brand-name graphical theme was significantly redesigned. The areas that can be used for dragging application windows are now explicitly marked out. We continued the process of style unification of different elements. For instance, a graphical bootloader theme was updated. As a result, the system appearance became more consistent and contemporary.


Some of our improvements developed when working on ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 are now pushed to upstream of different open source projects. For example, patches for improving work with remote file systems will be available in KDE starting with Plasma Desktop version 4.10. And the GRUB2 project got support for displaying non-ASCII (e.g., Cyrillic) symbols in console and possibility for custom decorations of inactive menu items. More details about these upstream contributions will be available in the New Year's issue of "ROSA Planet" bulletin.

Fresh differs from its predecessors a lot. This platform was developed by ROSA company as an area for experiments with the freshest software components. The distribution is targeted at community users who are familiar with basic Linux components and want to get a product with a wide set of customization and personalization possibilities.

 

 


P.S.
During the work on ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012, we got a sad news about tragic death of Eugene Dodonov, an active member of ROSA community. It was mainly to his efforts that the 2011 release of our operating system saw the light. He was a leader of migration to RPM5 package manager in 2011. And we would like to deedicate the release of our new operating system to him.

 

 

Link for download:
http://mirror.rosalab.ru/rosa2012.1/iso/ROSA.Desktop.Fresh/

 

A list of known issues with the release candidate can be found here:
Errata ROSA Desktop 2012

 

ROSA Linux Bugzilla:
http://bugs.rosalinux.ru/

 

 

Have fun :)

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