Monday, October 14, 2019

Linspire CE 8.5.1 ESR (Education Special Release) Released

Today the PC/OpenSystems development team is pleased to announce the release of Linspire CE 8.5.1 ESR (Education Special Release) to our educational customers. This release contains many bug fixes and feature enhancements from our previous ESR.

Linspire CE educational Release is currently used by over 200 school systems around the United States and internationally.  Linspire CE ESR is a strong commitment to educational computing and is the number 2 Linux distribution used by schools and academic facilities.

One of our main goals with the distribution was security. One of the things that we have heard from customers in this arena were several security concerns. An example of this was being able to go into the Synaptic Package Manager and uninstall or cripple core OS functions. So Synaptic has been removed and we gave control of application installation to the Software Center. We also updated Time Keeper so any systems left on premises you can set usage times so students and faculty can only use the system during scheduled times. We also have heard from users that the Thunderbird e-mail app was no longer necessary since most e-mail work is executed using Gmail or Outlook Web interfaces so we did include the Gmail web app for users (Linspire CE Office 365 customers will receive their update later this week) We have now included the latest release of WebMin for remote access and system maintenance in the core OS.

 Some of the features we have included specific to this release are:

 Better XBox One controller support
Preliminary Nintendo Switch support for use with Presentations
Google Classroom web app now installed by default
Google Docs and Google Keep web apps installed by default
Improved Google Admin support
Improved Chromebook support for installation on EOL (End of Life) EOS (End Of Service) Chromebook models so that you can maximize your hardware investment

Core OS  Features that we have updated are:

Kernel 5.0.0-31 KDE 5.12.9
Ice 6.0.4
Google Chrome 77
KolourPaint
Kpatience
DreamChess
VLC media player
Kamerka
Boot Repair
Firewall configuration
Discover Software Center

 Current customers will have this release delivered to them.  New customers can purchase a facility license or individual licenses here



Linspire CE ESR (Education Special Release)
Install Media
Order Notes

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