The Wasta-Linux 20.04.2 Stable ISO is now available. Besides all the standard updates being applied, there are a few feature updates:
- Linux Kernel 5.8 - This newer kernel will give better hardware compatibility for newer computers. Actually, if you update your system even if you installed with Wasta-Linux 20.04.1, it will automatically install this newer kernel. If you have any hardware issues after you update, this may be the problem. Please contact us on the Wasta-Linux user email list so we can help you go back to the Linux Kernel 5.4 if necessary. I had not realized that Ubuntu had made the Linux Kernel upgrade default for 20.04.1, so sorry for any problems that you may experience from this.
- “Traffic Cop” installed by default (tt-bandwidth-manager package). Thanks again to Nate Marti for coding up “Traffic Cop.” If you need to make sure certain applications don’t drain your “pay per MB data plan” then Traffic Cop will be your friend.
- ZSWAP enabled by default. As discussed earlier on the email lists, zswap will use a compressed portion of your normal RAM for “swap space” (“virtual memory” overflow) instead of your SSD / HDD storage. This will result is your machine not experiencing significant slowdowns when your physical memory is saturated. It is quite essential for 20.04 installs with 8GB or less of RAM, and I have noted that even with 16GB of RAM on my system it is used quite often.
- Cinnamon 4.8: The newest Cinnamon version further improves CPU and RAM usage of Cinnamon. It is running quite snappy, so I recommend all Cinnamon users upgrade to 4.8!
Existing Users: Update to get the above features
All existing Wasta-Linux 20.04.1 users do not need to re-install to get all of these updates. Instead, you can run these commands from a terminal to make sure you are up to date:
- sudo wasta-system-upgrade
- All system updates will be applied, all new default applications (like “Traffic Cop”) will be installed, and zswap will be enabled. No existing applications will be removed.
- sudo wasta-cinnamon-upgrade
- The Wasta Cinnamon 4.8 “PPA” (software repository) will be added to the system and Cinnamon will be upgraded to version 4.8
Both of the above commands can have the “auto” parameter appended to them to run non-interactively (e.g. "sudo wasta-system-upgrade auto")
Download
You can find a link to this Wasta-Linux 20.04.2 ISO from the default tab of the Wasta-Linux website download page:
https://wastalinux.org/home/download/
Closing
Please let us know of any issues you encounter, or questions you may have on using Wasta-Linux. There are always ways to improve Wasta-Linux and make it easier and more effective for our users. So please give us feedback as you are able and consider making contributions yourself to benefit us all!
Keep on wasta-ing,
Rik