ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 brings Azure and Steam support

ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 ships with a number of custom tools from ROSA Laboratory

ROSA Laboratory has released a new version of the Fresh branch of its ROSA Desktop distribution of Linux. ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 is targeted at Linux enthusiasts and advanced users who want more cutting edge packages than are provided in the company's more conventional ROSA Desktop variant; both ROSA editions are based on a fork of Mandriva. A notable new feature in ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 is support for deploying the distribution on Microsoft's Hyper-V in the Windows Azure cloud hosting environment. ROSA Laboratory says that it will also publish out of the box images on Azure's VM Depot image catalog soon.

The developers say that users of Desktop Fresh R1 can now install Valve's Steam distribution platform on it, giving them access to over a hundred commercial games. The default desktop environment in ROSA Fresh R1 is KDE and the distribution includes version 4.10.3 of the desktop environment. The developers promise that GNOME and LXDE editions of the distribution will follow. They have also introduced a new font rasteriser, making the display of fonts throughout the distribution more readable, and have updated a number of the distribution's own tools. Other software shipped with the release includes version 3.8.12 of the Linux kernel, LibreOffice 3.6.6 and Firefox 21.

ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 is available from the ROSA Laboratory download servers. The release is available for 32- and 64-bit systems. Users of the ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 release from December of last year can update their systems to the new version by using the built-in updating mechanism in the distribution.

(fab)