SolydK Business Edition

SolydK Business Edition is an open source distribution of Linux, a special edition of the SolydK operating system specifically designed for small businesses and non-profit organizations who are looking for a free, secure and stable OS. It is based on Debian GNU/Linux and uses the KDE SC desktop environment.

Availability, supported architectures, boot options

The distribution can be downloaded as a single Live DVD ISO image, which supports only the 64-bit (amd64) instruction set architecture, and can be written to a USB flash drive of 2GB or higher capacity, or burned onto a blank DVD disc.

The ISO image can be booted from the BIOS of most PCs and laptops. You can access the boot menu by pressing any key during the ten second timeout, which will enable you to start an existing operating system installed on the first disk drive of your computer, run a memory diagnostic test, reboot or shutdown the computer, as well as to check the disc for defects (only if using a DVD media).

In addition, the live environment can be started without the Plymouth boot splash or in compatibility mode, in case you encounter issues with some of your hardware components, such as the graphics card.

Same desktop environment as SolydK, fewer apps

This edition comes with the same desktop environment as the main SolydK operating system, but with fewer apps. It only includes the ESR version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, LibreOffice office suite, VLC Media Player, digiKam photo management software, K3b CD/DVD/BD burning program, as well as a few other KDE default apps.

Bottom line

The Business Edition of SolydK has been designed from the ground up as a LTS (Long Term Support) release, providing its users with security updates and patches for a period of three years.

What is new in this release:

• The Home Editions were upgraded to the latest Upgrade Pack and the Business Editions were upgraded with the latest security updates. This time I will not list the version changes of the major applications, but limit myself to the most important changes.
• The Live Installer now supports multiple drives which will give you the ability to install the home directory to a separate drive rather then another partition.

What is new in version 201407:

• Debian has started to move testing to systemd. The Home Editions use systemd while the Business Editions continue to use sysvinit. For the Home Editions, you will notice the difference during boot, but especially during shut down which now takes a lot less time. We can still need your help to improve boot time, though. Samba is on by default, and that is causing no significant improvement in boot time.
• If you're really into optimizing boot time, you can start by analyzing the output of these commands...
• systemd-analyze blame
• systemd-analyze critical-chain
• As from the last update kdenext was removed from SolydK. We are now tracking Debian KDE.
• The multimedia repository (deb-multimedia) has been removed from the ISOs. Some of the multimedia packages, and some codecs were added to our own repository. These packages might, or might not be legal to use in your country, but you can install them by checking the Multimedia check box during the installation. This option is selected by default.
• The current multimedia repository is still available, and you can continue to use it. If you want to remove the multimedia repository from your current system, and replace them with a Debian equivalent, you can use Grizzler's script as described in this tutorial: http://forums.solydxk.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4367
• The KDE Display Manager (KDM) has been replaced with LightDM. If you want to replace KDM with LightDM on your current system, you can follow this tutorial: http://forums.solydxk.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4368.

What is new in version 201401:

• KDE:
• KDE has been updated to version 4.12.1
• LibreOffice:
• LibreOffice has been updated to version 4.1.4-2
• Firefox and Thunderbird:
• Firefox has been updated to version 26.0, and Thunderbird to version 24.2.0
• Community packages:
• These packages were added to the community repository:
• grub-customizer, kdeconnect, plasma-mediacenter, xfce-theme-manager, xfwm4compositeeditor