I would like to announce the release of Qubes RC1. The installation ISO and instructions can be found here.
This release is expected to essentially be identical to the final 1.0 release, which will likely follow in the coming weeks, except for some minor, cosmetic fixes.
Comparing to the previous Beta 3 release, the major changes and improvements in this version include:
- A much improved Qubes Manager, that now allows to configure and manage almost every aspect of the Qubes system using a simple and intuitive GUI.
- All the VMs are now based on Fedora 17 template.
- Updated Dom0 and VM kernels are now based on 3.2.7-pvops kernel, which offer better hardware and power management support.
- Convenient menu improvements, that include e.g. a handy icon for launching a Disposable Web browser in a Disposable VM.
- Support for “yum proxy”, which smartly allows to update packages in a template VM (or other updateable VM), without requiring to grant general HTTP access for this VM. This has been a problem before, as the Fedora repos use hundreds of mirrored yum servers, and it wasn't possible to setup a single rule in the firewall VM to allow only access to the yum servers, and nothing else. Now, this is possible, and the primary application is to prevent user mistakes, e.g. against using the temaplate VM for Web Browsing.
- We also added support for an opt-in fullscreen mode for select VMs.
- ...plus lots of other improvements and fixes under the hood. As can be seen in the wiki, there has been over 200 tickets closed as part of the work on this release!
So, again, this is almost the final release, please test it and report any problems to the mailing list, so that we could fix them before Qubes 1.0 comes out officially.