That’s right: after a 5 year hiatus, Finnix — the LiveCD for system administrators and the oldest LiveCD in production — is back to celebrate its 20 year anniversary in 2020 with Finnix 120.

Finnix 120 is a complete overhaul, with a number of major changes (as well as too many minor changes to enumerate). From the Finnix 120 release notes:

  • Finnix 120 is now a native 64-bit amd64 userland and kernel system. For older 586/686/PowerPC support, Finnix 109 is recommended as the last Finnix release which was well-supported on those 32-bit platforms.
  • Both BIOS and UEFI booting are now available, with Secure Boot.
  • Hundreds of new utility packages have been added.
  • Automatic setup attempts of complex block device layouts have been removed, in favor of management via udisksctl with tab-completion.
  • Other legacy features and boot modes have been discontinued or are no longer supported, in favor of core USB/CD booting.
  • ISO size has increased (477 MiB, from 160 MiB), but the goal is to continue to keep it under the size of a CD-R.
  • NEALE, the bespoke build system used by Finnix, has been discontinued. Finnix is now built as a customized system based on the debian-live build software.

Please visit finnix.org to download Finnix 120 today!