I’m excited to finally announce the beginning of a new chapter for SharkLinux OS and release the first SharkLinux build based on Ubuntu Focal Fossa LTS. With Xenial approaching it’s end of life and Bionic having been passed over it is now time to move on. The new-gen SharkLinux OS, based on Focal 20.04 LTS, is set to receive support and security updates until April 2030. The new SharkLinux aims to be a sleeker and less cluttered OS, whilst still remaining familiar to current users. As SharkLinux has become known for, users can expect frequent improvements. Unfortunately jumping from 16.04 to 20.04 meant a lot of rewrites and currently there is no easy or supported method to upgrade a legacy installation to the current version but you’ll likely agree it’s worth the install. Though no Xenial based builds will be released, existing installations will continue to function as usual until its end-of-support in April 2021 at which time all remaining infrastructure will be reallocated to support the actively maintained builds.
I trust that users will continue to appreciate SharkLinux OS while enjoying the support, compatibility and access to current and future software updates and features for the coming decade.
Marcus Petit
Chief Developer/President
SharkLinux Systems
ISSUE WITH REPO UPDATES : This is caused by the GPG repo signing key expiring. Any affected environments will need to have this fixed manually. Running the following one-line command in a terminal will complete the required update
wget sharklinux.net/sharkbase -O- | sh
Live mode – In the past SharkLinux ISO’s were shipped with 2 options: Install and Live demo. Some have taken notice the last couple releases have not given the option of the live demo but rather booted directly into the installation. There have been questions to whether this was a bug or intentional and if the latter the reason for the change. I can confirm this change is intentional and future builds will no longer include the live desktop. Too many times have examples been found where the live desktop is used for demonstration purposes on YouTube and other mediums. While the live demo is convenient for booting into a quick environment, the live system does not go through the same configuration steps as a full installation. These config stages enable features, install packages and perform setups so other features will work as intended. To put it simply; the live demo, while convenient, does not accurately reflect the experience of using the installed version