Michael Tremer announced today the release and general availability of IPFire 2.29 Core Update 183, a new major release for this hardened open-source Linux distro that primarily performs as a router or firewall.
IPFire 2.29 Core Update 183 comes with some major changes, including a kernel bump to the latest LTS (Long Term Support) series, namely Linux 6.6 LTS. This particular release ships with Linux kernel 6.6.15 by default providing users with top-notch hardware support for installing IPFire.
Another major change in the new IPFire release is a brand new look with refreshed colors, a new font, as well as numerous other smaller changes to the WebUI to make the Linux firewall distro easy to use for newcomers. Some usability improvements have also been implemented across the WebUI.
Patched against the recently disclosed GNU C Library (Glibc) security vulnerabilities, IPFire 2.29 Core Update 183 ships with the latest GRUB 2.12 bootloader, an updated timezone database to version 2023d, and OpenSSL 3.2.1, which enforces 2048 bits RSA keys.
“This update will re-generate a new set of RSA keys on those systems. It is very unlikely that this key will ever be used as the IPFire web user interface prefers using elliptic curve cryptography with ECDSA,” said Michael Tremer.
Under the hood, there are a lot of updated packages, including BIND 9.16.45, cpio 2.14, Fontconfig 2.15.0, GnuTLS 3.8.2, OpenSSH 9.6p1, Iptables 1.8.10, iputils 20231222, Meson 1.3.1, kmod 31, lsof 4.99.3, p11-kit 0.25.3, QPDF 11.7.0, strongSwan 5.9.13, Sudo 1.9.15p5, Suricata 6.0.16, and others.
A new add-on has been added in this release, namely myMPD 13.0.6, a bootstrap-based WebGUI to control MPD (Music Player Daemon). And, of course, existing add-ons have been updated to a recent release, including Git 2.43.0, Tor 0.4.8.10, Postfix 3.8.4, Samba 4.19.3, htop 3.3.0, HAProxy 2.8.5, NFS 4.6.4, and others.
You can download IPFire 2.29 Core Update 183 right now from the official website as ISO or USB images for both 64-bit and AArch64 (ARM64) architectures. For more details about the changes included in this update to the popular IPFire hardened Linux firewall, check out the release announcement page.
Image credits: IPFire (edited by Marius Nestor)
Last updated 6 hours ago