Cinux 1.7 "Pandora" was the last available release, yet one full year has gone by since then and no other release has been provided. Since then, I have worked on it, periodically, but I have not dedicated time to it. As stated in a previous article, I have surpassed the one thousand builds barrier and have kept every in between release (1.8 to 2.1) to myself, unfortunately.

    Cinux 1.8 "Dusa" was the first release after "Pandora" and came with really nice features; Gnome 2.30.2 was discontinued and Xfce 4 was introduced, bringing freshness to a rusty and old system; several networking tools were added and tweaked just for Cinux and made it possible for people to connect to a network without the need of the Terminal.

Open Source: Software, hardware or manufactured goods with an open license, that you can modify, reproduce and redistribute, free of charge.

    To those who think that #Ubuntu and #Android are really free, open source and secure, well, I have bad news for you. Sure, Ubuntu and Android are open source, you can view the source code and compile it, thus create your own instances or "distributions," but what you aren't really told is what is happening behind the scenes. 

    I haven't written anything in a while and I feel a little bad, since we have done a lot to make this operating system better and more appealing to people. However, work and school have been slowing me down a lot; And that's the reason I decided to make an effort to grow the development team: I welcome, officially, Tony, John and Dimitri.
    Well, as of this moment, I am trying to get rid of the rusty and old 1.7/1.8 based systems and move to a newly created system with a newer base-system which gives better performance and only supports x86_64 (x64) for desktop computers. So, soon you will have a brand new system which will support x86_64, ARM and PowerPC computers. The ARM version, for the Raspberry Pi is already available (Go to the Download page) and we're still experimenting with the x86_64 version and specifically the kernel (Currently Linux-3.7.5). Sometime at the end of the month, hopefully earlier, we will have a live CD ready for you to download and play with, as it will feature all the goodies, Fluxbox (just for now and only for the x86_64) and  a brand new, wait for it, package manager!

     Cinux has already marked its second year of constant development. Throughout these two years, for the first half year of its existence, it had no graphical environment but then things changed and for one and a half year now it has always "shipped" with Gnome 2.30.2 and later on CGI (Cinux Graphical Interface), a fork of Gnome 2.30.2. As I and my team are working on the next release, Cinux 1.8 "Dusa," I will be discontinuing support for not only Gnome 2.30.2 but also for Gnome 3. Even though the Beta build 0.1.8.398 of Cinux 1.8 is still equipped with CGI, the official stable release of Cinux 1.8 will feature Xfce 4.10 instead, wiping out any trace of CGI's existence from the system. The reason for this is, firstly, to update the old, rusty and, pretty much, heavy graphical interface bringing a new but at the same time a well known user experience and, secondly, to take a new step towards the goal of Cinux: A fast, lightweight and secure Linux based operating system.