New version of Qubes OS available.


Qubes OS 2 was released.

"Today we're releasing Qubes OS R2! I'm not going to write about all the cool features in this release because you can find all this in our Wiki and previous announcements. Suffice to say that we've come a long way over those 4+ years from a primitive proof of concept to a powerful desktop OS which, I believe, it is today. One of the biggest difficulties we have been facing with Qubes since the very beginning, has been the amount of this extra, not-so-exciting, not directly security-related work, but so much needed to ensure things actually work. Yet, the line between what is, and what is not-security related, is sometimes very thin and one can easily cross it if not being careful."

Qubes OS is a security-oriented, Fedora-based desktop Linux distribution whose main concept is "security by isolation" by using domains implemented as lightweight Xen virtual machines. It attempts to combine two contradictory goals: how to make the isolation between domains as strong as possible, mainly due to clever architecture that minimises the amount of trusted code, and how to make this isolation as seamless and easy as possible.