IonOS For Linux

IonOS is an open source operating system that uses the traditional, easy to use and lightweight MATE desktop environment on top of the latest upstream Debian GNU/Linux distribution. It includes support for the Castilian and Portuguese languages.

The distribution can be downloaded from Softpedia or its official homepage as Live DVD ISO images that have been engineered to support the 32-bit (i486 and i686 PAE) instruction set architectures. There are two Live DVDs with free software and drivers, and two other with proprietary drivers and non-free software.

The boot menu of the Live DVDs uses a custom background image specific to the IonOS operating system and allows the user to start the live environment with default boot options, with support for the Castilian or Portuguese languages, in safe graphics mode, run a system memory test, as well as to boot an existing OS from the first disk drive.

The default and only desktop environment of IonOS is MATE, a clone of the GNOME 2 (a.k.a. GNOME Classic) graphical session. It uses a two-panel layout, where the top panel will help users to quickly launch their favorite apps and the bottom panel to easily interact with running programs.

As mentioned, while the non-free editions include non-free applications and proprietary drivers, the free editions include only libre software and open source drivers. Among some of the default applications, we can mention Liferea, Iceweasel, Icedove, Pidgin, Mumble, XChat, Skype, SteadyFlow, LibreOffice, HomeBank, GnuCash, Meld, Audacious, Brasero, GNOME MPlayer, SMPlayer, VLC Media Player, GIMP, Scribus, Shutter and Dia.

IonOS is fully compatible with the Debian Wheezy operating system, it is ready to be used by Spanish and Portuguese users, and includes several office programs, printer support, Windows network support, and various utilities (system backup, log viewer, VNC viewer, etc.).