ALT Linux announces public availability of two products based on Platform Five: ALT Linux 5.0 Ark, a suite designed for making integrated solutions, and ALT Linux 5.0 School, a suite that is targetted at secondary and high schools.

Now you can follow ALT Linux on Twitter in English and Russian.

We're happy to announce the beginning of public beta-testing of ALT Linux 5.0 Ark - a suite of distributions designed for making integrated solutions.

The suite includes 3 distributions for two hardware platforms (i586 and x86-64):

• ALT Linux 5.0 Office Server
• ALT Linux 5.0 Desktop
• ALT Linux 5.0 GNOME Desktop

ALT Linux starts public beta-testing of ALT Linux School. This is a set of distributions that includes:

• ALT Linux 5.0.0 School Lite (XFCE)
• ALT Linux 5.0.0 School Junior (GNOME)
• ALT Linux 5.0.0 School Master (KDE4)

There are many differences compared to the Free Software Suite that was released and sent to Russian schools in 2008. One distribution is now based on GNOME desktop environment. We have added packages to all distributions for additional educational process automation (iTALC to monitor and control computer class activity, iTest to make testing pupils easier, FreeNX to access remote systems with graphical terminals, recordMyDesktop to record videos of your desktop). Several IDEs have been added, including Anjuta, Geany and Code::Blocks. VirtualBox, a system virtualization engine, and Avidemux, a video processing tool, are also in ALT Linux School, as well as many other pieces of software.