Dear Community,
Today is the day on which we officially release IPFire 2.13. We are very proud to have a brand new milestone release with a lot of exciting, new features. We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the project and if you would like to help us out as well, please consider making a donation.
IPFire 2.13 is a new major version of IPFire, the Open Source Firewall distribution. The list of changes, enhancements, and fixes is endless, but we would like you to pay special attention to the following features which we’re the most excited about:
Base System
The most important components of the base system have been updated to include a brand new kernel based on the Linux 3.2 release. With that, IPFire now supports more hardware than ever before and many of the hardware problems from the past should be gone.
The most basic system libraries have been replaced as well, giving us great performance and fixing some general security issues. If you’d like to know more about this specifically, please read this post on our planet.
Quality of Service with CoDeL
In case you are struggling with a slow internet connection, CoDeL is your solution. This new algorithm shares the bandwidth fairly between all connections. It doesn’t need any configuration at all, but when tied together with our Quality of Service features, CoDeL gives you the most out of your connection.
Learn more about CoDeL in our planet post.
ARM
We have finally declared the ARM versions of IPFire as stable. Since the very first testing release back in October 2011, a multitude of things have improved. As of today, IPFire runs on many different platforms, such as Marvell Kirkwood and Texas Instruments OMAP4-based systems, and of course, the Raspberry Pi computer.
The vast amount of people who have already been using IPFire ARM since we began to port it to the ARM architecture know that there was never really any big trouble to begin with. You can find more about this over here.
IPsec VPNs with strongswan 5
The IPsec implementation strongswan recently released a new version which cleaned up a significant amount of old code, some of which has been in use for over a decade. If you want to know the details, check out the IPFire planet post.
Wireless LAN
From our wishlist, we’ve implemented proper support for 5 GHz WLANs. Read this planet post to learn about the benefits.
The IPFire developers have been working on this release for several months and would like to thank all of the people who have helped with testing or contributed in any way. We’re one big team and we appreciate anyone who wants to join us. There is always plenty fun stuff to do.
To update your system, just visit the web user interface and head over to the pakfire page. The update will download approximately 60MB of data and will take some time to install. Please be patient and do not switch off your system during the update.
For a fresh installation, download IPFire on the download page.
Have fun!
- Your IPFire Development Team