Parrot OS, similar to Kali, is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed for security and privacy. Using the MATE desktop environment, Parrot OS includes various tools for penetration testing, digital forensics, reverse engineering, cryptography, and anonymity, making it a popular choice for security professionals and researchers.
Just over four months after its latest stable 5.1 release, Parrot OS 5.2 is finally here. So let’s see what’s changed.
What’s New in Parrot OS 5.2?
Under the hood, Parrot OS 5.2 ships with the Linux kernel 6.0. In addition, a number of the other core elements have also received updates, such as Systemd 252.4, Python 3.9.2, Pipewire 0.3.63, and GnuPG 2.2.27.
On the app side, users get in the default installation Firefox 102.7.0esr Web Browser, LibreOffice 7.4.5 Office Suite, GIMP 2.10.22 Image Manipulation Program, and VLC 3.0.18 Media Player. For the needs of developers, Parrot OS 5.2 offers VSCodium 1.75 IDE and PowerShell 7.2.1.
It’s worth noting that the MATE desktop environment used here is version 1.24.1 rather than the most recent 1.26, which was released back in August 2021.
Apart from the things mentioned above, Parrot OS 5.2 brings several security updates to fix important bugs in Firefox, Chromium, sudo, D-Bus, Nginx, LibSSL, OpenJDK, and Xorg. On top of that, several improvements were made to the Calamares installer to address some installation issues.
AnonSurf, Parrot’s anonymous mode wrapper to force connections through Tor, now includes better support for TOR bridges. Moreover, the wireless drivers for several Broadcom and Realtek cards that were previously unsupported received updates to support the 6.x Linux kernel and Virtualbox and Nvidia drivers.
Finally, users running the operating system on Raspberry Pi devices have reason to rejoice. Parrot OS’s Raspberry Pi images have received software updates to boost the system’s performance and fix audio drivers.
You can refer to the release notes for detailed information about all changes in Parrot 5.2.
Download
Head to Parrot’s official download page when you’re ready to grab a copy of this free security-oriented operating system.
Parrot OS is a rolling release Linux distro, so if you already have it installed, you don’t need to make a fresh install. Instead, use the APT to upgrade your existing system by running the following:
sudo parrot-upgrade
