Probably the most important feature of the Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx” Beta 1 release is that the entire OS has been fully synchronized with the upstream Ubuntu Trusty Tahr software repositories, which means that it’s now based on the latest Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS operating system, which comes with updated kernel and graphics stacks from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) distro. By popular demand, the Abiword word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet editor, Rhythmbox music player, VLC Media Player, GIMP image editor, and Chromium web browser application packages are included in the first Beta release of Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx”, along with many web apps.