NoTouch Release 2.40 “Cathedral Peak” is out. Following on the excellent “Mineral King” product generation, Cathedral Peak comes with tremendous improvements in all areas. Part of Cathedral Peak is a new major release of NoTouch Center, a generational update with both enterprise features and usability enhancements.
- Newest generations of Citrix, VMware Horizon, RDP clients and others
- Reporting engine with customization interface
- Scripting support with builtin script engines Python, JavaScript and Lua
- All-new auto-assign/auto-configure mechanism makes up for a perfect hands-off rollout – the perfect companion to our unique MSI installation method, our PXE boot stack or regular installation
- Even more hardware supported
As usual, many of these changes had already been deployed to our customers, also there were intermediate releases with for example VMware Horizon View client 3.4. Cathedral Peak includes the latest versions of Citrix Receiver (13.1) and VMware Horizon View client (3.4), each with their respective multimedia enhancements. The operating system also contains a number of additional updates such as Firefox (38.0.5), Dell/Quest vWorkspace (8.5) and FreeRDP (Build 1.2). With the “Cathedral Peak” release, Stratodesk has also introduced a new OS variant based on Linux kernel 3.16, which includes new drivers and additional hardware support. Cutting a long story short, NoTouch has been and will always be the number one VDI OS, designed to run on various existing or new PCs as well as Thin Clients.
The new release also includes improved touchscreen support and a security-enhanced key-based management transport mechanism. The actual changelog and list of improvements – as always – is too long to be shown here. We kindly suggest to read the release notes that are available for download together with the actual release binaries.
Version 4.2.0 of NoTouch Center includes a new reporting tool, in which the most popular reports, such as those for peripheral devices, firmware images or client and group hierarchies can be pre-configured to be readily available. Reports can be displayed in various formats, including PDF, XLS, DOCX, PPTX, ODT, XML, or CSV file.
At the same time, administrators can also create and customize their own reporting templates more easily than ever before. NoTouch Center contains the JasperReports Library tool, the de facto standard open source solution for the reporting segment.
The new scripting engine offers enhanced flexibility, giving users the ability to write their own scripts in their preferred programming language (for example, Python, JavaScript or Lua). Possible usage scenarios could include, for example: customized scripts for selective firmware updates based on hardware parameters; or automated generation of notifications to third-party manufacturers of IT-asset management solutions.
The management, maintenance and group assignment of terminals within a network is made even more convenient with the newly developed auto-assign mechanism, which enables administrators to fully automate the rollout of software to new clients. Upon discovery, and based upon certain criteria, new devices within the network are automatically assigned to their respective groups and configured accordingly.
Additional developments in NoTouch Center include enhanced security features and a new management interface for the administration of operating system images.
“A great deal of detailed work has gone into the newest release, and we have incorporated many user requests and suggestions,” says Emanuel Pirker, CEO of Stratodesk Corp. “The scripting engine and features such as auto-assign afford IT administrators, network managers and IT executives a considerable advantage in terms of flexibility, while at the same time providing more convenience and reduced effort in administration of standard tasks.”
Stratodesk’s NoTouch solutions are ideally suited for the vendor-agnostic re-use and continued use of PCs and thin clients within the context of a virtualized infrastructure (“PC repurposing”). Businesses and organizations can use the solutions to reduce costs and efficiently reuse existing hardware.
NoTouch 2.40 runs on PCs and Thin Clients with at least 512 MB RAM. The standard image requires 768 MB Flash or hard drive space, though smaller builds are available. NoTouch OS 2.40 works best with NoTouch Center 4.2 that has been released at the same time. A current Stratodesk Virtual Appliance image 20150623 was released as well – with VA software 1.0-83. All builds together form “Release Cathedral Peak”, named after Cathedral Peak, a breathtaking mountain with amazing climbing ascents in California’s Yosemite National Park. The picture shows climbers – one of them a Stratodesk team member – on Eichorn’s Pinnacle, a stunning spire next to Cathedral Peak’s summit.
Please log in to www.stratodesk.com/login to download. NoTouch 2.40 is available to subscribed customers free of charge.
We want to highlight that Stratodesk Knowledge Base has undergone a major update as well – check it out at https://www.stratodesk.com/kb.
If you have any problems or questions on how to update to this release please contact [email protected]
