Trinity has broken its year-long public silence to unveil Trinity Rescue Kit v.3.4, the latest version of its live Linux distribution solution for recovery and repair operations on Windows and Linux machines.

The latest iteration of the distro uses the 2.6.35 Linux kernel and incorporates a more user-friendly, scrollable text menu to access the most commonly needed features.

"The biggest visible enhancement here is the addition of a menu interface: Not a graphical one -- who needs that in a rescue distribution? -- but a text based, scrollable menu from which any regular computer user can perform otherwise complicated tasks," said developer Tom Kerremans on Trinity's website. "So no more learning curve for new users, just boot from it and select your task from the menu."

Other enhancements include Winclean, a Trinity-developed utility that performs offline Windows disk cleaning; a new virus-scan engine within the software's virus-scan tool; a rewritten winpass password reset tool; complete man pages for TRK's utilities; and a so-called "Quick and Dirty Guide" for those anxious to jumpstart their use of TRK, according to Trinity.

In the antivirus arena, TRK continues to support antivirus engines ClamAV, F-prot, BitDefender, Vexira, and added support for Avast. Trinity stopped supporting Grisoft AVG. Under TRK, the five engines are available under one uniform command line, said Kerremans. The Winclean script searches for unneeded junk files -- such as temp, IE-cache, javacache, hanging printer jobs, uninstall files from Windows update patches, dllcache, and recycle bins -- and removes them.

"On a heavily used computer it can easily recover gigabytes of free space and seriously enhance speed," he said.

The software is available as a bootable CD, which can be burned from a downloadable isofile or self-burning Windows executable; from a USB stick or disk, installable from Windows or the bootable TRK CD; and from the network over PXE, according to Trinity.

"One other major new feature which has not directly to do with TRK is the TRK version that can burn itself to CD," said Kerremans. "Indeed, using cdrecord, 7-zip, and some cmd-scripting I was able to create a self-burning Trinity Rescue Kit in the form of a Windows executable. So no more external ISO-burn software needed anymore; any computer with a CD burner can write TRK to a blank CD."

Trinity also enhanced TRK's fileserver to run a local Samba server sharing all drives; trkbootnet, a utility that makes a TRK network bootserver out of the running TRK; mclone, to mass clone PCs over the network using multicast; and full (virtual) read/write support that allows IT departments to install external RPMS, according to Trinity.