Four weeks ago I reviewed CAINE v1.0, the first full release of the Italian computer forensics LiveCD. It took the development team a mere six weeks to release version 1.5; how much an improvement is this edition? How far can one distribution go in such a short time to reach such an increment?

Well, should you look at the ChangeLog, the answer would be not very far. The changes listed are just additions of small software packages, without improvements to its application that one may expect from such a large version increase. A few improvements have been made, such as a ‘read-me’ in the ‘Bash Scripts Tools’ folder, a more complete copy of documentation from the website & a couple more icons are present on the Desktop — but aspects of CAINE’s application remain the same, such as its prized CAINE Interface. So too is the back-end of the system; I cannot notice much (if any) improvement on start-up or operational speed, system optimisations or further customisation of Ubuntu software.

While it is still a good product and contains many useful features, I fear that more time should have been taken to release this next iteration and a more accurate version number of v1.1 should be used due to this lack of major development.