14 DAY TRIAL // After having informed us about the immediate availability of Black Lab Linux Enterprise Desktop 6 SR4, Black Lab Software has had the great pleasure of sending us details about the fourth service release of their Black Lab Linux Education Desktop 6 distribution.
Black Lab Linux Education Desktop 6 is a commercial operating system based on LTS (Long Term Support) Linux technologies and derived from Canonical's Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) OS. The SR4 maintenance release brings updated packages, which have been synchronized with the upstream Debian GNU/Linux 8.0 (Jessie) repositories as of May 25, 2015, as well as security patches.
"Black Lab Education 6 is also certified to run many of your state accredited Linux based apps and includes Virtual Machine technology to help you in your migration from Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X environments. Black Lab Education Desktop is the only commercially supported Mate and KDE based distribution on the market today," says Robert Dohnert.
KDE4 and MATE 1.8 desktop environments are included
While the default desktop environment of the Black Lab Linux Enterprise Desktop 6 SR4 operating system is built around KDE 4.14.2, the MATE 1.8.2 desktop is available for customers who are switching from an operating system that uses a similar user interface, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. SR4 also brings an updated Linux kernel, version 3.16.0-38, which has been patched to offer support for more hardware components.
Additionally, Ubuntu 14.04's Linux kernel 3.13.0-53 is also available, but not enabled by default, just in case you need a more stable, reliable kernel. Last but not least, several of the pre-installed applications in Black Lab Linux Enterprise Desktop 6 SR4 have been updated to their latest version available, including GCC 4.9.2, Mozilla Firefox 38.0, Mozilla Thunderbird 31.7, Skype 4.3, and LibreOffice 4.3.
The distribution also offers several educational applications and some useful system utilities, such as ScudCloud, Citrix Receiver, FocusWriter, NitroShare, Gcompris, Calibre, Tux Type, Tux Paint, Ardesia Desktop Sketching, and Timeshift. Support for Wiimote and Kinect is also provided. More details about pricing can be found on the project's website.