14 DAY TRIAL // Knoppix 7.4.0, a bootable Live CD/DVD made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by an automatic hardware detection and support for many video cards, SCSI, and USB devices, has been released and is available for download.
It's been more than a year since the previous Knoppix release, but the developers have returned with a new update, which brings quite a few changes and improvements. Knoppix is an old operating system and it's been around for a long time, 13 years to be more exact. It's still around and the devs continue making improvements.
“One of the well-known genuine productions of KNOPPER.NET is KNOPPIX(r), which is a GNU/Linux distribution that starts and runs entirely from CD, DVD or USB flashdisk, or over a network, without prior installation on harddisk or configuration.”
“As integrated part of Debian/KNOPPIX, a ‘talking’ Desktop - ADRIANE(r) - is being under continuous developent, which allows blind and vision impaired computer users without advanced computer skills, to use the internet and various media in a comfortable way. Special hardware or cost-intense proprietary software is not required, opposed to common expensive and feature-restricted commercial solutions,” reads the official announcement.
According to the changelog, the current version of Knoppix is based on Debian stable (wheezy) and a few newer Desktop packages from Debian/testing and Debian/unstable (jessie) are being used, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.15.6, xorg has been updated to version 7.7, the 64-bit version of the same kernel is installed on the DVD edition, systems with more than 4GB of RAM and chroot to 64-bit installations for system rescue tasks are now supported, and the bootloader will start the 64-bit kernel automatically, if a 64-bit-capable CPU is detected.
Also, an experimental version of 3D window manager compiz 0.9.11.1 has been implemented, the service manager systemd has been added, LibreOffice 4.3.0 is now available by default, GIMP has been updated to version 2.8.10, Chromium 36.0.1985.103 and Firefox/Iceweasel 31.0 Web Browser with AdBlockPlus 2.6.4 and NoScript 2.6.8.38 security plugin have been added, and LXDE (Default) with filemanager PCMANFM 1.2.1, KDE 4.8.4 (boot option knoppix desktop=kde, DVD version only), and GNOME 3.8.4 (boot option knoppix desktop=gnome, DVD version only) desktop environments have been added.
The ISO images for Knoppix are bootable and users can test it before the actual installation. Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes. You can download KNOPPIX 7.4.0 right now from Softpedia.