14 DAY TRIAL // The KaOS project has kicked off the new decade by releasing the first ISO snapshot of their rolling and transparent GNU/Linux distribution build from scratch for the modern desktops.
KaOS 2020.01 is now available to download as the latest and most up-to-date installation media for this GNU/Linux distribution, bringing the Linux 5.4 kernel series, which adds support for Microsoft's exFAT file system and the "lockdown" security feature, as well as automatically signed kernel modules.
"All internal modules are now automatically signed during the kernel build, out of tree modules like VirtualBox-modules and NVIDIA packages have the signing added too. Building of those modules was adjusted to use the kernel specific signing files during each and every rebuild," explain the developers.
Users who want to harden their KaOS Linux systems will have to add the "module.sig_enforce=1" parameter (without quotes) to the kernel boot line. Also, they can check if there are any unsigned kernel modules in their system by executing the command below in a terminal emulator.
for mod in $(lsmod | tail -n +2 | cut -d' ' -f1); do modinfo ${mod} | grep -q "signature" || echo "no signature for module: ${mod}" ; done
Improved support for hybrid systems, updated components
Another interesting feature added in the KaOS 2020.01 release is better support for hybrid systems by adopting the libglvnd library instead of libgl. This change alone makes the Nvidia Bumblebee packages obsolete as the required PRIME patches are now included in the X.Org Server 1.20.6 update, as well as in the hardware-detection scripts and Calamares installer.
KaOS 2020.01 also ships with the KDE Plasma 5.17.4 desktop environment, KDE Frameworks 5.65.0, and KDE Applications 19.12.0. Among some other notable updates included in this release, we can mention Mesa 19.2.8, GNU Nano 4.7, Glib2 2.62.4, LLVM/Clang 9.0.1, GStreamer 1.16.2, Bison 3.4.2, Python3 3.7.6, Qt 5.14.0, Protobuf 3.11.1, and NetworkManager 1.22.2.
