Kanotix live Linux system refreshed

The Kanotix Dragonfire desktop At LinuxTag 2012, currently taking place in Berlin, the Kanotix development team announced the release of an update to the Hellfire branch and a preview of the Dragonfire branch of its live Linux system. Kanotix appeared in 2003 as a Knoppix derivative and evolved into its own distribution, based on Debian. Designed for use as a general purpose Live CD/USB Linux system and able to boot on a wide range of hardware and with a full range of applications, Kanotix also happily installs onto hard disks to provide a permanently resident operating system.

Kanotix Hellfire 2012-05 is based on the current 6.0.5 "Squeeze" stable version of Debian, while Kanotix Dragonfire Preview 2012-05 uses the yet to be fully released Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" as its foundation. Both of the new releases use the Linux 3.2.0-24 kernel, which has been recompiled from Ubuntu, and include version 3.5.3 of the LibreOffice productivity suite, Wine 1.4, version 2.10.4 of the Pidgin instant messaging program, and Grub2 1.99. However, some of the bundled packages vary between the two releases: the Dragonfire preview includes version 10.0.4 ESR of Iceweasel and Icedove, the re-branded versions of the Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox and Thunderbird, while Hellfire has Iceweasel 12.0 and Icedove 3.1.16.

The developers note that each of the 32-bit releases is available as a stripped-down "mini" version that removes a number of bundled applications including LibreOffice, Wine, GIMP, Amarok and OpenVPN, as well as all of the games.

Further information about the releases can be found in the announcement news post. Kanotix Hellfire and Dragonfire Preview 2012-05 are available to download as multi-hybrid ISO images for 32- and 64-bit systems, which can boot from a CD, DVD or USB flash drive.

(crve)