Klaus Knopper, creator of Knoppix officially declared the general availability of its popular Live Linux distribution -
Knoppix 7.0.1. This release includes a number of improvements and package upgrades, while removing proprietary packages, such as Adobe Reader. Version 7.0.1 of Knoppix is based on the usual picks from
Debian stable (squeeze) and newer Desktop packages from Debian/testing and Debian/unstable (wheezy). It uses
kernel 3.3.7 and
LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) as its default desktop environment. The DVD version of Knoppix also includes a choice of
GNOME 3.4 or KDE SC 4.7.4 (the current release is KDE SC 4.8.3 from early May), and additional packages such as
VirtualBox 4.1.4. Package upgrades include version
3.5.3 of the LibreOffice productivity suite,
Wine 1.5.4, Chromium 18 and
Iceweasel 10, the re-branded version of the
Firefox web browser for Debian. It now has version 1.4 of the open source
ADRIANE (Audio Desktop Reference Implementation and Networking Environment) talking menu system for blind users. Other changes include better support for Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets and experimental support for automatically detecting graphics cards with composite 3D extensions for the
Compiz window manager. A full list of changes and new features can be found in the
release notes.