KNOPPIX 5.2 Release Date

KNOPPIX 5.2 has been announced and will probably be showing up on the torrent sites soon, with an official release public release of 5.2.1 coming in April. Some of the major changes are inclusion of the Beryl 3D desktop, NTFS-3G 1.0, and a boatload of virtualization technologies.

As announced on Heise.de, the first special edition of Knoppix 5.2.0 is included in c’t magazines 7/07 issued during CeBIT 2007. This version is only available within the german magazine, plus distributed in limited numbers at CeBIT 2007, Heise-booth in hall 5, and at the booth of Rheinland-Pfalz in hall 9, C39/21. The next public download edition (5.2.1) will be issued as CD and DVD probably in April 2007.

Review of Damn Small Linux 3.2

Open Addict reviews Damn Small Linux 3.2.

Under the hood, DSL features the 2.4.26 kernel compiled with SMP support. The system had no trouble recognizing the hardware on our test laptop and booted to the desktop in around 30 seconds. DSL is committed to remaining useable on older hardware. In fact the minimum system requirements for this distro are just a 486DX with 16MB of Ram.

Puppy Linux 2.14: This Hound Has Teeth

PerformancePC reviews the latest version of Puppy Linux.

Though worthy Linux distributions from Ubuntu and SUSE run very well, they are also rather large collections (though certainly not as bloated as Windows is!) and this has led to the creation of some smaller incarnations like Damn Small Linux and Feather Linux. The best of these lite Linux versions, though, has got to be Puppy Linux, which, in its 2.14 version, shows that it can run very comfortably with the big hounds.

Securing Linux by breaking it with Damn Vulnerable Linux

Linux.com reviews an interesting new LiveCD designed for learning software security.

“The main idea behind DVL,” says Schneider, “was to build up a training system that I could use for my university lectures.” His goal was to design a Linux system that was as vulnerable as possible, to teach topics such as reverse code engineering, buffer overflows, shellcode development, Web exploitation, and SQL injection.