The kernel now ships with built-in microcode support

Jul 28, 2016 22:33 GMT  ·  By

The KaOS development team has proudly announced the debut of the KaOS 2016.07 ISO refresh for the month of July, bringing all the goodies that have been pushed to the main software repositories of the rolling release operating system since June 2016.

KaOS 2016.07 is, as expected, a major update, but it's here only for those who want to reinstall their KaOS installation for various reasons or deploy the operating system on new computers. Existing users who want to get all the goodies included in the KaOS 2016.07 ISO need only to run the "pacman -Syu" command from time to time.

"The policy is, once a first pacman -Syu becomes a major update, it is time for a new ISO, so new users are not faced with a difficult first update. With all the needed rebuilds for the move to GCC 5, most systems will see 70-80% of their install replaced by new packages, so a new ISO is more than due," the developers explain.

Here's what landed in KaOS 2016.07

Among the updated core components and applications introduced in the KaOS 2016.07 ISO refresh, we can mention the latest KDE technologies, including the KDE Plasma 5.7.2 desktop environment, KDE Applications 16.04.3 software suite, and KDE Frameworks 5.24.0 collection of add-ons for the Qt 5.7 GUI toolkit.

Another interesting change is the move to the Linux 4.6 kernel series, which now comes with built-in microcode support, allowing full automatic update of the CPU firmware on modern PCs compatible with this feature. There's also encrypted file system support implemented in the Calamares graphical installer, using LUKS encryption.

Moreover, the KaOS 2016.07 release includes lots of other up-to-date GNU/Linux technologies, such as GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.4.0, X.Org Server 1.18.4, PulseAudio 9.0, Python 3.5.2, Binutils 2.26.1, LLVM/Clang 3.8.1, Poppler 0.45.0, MariaDB 10.1.15, and Calamares 2.3. Download KaOS 2016.07 right now via our website.

Calamares 2.3 graphical installer with full-disk encryption support
Calamares 2.3 graphical installer with full-disk encryption support

KaOS 2016.07 (2 Images)

KaOS 2016.07 with K3b
Calamares 2.3 graphical installer with full-disk encryption support
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