Roundup of Upcoming Distribution Releases

Let's start with SUSE Linux. The third beta release of SUSE 10.0 should be out by the time you read this, with the final release expected around the middle of September. After years of being developed behind closed doors, SUSE is about to become one of the most open Linux projects, complete with public participation and available as a free download as soon as the testing process is finished. The response by the Linux community has been overwhelmingly positive so far and SUSE's newly established Bugzilla and mailing lists are buzzing with interest. Judging by the first two betas, SUSE 10.0 will be a solid release, perhaps lacking major new features, but it should come with many updated packages, a more consumer-friendly installer and plenty of eye candy. The 'apt' package management utility will be included for the first time. And its Xen virtualization technology and Beagle desktop search tool are likely to be a lot more mature than in SUSE 9.3.

Mandriva Linux 2006 has been in beta testing since the end of July and the final release should be out before September is over. As has become tradition in the Mandriva development labs, the beta releases are published behind schedule, but the company has been hard at work replacing all references to Mandrake with Mandriva and revamping most of the their web sites. Mandriva 2006 will be the first release under the company's new annual release cycle. Many users hoped that it would incorporate some of the technologies from its recent acquisitions of Conectiva and Lycoris, but there have been few signs of those in the three betas released so far, with 'urpmi' still remaining the distribution's preferred package management tool. One interesting update is that Mandriva's latest beta is the first distribution shipping with a cvs version of the upcoming X.Org 7.0.

The developers of Ubuntu Linux have had their hands full with a new version 5.10, code name "Breezy Badger", scheduled for release on October 13th. As with previous versions, there will be a preview release immediately after GNOME 2.12 is declared stable on September 7th, followed by a release candidate a week before the final Ubuntu 5.10. Breezy will ship with a large number of new features, including a graphical installer, improved support for laptops through LaptopMission, thin client integration, application launch pads, complete sound infrastructure including audio CD burning, and the usual updates to artwork, sound events and branding. The release will be accompanied by Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) and also Edubuntu, a distribution specifically designed for classroom use. Besides all the coding, much effort has been put into promotion of Ubuntu (and Linux in general) - a 12-day Ubuntu conference will be held in early October in Montreal, Canada and Ubuntu is also part of a task force to formulate South Africa's national strategy on open source - an initiative that Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth believes could foster international cooperation and increased adoption of open source software by governments and the private sector across the globe.

September should also see the final release of FreeBSD 6.0. It has been delayed by more than a month due to several show stopper bugs in the core system resulting in instability and kernel panics. At the time of writing, the FreeBSD 6.0 development page lists six critical bugs and one required feature that has yet to be completed. It is not yet clear whether FreeBSD 6.0 will be considered "production quality" or just an "early adopter's preview", as was the case with FreeBSD 5.0. On a related note, new versions of both OpenBSD (version 3.8, currently in beta) and NetBSD (version 3.0) are scheduled for release in October.

Slackware Linux is another project that will release a new version of its distribution within the next couple of months. Patrick Volkerding has already indicated that version 10.2 will enter a beta testing phase shortly and since its "current" tree looks in a reasonably good shape, the testing process will probably be very short. Slackware 10.2 will remain on the conservative side of things, with the maintainer still giving clear preference to the tried and tested Linux 2.4 as the distribution's default kernel. And although many packages in Slackware's "current" branch have been updated to their latest versions, Slackware 10.2 will ship without GNOME - for the first time since Slackware 4.0!

Also for the first time in years, the fans and beta testers of Fedora Core (and Red Hat Linux before) will be deprived of the adrenaline that used to accompany the highly intensive testing process of their favorite distribution. That's because the developers of Fedora Core have agreed to extend the distribution's release cycle from six to nine months, with the expected release of Fedora Core 5 now scheduled for the middle of February 2006. That said, the first two test releases should appear before Christmas, so there will be some beta testing to deal with, but the usual rush to complete testing before a certain pre-Christmas deadline will be absent this year. The extended release cycle should be a welcome relief for the Fedora developers, especially since Core 5 will likely form the basis of the all-important Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, possibly coming out in the second half of 2006.

Among other major distributions, the Gentoo Linux project has recently completed its second release of the year and there won't be any new one until early 2006. Debian GNU/Linux is currently in a major transition course towards X.Org, glibc 2.3.5, GCC 4.0 and apt 0.6 so it will take time before there is any talk about releasing "etch" (Debian's next version). Similarly, the many Debian derivatives that have been, until recently, happy to base their releases on the more up-to-date unstable ("sid") branch of the pre-sarge period are now forced to postpone any new releases until "sid" completes its current transition. In the meantime, the developers of MEPIS Linux have been concentrating on building various specialist editions of MEPIS Linux, all based on Debian "sarge" and, if tradition is kept alive at Xandros, we might perhaps see a new release of Xandros Desktop before the end of the year.