Distributions

News and Editorials

CentOS

The CentOS development team has announced the first beta release of CentOS 5 for i386 and x86_64. See the release notes for more information about the beta.

According to the CentOS website, "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free."

The prominent North American vendor is Red Hat, but the Red Hat legal department defends the Red Hat trademarks and requires that all mention of that trademarked name be absent from the CentOS site and software. However, it's no coincidence that CentOS releases follow closely after those prominent EL releases.

Of the various EL clones that showed up a few years ago, CentOS has done an exceptional job of attracting developers and users and keeping up with its upstream parent. Security advisories are posted regularly to the centos-announce mailing list.

CentOS supports i386 and x86_64 hardware and there are mailing lists available in English, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese.

Looking down the road a ways it looks like there is some possibility for collaboration between Fedora and CentOS. See this thread on centos-devel which looks at the Fedora EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) project. This project is still quite young but some packages are available for download and testing. The epel-devel-list is available for EPEL development discussion.

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New Releases

Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0: The desktop you were waiting for

Mandriva has announced the launch of the beta program for Corporate Desktop 4.0. "Ergonomic, secure, comprehensive, easy to use and to administer: by consulting its corporate clients and by exploiting its experience in the desktop area, Mandriva developed Corporate Desktop 4.0, a distribution that can be installed in less than 10 minutes and extensively customized thanks to a new post-installation tool."

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RHEL 5 released

It's official: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is available. See the list of features to learn more about what's new.

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Distribution News

The new Debian etch release schedule

There is an update from the Debian release team: "You might not remember who the release team is, but we still want to inform you about the final leg of the etch release cycle. Our original schedule did not work out due to problems with the kernel and the slower than expected reduction of release critical bugs." The new schedule calls for some aggressive bug fixing and a final release at the beginning of April.

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Debian Votes

The Debian Project Leader election is still in the campaigning period. The IRC debate was held recently and the logs have been posted.

Debian developers have until March 18 to vote on this General Resolution. "The Debian project resolves that Debian developers allowed to perform combined source and binary packages uploads should be allowed to perform binary-only packages uploads for the same set of architectures."

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Alioth goes Mercurial

Debian's Alioth team has announced the availability of Mercurial for source control. "Alioth can now host your Mercurial repositories in pretty much the same way as it can host your CVS, Subversion, Arch/Bazaar, Bzr and Git repositories."

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Gentoo fights flamewars and bad behaviour!

The Gentoo Council has drafted a new Code of Conduct that will be enforced for both developers and users. The draft version of the Code of Conduct is currently being discussed on the Gentoo-dev mailing list. "The Code of Conduct will be voted upon by the Gentoo Council Thursday, March 15th; implementation will be immediate upon final approval. The Code of Conduct describes what the Gentoo Council has deemed acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It also describes the punishment that will be enforced if the Code of Conduct is breached."

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SUSE Linux 9.3 security support discontinued soon

SUSE Security has announced that SUSE Linux 9.3 will be discontinued soon. "Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 9.3 after April 15th 2007 will not be fixed any more for this product. We expect to release the last updates around April 30th 2007."

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Ubuntu beta freeze imminent

The Ubuntu beta freeze is scheduled for March 15, with the beta release happening one week after on March 22.

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Google Summer of Code 2007

Several distributions have announced that they will be participating in the 2007 Summer of Code. Debian is looking for proposal ideas and mentors and has two wiki pages set up collect them. Mandriva has this announcement with links to a wiki page for ideas and another page for mentors. Ubuntu is also participating and looking for project ideas, mentors and students.

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New Distributions

pg_live announcement

Pg_live is a free Linux Live CD community project. It is an enhanced adaptation of one of the Ubuntu family of distributions, known as Xubuntu, and has been designed and optimized expressly for the PostgreSQL Database administrator and enthusiast.

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News - March 13th, 2007

The Debian Weekly News for March 13, 2007 covers spring list cleaning, GIF patent has expired, Second Life runs on Debian servers, the release status of the Motorola 680x0 port, handling of inactive Debian accounts, One Laptop per Child Software on Debian, Google's Summer of Code 2007, and much more.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 80

The Fedora Weekly News for March 12, 2007 looks at 2 Million Fedora Core 6 Installs, Fedora Core 6 Linux Eclipses 2M User Mark, Talking points for Fedora 7 release, Fedora Infrastructure needs your help!, Fedora 7 and the wireless world, Ambassadors Report: Chemnitz LinuxTag, Review: Fedora 7 Test 2, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for March 5, 2007 covers the Opengear donation of two CM4008, Xfce becomes an official project, Developer of the Week (nightmorph), FOSDEM, Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, Linuxforum 07, and several other topics.

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Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #30

The Ubuntu Weekly News for February 28, 2007 covers New Team: Ubuntu Scribes, Feisty Fawn Herd5 Released, No Beryl or Compiz for Feisty, Weekly Quiz Update, Changes in Feisty, Upcoming meetings and events, and much more.

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Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #31

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for March 10, 2007 looks at Linspire now based on Ubuntu, Statistics of Ubuntuforums, Ohio US Team approved and official, Weekly Quiz Update, Upcoming meetings and events and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 193

The DistroWatch Weekly for March 12, 2007 is out. "Twenty news announcements on the main page of DistroWatch turned last week into the busiest one so far this year, but things are unlikely to slow down much in the coming days either. The new GNOME 2.18, whose bits and pieces are slowly starting to appear on some mirrors, will be followed by the much awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 later this week, while new development releases from Mandriva Linux (2007.1 RC1) and openSUSE (10.3 alpha 2) are also expected shortly. In other news: How OpenBSD and an old IBM laptop saved a construction project in a Central American jungle, an introduction to Conary - a package management system done right, and a brief comparison between Linux Mint and Freespire - two distributions with similar goals and identical base systems. The feature story of this week's issue looks at the deepening management crisis at Gentoo Linux."

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Candidates for Debian Project Leader sound off (Linux.com)

Linux.com talks with some DPL candidates. "Once again, the Debian project is gearing up to elect a new project leader, with voting set to begin late this month. As we did last year, we asked the DPL candidates to sound off on some of the issues that will face the Debian Project in the next year. Out of nine candidates, six took the time to respond to our questions via email. Steve McIntyre, Sven Luther, and incumbent DPL Anthony Towns failed to respond in time for this article. We received responses from Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Simon Richter, and Raphaël Hertzog." Update: Sven Luther has withdrawn his nomination, leaving only eight candidates.

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Mandriva moves in on business Linux desktop (DesktopLinux)

DesktopLinux covers the release of Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0 beta. "For its desktop environment, Corporate Desktop 4.0 features the X.org 7.1 window manager and the KDE 3.5.4 desktop environment. While GNOME 2.16 is also included, this distribution is optimized for KDE. It also includes a new tool to set KDE user rights from an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory, to complement directory-based authentication."

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Distribution reviews

Linux Mint freshens Ubuntu's palate (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Linux Mint. "Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards."

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Dual-licensed Linux router distro ships v2.0 (LinuxDevices)

LinuxDevices looks at Vyatta Subscription Edition 2.0 (VS2). "Vyatta two weeks ago released Vyatta Community Edition 2.0 (VC2), which featured a move to a full Debian Linux undercarriage, for enhanced user serviceability. Vyatta does not specify whether VS2 is also based on Debian; however, it seems likely that the two platforms are similar, except for their licensing terms."

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