The 'New Releases' Season is Upon Us...

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

It is that time of the year when commercial Linux companies are readying their new boxes full of the latest and greatest Linux software. While their programmers do the last minute debugging and marketing departments prepare for the grand product launches, for the consumers among us it's time to face the usual decisions: to upgrade or not to upgrade? And should we stick with the existing choice or try a different distribution? Let's take a look at what we can expect to come our ways within the next few weeks.

Slackware Linux, the oldest surviving Linux distribution, is the first one to grace us with a new release this season. What's new in 9.0? This question is best answered by this little dialog I noted on a public forum discussing one of the Slackware release candidates. The question: "What has Slackware accomplished? Red Hat has given us plenty of useful utilities, SuSE has developed YaST, Mandrake has drakconf, but what about Slackware? All they do is compile packages that others develop and put them on a CD, nothing extra, no major accomplishment." And this was one reader's reply: "Thank you, Slackware, for not putting anything extra into your distribution. This is why you develop the most stable, dependable and bug-free Linux distribution on earth!"

Yes, Slackware is like a medieval city surrounded by modern skyscrapers, a stark contrast of an installer and package management tools developed in mid-nineties, together with the most up-to-date software found in any distribution. The result is highly appealing as demonstrated by Slackware's continuing popularity as the tool of choice for many seasoned Linux users and administrators. Suggest that they switch to something else and they'll laugh at you...

MandrakeSoft will launch Mandrake Linux 9.1 shortly. Users who have tested the release candidates have reportedly been impressed with the product's stability and lack of major bugs as well as some of the new features. What can we expect? One of the main new features is the inclusion of a NTFS partition resizing tool, which makes Mandrake only the second distribution, after Xandros Desktop, offering this feature. A new theme called "Galaxy", running under both KDE and GNOME desktop environments, has been revealed to make the user interface more consistent. Another new and long overdue feature is "zeroconf" which promises to make network configuration as easy as plugging the cables into your network's workstations and servers. All this, together with the fact that the applications on offer were chosen by their users, the MandrakeClub members, and you seemingly have a winner.

Of course, there is a big question that has to be answered sooner or later. Will 9.1 be the MandrakeSoft's last release in its present form? Or will the company survive their financial woes and come out as strong as before? MandrakeSoft's practice of releasing a new version to the FTP servers at the same time it goes to the manufacturer allows many people to download the release before the boxed sets are available. This practice has pleased Mandrake users, but it also cuts into Mandrake sales. Their customer support was reported to be far from top-notch. Producing a quality distribution is the first priority, but there is much more to generating revenue. Mandrakesoft has a thin line to walk to generate the revenue they need to survive, while keeping their customers happy with cutting edge software that is freely available. If they can do that, we will likely see many more Mandrake releases in the years to come.

SuSE Linux AG has announced that a new release, version 8.2, will be available on April 3 in Europe and on April 14 in North America. Besides all the latest software, the new release claims to be the first distribution shipping a professional video editing application called MainActor. The release also provides improved wireless networking support, tools for automatic network reconfiguration for mobile computer users as well as further improvements to the YaST configuration utility and enhanced security. Certainly a very tempting bunch of features.

Other major distributions will no doubt follow soon. Red Hat, which traditionally does not pre-announce final releases, has produced three betas of its upcoming Red Hat Linux 8.1 and even the Debian developers have started talking about a package freeze of their testing branch called "Sarge". The next two months will be highly interesting for the industry while all the major players try their best to please the consumers. We will be watching the competition with great interest.

Of course it's not just the major players that are announcing new releases. Below we have new release announcements from Immunix and Yellow Dog Linux. Who knows, maybe even the long awaited Gentoo Linux 1.4 will be out soon.

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