New Release Season

Right now there are several major distributions preparing new releases. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva and Fedora are all on semi-regular six-month schedules; releasing each spring and fall. Debian has a much longer schedule, but that project is also nearing the release of Debian 5.0 "Lenny".

Ubuntu 8.10, "Intrepid Ibex" is due for a final release on October 30, 2008. Some new features have been added since the release of Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". Some highlights include GNOME 2.24 with tab support in the Nautilus file manager and new file types supported by File Roller. X.Org 7.4 has better support for hot-pluggable input devices such as tablets, keyboards, and mice. Ubuntu 8.10 Beta includes Linux kernel 2.6.27, a release with better hardware support and numerous bug-fixes. The ecryptfs-utils package has been included with support for a secret encrypted folder in your Home Folder. The "Last successful boot" recovery entry retains a copy of your running kernel and makes it available from the boot loader as a "Last successful boot" option. Network Manager 0.7 has some new features that are included in this release. There are also a few known issues with the beta release, so check the wiki before installation.

openSUSE 11.1 is currently at beta 2. Some changes since the first beta include VirtualBox 2.0.2, the Intel e1000e have been disabled, OpenOffice.org 3.0RC2 from the openSUSE build service, plus GNOME 2.24.0, KDE 4.1.2, Mono 2.0 RC 3, Compiz 0.7.8, and more. You can see an expanded package list for the factory tree at DistroWatch. Just scroll down to see all the packages with version numbers. You can also find out more about openSUSE 11.1 on this page, which includes links to the most annoying bugs and the roadmap which calls for a final release on December 18, 2008.

Mandriva 2009.0 "sophie" could already be officially released, since it is due on October 9, 2008. The second release candidate wiki site lists some major new features including improved boot speed, support for LUKS encrypted partitions in installer and diskdrake, improved support for netbook hardware, support for Intel G41 graphics chipset, and GNOME 2.24 final. KDE4 is the default desktop for sophie. You can find out more about KDE/Mandriva integration here. The 2009.0 Development page has more information.

Fedora 10 "Cambridge" is currently scheduled for release on November 25, 2008. The accepted feature list for F10 includes an AMQP Infrastructure, that makes it easy to build scalable, interoperable, high-performance enterprise applications. F10 also has better printing, better remote support, faster startup, the Echo Icon Theme, Eclipse 3.4, GNOME 2.24, RPM 4.6, the Sugar desktop (used in OLPC), and much more.

Debian 5.0 "lenny" was originally scheduled for release in September. Now the release date is "when it's ready", which should be soon. We covered lenny in the July 31st edition, at the freeze. "Now to explain what, exactly, we mean by "freeze". The freeze upload policy of uploading changes in through unstable if possible will be continued to apply until the release." Since then there has been lots of bug fixing. See more in the Debian "lenny" Release Information page. Debian 5.0 won't have the newest packages like the distributions mentioned above, but when Debian 5.0 is declared stable you will have just that; a stable system that will be supported for several years.

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