Debian to BSD - The H Open: News and Features

Debian, Mandriva, openSUSE

The Debian developers voted in Steve McIntyre for a second term as the leader of the GNU/Linux distribution. They also released the first update for Debian 5.0 "Lenny", as well as the eight update for Debian 4 "Etch". The updates patch, as usual, security vulnerabilities and bugs found in the releases.

Mandriva is also on it's own home stretch. A second release candidate is already available for Mandriva 2009.1 "Spring" which is expected to be released on the 29th of April.

Novell released the, at the time, state of the art SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 in March. The openSUSE Build Service, used to create the openSUSE 11.1 release, was added to the Linux Developer Network (LDN) at The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. The tool can create packages for openSUSE and a number of other distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu and Mandriva. An openSUSE conference will take place in Nuremberg, Germany from the 17th to the 20th of September for openSUSE enthusiasts.

The BSD-Front

Version 7.1, the Galileo Edition of PC-BSD was released in mid-April. It's based on the stable branch of FreeBSD 7.1 and includes the KDE 4.2.2 desktop environment. A first release candidate of the next version of FreeBSD, version 7.2, was released a few days ago and the final version is scheduled for release on the 4th of May. A second and final release candidate is currently in the works.

FreeNAS, a Network-attached storage (NAS) UNIX like server operating system based on FreeBSD, was updated to version 0.69.1 (code-named Omnius). Even OpenBSD is expecting a new release: Theo de Raadt wants to release version 4.5 on the 1st of May. The changes in the upcoming release have already been listed in the provisional release notes for version 4.5.

The traditionally lavish Gentoo offshoot Sabayon Linux has slimmed down and now GNOME fits a new version with the GNOME desktop into a 2GB image. It includes the 2.6.29.1 Linux kernel and X.org 7.4, in addition to support for the latest graphics cards from ATI/AMD and Nvidia. A KDE version is also expected to be released soon.

At the Fedora Project, preparations for Fedora 11 are in full swing. A beta of Fedora 11 has already been released and a preview release is expected to be available later this month. The final version of Fedora 11 is scheduled to be released in late May.