May 23, 2008 -- While our friends at DistroWatch only rate Zenwalk as the 19th most popular Linux distribution, we have been very impressed by their recent releases and have felt that it is a distribution worth trying as it is an unsung hero. With the Zenwalk 5.2 Beta having been released yesterday, we immediately took this new release for a quick test-drive.

May 15, 2008 -- Back in January of 2007 we had looked at Linux Virtualization Performance as we had compared a running native OS (at that time, Fedora Core 6) against the same operating system running as a virtualized guest OS using Xen, QEMU with the (once closed-source) kqemu kernel module, and then KVM. In this testing we had found that KVM had performed well and won a number of the tests, but it wasn't the clear winner nor it had won by a substantial margin. However, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine had premiered with the Linux 2.6.20 kernel and it has matured quite a bit over the past year and a half since its christening. With that said, we are in the process of conducting new Linux virtualization benchmarks to see how these various implementations compare today. While the full comparison isn't yet ready, due to much interest surrounding Linux virtualization on desktops and servers, this morning we are publishing some initial benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite when running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the host OS and then running it as the guest operating system with hardware-based acceleration through KVM.

May 01, 2008 -- Less than a week after the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron", the Free Software Foundation has gone ahead and released version 2.0 (named DeltaH) of gNewSense. For those not familiar with gNewSense, this is one of the few distributions certified by the Free Software Foundation as being a truly free Linux distribution. gNewSense 2.0 is essentially Ubuntu 8.04 LTS but with a few modifications to make it more free by removing some binary-only components. New in gNewSense 2.0 is also new artwork, switching the default web browser from Mozilla Firefox to Epiphany, Blag's deblob script in the kernel, and non-free GLX being removed from X.Org/Mesa. Here are a few screenshots from this latest release.

April 10, 2008 -- Back in December we looked at the initial Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 performance by comparing it to Ubuntu 7.10. In that article we had found the performance between the two releases to be roughly the same. Now that we're nearing an end in this development cycle as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) will be released later this month, we've ran a new set of benchmarks comparing the latest Ubuntu 8.04 packages to the previous Gutsy Gibbon release.

April 05, 2008 -- The beta of Fedora 9 was released just short of two weeks ago, but the Fedora Project has released new Rawhide snapshots of Fedora in its live form. No installation DVDs are being made available due to bugs, but there are 2008-04-04 Rawhide snapshos for both the GNOME and KDE LiveCDs. The KDE spin is already upgraded against the just-released KDE 4.0.3 release, which most noticeably has KHTML, KWin, and Okular improvements. Here's a few screenshots from Fedora 9 Live KDE (2008-04-04 Rawhide).

April 01, 2008 -- Gentoo 2008.0 Beta 1 has been released. This is no April Fools' Day joke, it's really here. The Gentoo Foundation has had its share of problems as of late, there was never a Gentoo 2007.1 release, and this first beta is coming a bit late, but Gentoo 2008.0 Beta 1 is now available. We have some screenshots up of the Gentoo 2008.0 Beta 1 i686 LiveCD.

March 30, 2008 -- If you're still on the quest of finding the best desktop Linux distribution for your needs, one worthy contender that often goes overlooked is Zenwalk. Zenwalk is a Slackware-based distribution that uses the Xfce desktop environment and is light-weight but comes with a variety of useful desktop applications. Zenwalk Live 5.0 was released this past week and it features LiveCD install support and capabilities for easily remastering your own Zenwalk LiveCD media. In addition, Zenwalk 5.0 has a few extra enhancements in the area of natural language support, multi-media, and WiFi drivers (both native and through ndiswrapper).

March 25, 2008 -- It's been almost two months since Fedora 9 Alpha was released, which we subsequently previewed. Now with the release of Fedora 9 just being 35 days out, Red Hat has pushed out the beta release of Fedora 9 (codenamed Sulphur) with many more features implemented and ready to be tested. We have taken the time to explore the features of Fedora 9 and the progress that has been made.

March 22, 2008 -- Last November we had looked at Mythbuntu 7.10 and found it to be an excellent MythTV distribution. With its LiveCD MythTV front-end capabilities and intuitive Mythbuntu Control Center, this distribution is far more than just a re-branded edition of Ubuntu with a couple MythTV packages. Being released in tandem with Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" next month will be Mythbuntu 8.04 and today we are taking an early look at this spring refresh using the recently released beta.

March 21, 2008 -- There's just about a month left until Ubuntu 8.04 is officially introduced, but the second to the last testing release is now available. The Ubuntu 8.04 beta came out last night and hardens up Hardy Heron on both the desktop and server ends for this first LTS (Long Term Support) release in nearly two years. The Canonical team and all involved free software projects have done a phenomenal job and Ubuntu 8.04 is shaping up to be their best release yet. Ubuntu 8.04 ships with many GNOME enhancements found in the recent 2.22 release, PulseAudio integration, virtualization improvements, and it uses the Linux 2.6.24 kernel.