October 14, 2009 -- There has not been a new development release of Fedora 12 since the Constantine Alpha release back in August. However, the second and last development release, Fedora 12 Beta, is set to be released next week. It has been delayed a few times already, but Fedora 12 Beta packs all of the features that are to be found in Fedora 12 with the final development freeze already in effect. Here is an early look at where the Fedora 12 Beta is at in regards to its artwork and feature set.

October 10, 2009 -- Last month from the Intel Developer Forum a preview copy of Moblin 2.1 was released, which introduces the Moblin Garage and other new capabilities to this mobile Linux operating system that is targeting Intel Atom netbooks and nettops but will be moving to smaller devices too. The first preview spin of the next Moblin release was nice, but this week Intel has put out a new build of Moblin 2.1. Of course, we fired up this new release for a look.

October 08, 2009 -- Just days after Gentoo resurrected itself with a new LiveDVD release in celebration of its 10th birthday, the developers behind the Yoper Linux distribution have come around with a new development release of its own. Yoper dates back to 2003, and one of their goals is to be the fastest out-of-the-box Linux distribution, but there has not been a new stable release in 28 months and it is not on a rolling release cycle like Gentoo or Arch. The new release for this distribution is Yoper 2009 Beta 1 "Dresden" and ships with all of the latest Linux packages and offers a new installer and various other improvements. Yoper also remains one of the few distributions shipping with a Zen-powered kernel, and on top of that, they even offer a kernel with the BFS scheduler.

September 27, 2009 -- Last year Gentoo canceled their 2008 release plans to focus on putting out just one release per year, while in years past they had put out as many as four releases per calendar year. There has not been a new official release of Gentoo since July of 2008, albeit they are one of the distributions to use a rolling release approach, but in honor of their tenth birthday they have begun work on a new LiveDVD. Gentoo has been producing timed snapshots of their installation media, but this will be the first Gentoo release in 2009.

September 26, 2009 -- Ubuntu Netbook Remix came around last year at Computex Taipei and the original version we tried out was quite nice with its small-screen optimizations and very different launcher interface compared to simply running GNOME or KDE on a small mobile device. This year when the Moblin V2 user-interface was finally unveiled and it put us in awe with its sleek, intuitive design that was driven by Clutter. How has Canonical responded to Intel and Moblin V2? Well, there is Ubuntu Moblin Netbook Remix that just debuted to deliver the best of Ubuntu and Moblin, but the traditional Ubuntu Netbook Remix has also picked up several improvements for its 9.10 release.

September 25, 2009 -- A few hours ago we talked about the Moblin 2.0 release, the launch of the Moblin Garage and Moblin Application Installer, and the next Moblin 2.1 release. Intel has provided an early development preview of the Moblin 2.1 operating system, which we briefly tested out on a Samsung NC10 netbook. Here are the screenshots and a few more details.

September 09, 2009 -- Linux distributions designed specifically for use on netbooks is nothing new. Canonical produces the Ubuntu Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu for these small-sized devices, Intel has their Moblin distribution that is very fast and offers an attractive interface, gOS has their own netbook distribution, Linpus has QuickOS, and the list goes on. One of the newest netbook distributions coming around is Jolicloud, which is based upon Ubuntu Netbook Remix and is self-described as a cool new OS for your netbook. Jolicloud is focused upon building an OS around the web and one that merges open-source and the open web.

August 27, 2009 -- By the time Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rolls around next April, Canonical is interested in seeing Ubuntu boot on an Intel Atom netbook (specifically the Dell Mini 9) in less than ten seconds. These incredibly fast boot time goals even led Canonical to decide against investing more time in enhancing the boot experience with Red Hat's Plymouth. Canonical has already come close to achieving this with the Ubuntu 9.04 release earlier this year, but how is Ubuntu 9.10 changing the boot time with defaulting to the EXT4 file-system and their other ongoing changes? In this article, we have re-installed Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, and a 9.10 development snapshot on two netbooks and one laptop to see how Ubuntu's boot time is changing.

August 24, 2009 -- Last week we provided benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, but Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution preparing for a major update in the coming months. Also released in the past few days were OpenSuSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta 1. To see how these three popular distributions compare, we set out to do our usual Linux benchmarking dance.

August 21, 2009 -- Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 was released last week and with all of its updated packages and changes compared to Ubuntu 9.04, we decided to carry out a fresh round of benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4. We used a Samsung NC10 for testing with an Intel Atom N270, 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 32GB OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, and Intel 945GME graphics.