Mandriva, Freespire, SmoothWall Updates

2007 isn't even over yet, but the Mandriva team already has out the first public beta for Mandriva 2008. Mandriva Linux 2007 (codename: Cassini) is available as a 3 CD free edition without any non-free software included while future releases will be in a hybrid edition. New in Mandriva 2008 will be NTFS write support, AppArmor, modular IDE drivers, new devicescape wireless stack, Compiz Fusion, and the Linux 2.6.22 kernel. More information on Beta 1 is available here.

Freespire, the free Linux distribution from the creators of Linspire, is finally out with version 2.0. While Freespire is supposed to be about software freedom, it includes the proprietary ATI and NVIDIA drivers as well as MP3, Windows Media, and RealNetworks codecs. More information on Freespire 2.0 is available on the Freespire Forum.

SmoothWall is an excellent firewall/router Linux distribution and finally we have the first release candidate for SmoothWall 3.0. SmoothWall 3.0 RC1 includes a variety of fixes since the previous beta releases with more information in the release notes.