Red Hat Linux 9 Officially Released

DistroWatch has the details of the official release: The press release has all the details with links to further information, such as features and benefits, product description of the Personal and Professional editions, technical details and the package list. Red Hat Linux 9 is available for immediate download to paid subscribers to Red Hat Network (US$60 per year). It will be released to FTP servers on 7 April. Update: Release notes on the newly created "Shrike" mailing list. New Nvidia drivers here. Update 2: How to add the Java plugin on RH 9.

SuSE Linux 8.2: Evolutionary, but not Revolutionary

What a big month this was with many Linux releases (and not just Linux ones). The third most popular Linux distribution (along with Debian), after Red Hat and Mandrake, is SuSE. While the company is more successful in Europe, with their 8.1 release a few months ago they were able to broaden their user base worldwide even more. The new version, 8.2, is coming out in about a week from now, but OSNews had early access to it so we were able to evaluate it. Read more for our experiences with SuSE Linux 8.2 and check out a few screenshots too.

GPL or as I Think of it: General Park License

The GPL is a wonderful license for community works, for the basic reason that it starts out with the premise that the point is the source code. The program, someone is trying to make. Not the programmer, not the programmer's company, or the programmer's pay check. What it basically says is that there is no way for one to act as a stop-gap to the flow of code development and the organic way that code tends to build upon itself.

ReactOS 0.1.1 Released

Jason Filby has notified us: "ReactOS 0.1.1 is out, and features much improved windowing and GDI abilities; WineMine can be played to a limited extend and the MS VGA and VMWare VGA drivers can be used. There is also better disk drive detection and support as well as registry, IO and console improvements. The usetup installer has also progressed well." For more infomation and screenshots, turn to the ReactOS website.

Page Clustering, Booting Linux On A 64GB x86

William Lee Irwin III recently announced on the lkml that he'd successfully gotten Linux running on a 64GB x86 server. His posts included two different boot message logs, one without his page clustering patch, and one with. In the latter case, his patch overcomes the 1GB mem_map virtual space limitation imposed by x86 32-bit servers, without which the kernel over-runs allowable memory space. Read the report at KernelTrap.

Get to Know the “Other” Linux Distributions

Yes, we all know the "big three" (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE) commercial distros, we also know the next big bunch of respected traditional/geek distros (Debian and Slackware and some might add Gentoo too in this list), and we know the "other big three" in the desktop Linux area (Lindows, Xandros, Lycoris). However, not everyone knows what is available besides this "threshold". Here is a list of Linux distros that worth knowing about and to keep an eye on!

Mandrake Linux 9.1 – Raising the Bar for Usability

The development of Mandrake Linux 9.1 has been completed: "Sounds like a good time to put myself in the seat of a first-time Linux user and dissect this long-awaited release. I had rehearsed the installation of Mandrake Linux 9.1 final using 9.1 RC2, and this time I decided to explore in detail the hardware and software configuration that I would consider adequate for a comfortable Mandrake desktop experience. Kind of, a Mandrake 9.1 Certify-It-Yourself PC if you see what I mean..." This article concludes DistroWatch's 7-part series in which followed the Mandrake 9.1 development process.

OpenBSD’s SMP Status

"An update on the current status of OpenBSD Symmetric Multiprocessor support was recently posted to the OpenBSD smp mailing list. At this time, it still looks to be quite a ways off in the future, with currently only i386-specific code that will detect and spinup a 2'nd processor, but not yet actually use it." Read the report at KernelTrap.