Mandriva Linux 2008 RC2 'Kepler' was released today. New features since the release of RC1 include the final release of GNOME 2.20, the inclusion of the new 8.41.7 version of ATI's proprietary driver in the non-free repository to support Radeon HD cards, significant kernel updates that improve support for certain ATA controllers and many audio chipsets, some new features in the urpmi and rpmdrake package management tools, and over 500 bug fixes since RC2. Download information and more is available on the full release information page here, the overall Mandriva Linux 2008 release notes are here, and a guide to the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 is here.

In a statement published this week, SCO Group blames the success of Linux and 'negative publicity', as causes for its decline - the company may need to wind up its operations after its copyright case against Novell collapsed, prompting it to file for bankruptcy. My take: In Dutch, we have a saying: hij die kaatst, kan de bal verwachten.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's Number 1 PC maker, will try selling pre-loaded Linux on PCs in several countries as it expands a test program - evaluating a market that some competitors have already entered - and moves its personal computer business into a new generation of form factors and functionality.

The openSUSE development team has announced that openSUSE 10.3 Release Candidate 1 is available for testing. "After quite a few rebuilds and testing, the openSUSE team is happy to announce that RC1 looks brilliant and is now available for download. We consider this release to be feature complete, stable, and suitable for testing from any user. For more information on the release schedule, take a look at the Roadmap."

"The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google Summer of Code 2007. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the 25 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We are happy to report that all students made some progress towards their goals for the summer, and the 22 students listed below completed the program successfully."

"Before installing a new shared Linux database- and webserver I wanted to get an idea of the real world performance of various filesystems combined with the noatime and atime flags. This article contains a brief analysis of the results of my testing. To get a good idea of the relative impact of the chosen filesystem I also tuned the amount of shared buffers used in the PostgreSQL database software, which powers a number of sites on the server. On top of that, I also took a look at the benefit of using APC, the Advanced PHP Cache."