Good (Linux) Things on the Horizon

We seem to be in a particularly good period for Linux at the moment. We've recently gotten the Mandriva 2009.0 and Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex releases, and both of them seem to be very good. There will be a number of new releases coming in the next few weeks, as well:

- Fedora 10 (Cambridge) is due next week, on November 25th. I have been running the Preview Release for several weeks, and it installs and works without problem on both of my laptops.

- openSuSE 11.1 is due on December 18th. I installed the latest development version, Beta5, last week, and it works extremely well on both of my laptops. This is a huge improvement, as I was unable to get openSuSE 11.0 to work very well on either one. In fact, it has already become my preferred version on the S2110 (AMD/ATI) laptop.

- Debian "lenny", their next major release, looks like it is getting pretty close to completion. They are much more conservative at Debian about release dates, so there is no specific date for this release yet.

- SimplyMEPIS 8.0 Beta5 was released last week. It looks good on my S6510, but I couldn't get it to install on the S2110. As MEPIS is based on the Debian distribution, I would assume that the 8.0 final release will follow hot on the heels of the Debian "lenny" distribution.

- OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 will probably come out in the beginning of December. It should be a "bug fix" release for the recent 3.0.0 release, and as there hasn't been a whole lot of shouting about bugs, I don't expect it to be a big deal. What will be significant, however, is that this is apparently the point at which OpenOffice.org 3 will be rolled into Ubuntu.

So, it looks like it is going to be a busy "holiday season", with lots of nice presents for Linux users.

jw 19/11/2008