As with the release of Karmic Koala, the majority of the other distributions we here at The Linux Experiment have decided to run will also be getting an upgrade. Here is a quick breakdown of what’s to come (in chronological order) to give you a heads up of what you can expect us to be blogging about shortly.
Gentoo – Release Set For: Tonight
OK fine, so technically Gentoo isn’t getting a “major new release” or anything like that but considering the nature of the distribution one could claim that it’s nightly builds are basically the same thing.
openSUSE 11.2 – Release Set For: November 12, 2009
The next step forward for openSUSE is version 11.2. Included in this release of openSUSE are major changes to YaST and zypper as well as a new release strategy whereby all releases are bootable by USB and CD-ROM. Some other incremental improvements in software are:
- GNOME 2.28/KDE 4.3
- Firefox 3.5
- OpenOffice.org 3.1
- Ext4 is the new default filesystem
- Support for whole-disk encryption
Fedora 12 “Constantine” – Release Set For: November 17, 2009
Always the cutting edge distribution, Fedora has a massive list of changes for it’s next release. For starters all software packages have been recompiled for i686 which should allow for improved performance, especially on the Intel Atom processor. In addition, all software packages are now compressed with LZMA instead of GZIP which, along with yum presto integration (delta versus full downloads), should offer much faster downloads. Thanks to the newest version of Xorg, spanning desktops (1 desktop on 2+ monitors) is now possible. Other software improvements include:
- GNOME 2.28/KDE 4.3
- Firefox 3.5.2
- PHP 5.3.0
- Ogg Theora has been updated to the most recent version
- GRUB now supports Ext4
- Dynamically rotating wallpapers is now a feature under GNOME
- NetworkManager has been enhanced to take advantage of Mobile Broadband technologies
- Bluetooth services are now on-demand meaning they only use system resources when necessary
- Tons of PulseAudio improvements
- PackageKit has been improved and can now install software from more places (i.e. right within the web browser)
Linux Mint 8 “Helena” – Release Set For: November 2009
Linux Mint 8 continues the trend by incorporating all of the most recent Ubuntu improvements found in Karmic Koala as well as improving on the Mint specific programs. Specifically Mint improves the boot sequence as well as the Mint tools suite of applications that differentiate this distribution from Ubuntu. The end result should make for one of the most user friendly Linux distributions ever.
Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” – Release Set For: TBD 2010
If you are familiar with Debian’s release cycle then you know that what will become of “Squeeze” is simply what passes muster in the current testing repository. Although this distribution is still quite a ways off, it is promising quite a few interesting improvements including better architecture support and boot performance thanks to parallel processing. kFreeBSD is also now included which makes this the first officially supported non-Linux architecture for a Debian release. While many obsolete libraries are being removed for security reasons many new libraries are also making their first appearance including full IPv6 support. Finally there is preparation going into the packaging formats which will allow for future improvements, including better compression algorithms for smaller download sizes.
It’s going to be a busy month!
Check back soon as we begin our upgrades and blog about our experiences doing so.
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