This Week in Linux

Avid Linux watcher and your humble correspondent, Me, fell a little under the weather this week and missed a lot of Linux news. Mandriva is more of a mess than ever; Linux Mint, KANOTIX, and Mageia saw their latest releases; Fedora 17 has gone gold; and openSUSE is having server trouble.

What a mess Mandriva's turned into. Mandriva CEO Jean-Manuel Croset followed up his post giving any community they can scrape up control of the desktop distribution - as long as the company agrees with their decisions - with a post that ended up confusing folks more that it helped. In "Mandriva SA evolves" Croset said their newest strategy concerning their server product would consist of "Collaboration and exchanges with the Mageia community, contributions to the project." Now that sounded to me like Mandriva may use some Mageia code, share a bit back if desired, and occasionally share work on particularly tricky challenges; but others took Croset's statement to mean that Mandriva wants to fold Mageia back into Mandriva. In fact, Mageia got so many questions, they had to issue a statement. In that, Thomas Backlund basically said Mageia folks are happy with their new setup and would rather not get any closer to Mandriva (or any commercial entity for that matter). He added that Mageia is Open Source, so if Mandriva wants to use their code - use away. So Sam Varghese finally said what many were already thinking, "Mandriva has become a joke." Of course, some disagree.

KANOTIX is an interesting little distro and project. Like Mandriva, they faced a near extinction event, but came back. The announcement said, "As announced earlier in highlight report we offer an update release for KANOTIX 'Hellfire' and a preview to KANOTIX 'Dragonfire'. KANOTIX 2012-05 'Hellfire' is still based on Debian 6.0.5 'Squeeze' and contains KDE SC 4.4.5, Iceweasel 12.0, Icedove 3.1.16, Pidgin 2.10.4, Linux kernel 3.2 (Ubuntu recompiled), LibreOffice 3.5.3, WINE 1.4, GFX overlays for NVIDIA and AMD 3D graphic driver. The preview of KANOTIX 2012-05 'Dragonfire' is based on the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 'Wheezy'."

Linux Mint released their latest. "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 13 'Maya'. Available in two editions, Linux Mint 13 features the choice between a productive, stable and mature MATE 1.2 desktop and the brand, new modern-looking and exciting Cinnamon 1.4. These two desktops are among the best available, they're perfectly integrated within Linux Mint and represent great alternatives to GNOME 2 users. Linux Mint 13 is also an LTS (long-term support) release and it will be supported until April 2017."

Mageia 2 arrived a few days ago as well. ""We're the Mageia community, and we are very happy to announce the release of Mageia 2! We've had a great time building our community and our new release, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it. Here are some of the nice things included in Mageia 2: KDE 4.8.2 SC, the current release of the popular KDE desktop; GNOME 3.4.1, Xfce 4.8.3; VLC 2.0.1; Flash Player plugin 11.2; Chromium Browser 18; GIMP 2.8 featuring the all new single window interface, and Amarok 2.5."

The public release of Fedora 17 was pushed back to May 29 last week, but in their traditional pre-release Go No Go meeting yesterday, the release team agreed the fourth RC can be tagged final and that "The Beefy Miracle" would be shipped on Tuesday, May 29. kparal didn't even wait for the meeting to adjourn to go "partying."

And finally, we found out yesterday that openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 4 was skipped altogether and the Beta scheduled for May 24 has been delayed because the build server is down. Stephan Kulow said, "our servers really do not like 12.2 to be released. ;( " No updated schedule has been posted yet.