This Week in Linux

Another interesting week has wrapped up here in Linuxland. openSUSE is still working on their developmental process, Debian 7.0 freezing soon, Ubuntu has UEFI plans of its own, and Red Hat stock has recovered some losses.

The openSUSE release manager sounded the alarm last week that the developmental process currently in use isn't scaling-up well enough to accommodate its many developers. While no firm path has emerged some of the discussion points have been revealed. It seems everyone agrees first and foremost that more attention needs to be paid to Tumbleweed, openSUSE rolling release and OBS base. Most folks are leaning towards a longer developmental cycle, or more specifically, "a longer stabilization period." A release-when-ready philosophy is being seriously considered! In the meantime, openSUSE 12.2 Beta 2 was released for testing on June 20.

Things have been a bit quiet in Debianville lately, but a smoke signal broke through the fog yesterday to announce that Debian 7.0 Wheezy would freeze on June 30. This is just one of several milestone freezes, and it stops the automatic updating of testing from unstable. It's still a long haul before final but rough estimates are for a Spring 2013 release.

Ubuntu head honcho et.al. have been scrambling to find an approach to Microsoft's upcoming monopolistic tactic commonly referred to as UEFI Secure Boot. Fedora has agreed to basically pay a small fee to get Microsoft's permission to run on these Window 8 machines and no one doubted that Ubuntu, and probably others, were working on their own solutions as well. Shuttleworth suggested one tact earlier in the week in which Ubuntu would have hardware manufacturers (shipping Ubuntu pre-installed) include their key. Since then, replacing GRUB2 with Intel's efilinux loader has been discussed to addresses GPLv3 issues.

Red Hat stock took a bit of a tumble Wednesday after missing billing estimates for the first-quarter 2012. Profits were up by $37.5 million and shareholders got a 19 cent per share increase, but stock prices still fell by as much as 12.5 percent in after hours trading. In the days since, share prices have risen back up to $55.01 per share, still down from the 52-week high of over $62.75.