Development Release: FreeBSD 9.0-BETA1

Ken Smith has announced the availability of the first beta release of FreeBSD 9.0: "The first beta build of the 9.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. Due to lack of support for boot floppies and issues with the new ATA_CAM infrastructure the pc98 architecture is being dropped to Tier-2 status. Note that some time between now and beta 2 we will finalize the list of shared libraries that need to have their versions bumped (only a subset of libraries have been converted to symbol-versioning) and take care of doing the bumps. So at the moment packages built for current should work. But when the bump happens you will need to recompile any applications you have installed and there will likely be a delay for suitable pre-built packages to become available on the FTP sites." The release announcement. Download: FreeBSD-9.0-BETA1-i386-disc1.iso (498MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-9.0-BETA1-amd64-disc1.iso (607MB, SHA256).

NEW • Distribution Release: Ultimate Edition 3.0 "Lite"

Ultimate Edition "Lite" is a Lubuntu-based distribution featuring the LXDE desktop environment. Version 3.0 was released today: "Well, ladies and gents, we now have Ultimate Edition 3.0 Lite. Ultimate Edition Lite was built off Lubuntu; it is intended to be run on low-resource computers, such as netbooks. Ultimate Edition Lite contains only the bare minimum, a browser, a music player and a few other tools. The desktop environment is LXDE / Openbox which has a look similar to Windows XP. This release, being as large as it was to begin with, did not leave me much to work with to keep its CD size. Unfortunately I was unable to pre-install the updates for you as I was in Ultimate Edition 2.8 Lite. I have enhanced the wireless support since this release is intended for notebooks." See the release announcement and release notes for more details. Download (MD5): ultimate-edition-3.0-lite.iso (703MB).

NEW • Development Release: Mandriva Linux 2011 RC2

Eugeni Dodonov has announced the availability of the second (and last) release candidate for Mandriva Linux 2011: "Today Mandriva and ROSA teams proudly announce that Mandriva 2011 RC2 is available for download. In this release candidate we fixed more than 300 bugs and added or changed about 700 packages. Here are main changes since RC1: we added VirtualBox guest additions by default, now testing in VirtualBox gives more pleasure than ever; minor fixes in programs for configuring pptp/vpn/wi-fi; more network cards from Atheros and Intel are supported; restored some old and added some new Epson, HP and Lexmark printer drivers; now USB 3G is supported much better; we are working hard to improve KDM and Dolphin...." Check out the release announcement for a full changelog and a list of known bugs. Download: Mandriva.2011.RC2.i586.2.iso (1,643MB, MD5, torrent), Mandriva.2011.RC2.x86_64.2.iso (105MB, MD5, torrent).