No major distro releases this week, but we do have a few new (to us) distros…

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Lots of releases this week, including one of my favorites: BackTrack

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Amazon has announced the release of the source code for all their Kindle products. The basic underpinnings are Linux kernel 2.6.22that includes E-ink drivers, Kindle-specific hardware drivers, and probably some other Kindle-specific hardware patches.  There are no specific licenses mentioned on the page but it should be safe to assume all of the code is released under the GPL since all of the modified packages are also GPL and Amazon isn’t releasing these as binary modules/blobs.

Congrats to Amazon for coming through with a major free software source code release! Hopefully the community puts this to good use to build some open source ebook readers .

Short release list this week, but we do have one major distro release that stands out from the rather small pack…

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Quite a few more releases this week than we’ve been seeing recently although some of them were hard to decipher foreign language distributions that I ended up leaving out…

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I tried out the Moblin 2.0 Beta booting off of a USB key multiple times over the past week and I wanted to share my thoughts on the overall experience without griping too much about incompleteness since this is the first public beta.

The general experience feels pretty good on my EEE PC 1000HA. I like the auto-hiding of the top toolbar and the snappiness of the system in general. The network configuration tool and web browser both work well. The UI looks very nice and is smooth on the 10″ screen, but I am unsure how well it will translate to smaller screens. There are definitely incomplete pieces that I would like to toy around more with such as the twitter tab (difficult to find the account settings – they were under Applications->Settings->Web Services instead of on the tab) and the IM applications (no support for AIM), but those aren’t things that I expect to be fleshed out more as new betas are released.  There are methods for adding new applications and new applications that you install that are not part of the default desktop should also work seamlessly with the UI. There is also a concept of zones that appears to be dynamically created desktop areas to avoid window clutter. There also appears to be some Last.fm integration coming in the future from the Web Services settings box .

The Linux Foundation intends for this to be a base for other distributions and the Linpus team has already announced that they plan to base a new version of Linpus Linux Lite on it. This is definitely a promising start and something that has the potential to bring an influx of new Linux users via netbooks.

Another small week of distribution releases, perhaps they ate too much at the Memorial Day barbecues?

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