Thanks for joining us for a holiday weekend edition of our weekly distribution roundup!

June 29

• Yellow Dog Linux 6.2 Yellow Dog has been around for quite awhile but hasn’t been on our release list yet. It originally started out as a PowerPC distribution based on RedHat Linux, but is now based on CentOS and was the distribution that Sony endorsed for running Linux on the PlayStation 3. Their new release has kernel 2.6.29, OpenOffice.org 3.0, Firefox 3.0.6, IBM Cell SDK 3.1.0.1, and  the addition of XFCE4 as a desktop environment option.

June 30

• Sabayon Linux x86/x86-64 4.2 GNOME This release of the Gentoo-based Sabayon contains kernel 2.6.29, Ext4 as the default filesystem, GNOME 2.26.2, X.Org 7.4, and the World of Goo demo (great game, I spent many many hours solving all the puzzles).
• PCLinuxOS 2009.2 The quarterly PCLinuxOS release comes in both KDE and GNOME flavors. Common updates include Firefox 3.0.11, Thunderbird 2.0.0.22, and Abiword. The KDE version is set at KDE 3.5.10 and the GNOME version is 2.26.2.

July 1

• RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta The newest RHEL update includes full Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support (Xen is still included and supported), full support for FUSE, Fibre channel over Ethernet, and lots more. This release incorporates lots of changes, many of which are architecture specific, so if you are interested in learning more you should read through the full release announcement.
• Slackware 13.0 RC1 Slackware 13.0 is coming! The upcoming release id currently sporting kernel 2.6.29 and there are many many updates. The announcement is somewhat hard to sort through because it’s mostly just a massive changelog…

July 2

• Calculate Linux Desktop 9.7 KDE This release from the Calculate Linux team follows their previous desktop environment-specific distributions with the major change being the addition of KDE 4.2.4 as the desktop environment.

July 3

• Pardus Linux 2009 RC The Pardus team announced their first RC for the upcoming 2009 release. This version contains updated software such as KDE 4.2.4, Python 2.6.2, Firefox 3.5, and kernel 2.6.30 in addition to many bugfixes and also a rewritten version of Firewall Manager.