We’ve hit a mid-summer loll as everyone relaxes and enjoys the warm weather

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The Official Google Blog has announced that Google plans to release an operating system based around the Chrome browser. They intend for it to be an open-source lightweight OS that targets netbooks at first and the source code will become available later this year with a consumer release planned for the 2nd half of 2010.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

There’s no official word as to what the underlying operating system will be, but I feel it’s safe to assume that it will be a variant of a current Linux distro or the Linux-based Android (they do discuss how Android and Chrome OS will be separate but that doesn’t mean they won’t share pieces ).

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

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

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

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Sorry for the lateness again, these holiday weekends get crazy. Not too many releases this week but one of them has managed to create some buzz…

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Linux Journal published an article that alerted me to the relaunch of Linux.com. The Linux Foundation acquired the Linux.com domain name from SourceForge earlier this year and has been promising a relaunch. From the LJ article:

One of the most intriguing aspects of the new and improved Web site is the “Linux Guru” feature. Registered users can earn points and work their way up to guru status by participating in various activities around the site. The top five contributors will be invited to the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and the top 50 will be showcased in the Foundation’s annual report. Each year, one user will also be crowned the “Ultimate Linux Guru” and win a fully-loaded Linux notebook computer, signed by Linus Torvalds.

The site has five main features that are an important aspect of working with and understanding Linux:

• News – Original content and analysis are featured in this section, along with content from FOSSBazaar, MoblinZone, and other Foundation workgroups.
• Community – Here’s where registered members can connect and network with each other, and create groups that focus on specific niches in open source.
• Distribution Central – Highlights of this section include original content provided by community managers and representatives of each distribution, and also provides a place for leading distros to interact with users right inside the Linux.com ecosystem.
• Learn – This is where users will find Man Pages, HowTos, and other Linux documentation, as well as a forum for posting questions and getting answers from the community.
• Directory – This section houses a collection of user-contributed software and user-reviewed applications, books, hosting services, and the like.

The new look is definitely an improvement from the old site and I see some nice content & links. Congrats to The Linux Foundation on a great relaunch!