We look beyond the traditional open source OS of choice to other free options such BSD, OpenSolaris, HaikuOS, ReactOS, and PureDarwin.

Kicking off the 2008.1 development cycle in earnest, the first alpha is here. This alpha features X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 (in /contrib), GNOME 2.21, kernel 2.6.24, OpenOffice.org 2.3, new NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, PulseAudio by default and more. Despite being a first alpha, it is also in a fairly stable and reliable state. Check out the Mandriva 2008.1 Alpha 1 screenshots by The Coding Studio.

I'm a big proponent of the long-term-release concept in operating systems because I think both the enterprise and the home user doesn't want things breaking and should have the option of sticking with a particular distribution longer than 6 or 12 months.

The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of the second alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named "Lucid Lynx". The latest development milestone is the second of three planned alpha releases, which will be followed by two beta releases and then a release candidate.

The developmental release of the beautifully "near-microscopic" Damn Small Linux 4.0 Alpha1 has been released on 17 July 2007. This is what Damn Small Linux's fans have been really longing for. Happy, no. Euphoric, yes!

The development schedule for Mozilla Messaging's Thunderbird 3 has been changed as the next beta milestone release is being rescheduled to be a third alpha release.

As you are probably aware, in Lucid the platform team is working and re-planning in three separate milestones. Last week we passed the first such milestone, Alpha 2. The desktop team then re-planned for the next milestone, Alpha 3.

Canonical, and the Ubuntu developers, have announced the availability of the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named "Lucid Lynx". The first development milestone is the first of three planned alpha releases.

This release includes approximately 6 months of development that provide major enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.6 release. This includes significantly better generated code, improvements to debug information generation and a broad number of new features in the core infrastructure.