While the community distributions Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as Mandriva, prepare for their spring releases, Novell has been busy completing final adjustments to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Smaller Linux distributions are also doing some spring cleaning and publishing updated versions.

Last month the British Linux magazine, Linux Format, did a big comparison of the current crop of Linux packages or distributions (distros for short), concentrating on the ten most popular as measured by DistroWatch. They were SUSE (version 10.2), Fedora (Core 6), Mandriva (Spring 2007), PCLinuxOS (2007), Debian (version 4), Ubuntu (7.04 "Feisty"), Slackware (version 11) and Sabayon (version 3.4).

Recent early development releases of the popular distributions provide a preview of what's to come, while some lesser known distributions reach new milestones. A new version of the KDE desktop is due by the end of the month.

This spring sees a burst of activity for Linux distributions. In addition to Ubuntu and Mandriva, FreeBSD and OpenBSD also put final touches on their new releases

Linux’s history can be measured in both releases 2.0, 2.6, and so on, and in its major distributions, which brought these releases to the masses at large. Here’s my list of the top five major Linux distributions that had the most impact in the operating system’s brief history.

"The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom.

Here is an update on the status of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring development, including the publication of the release schedule and the technical specifications for this release. Highlights include PulseAudio, a switch to the fork of RPM that SUSE and Fedora are using, a parental control tool, mail import support for the Windows migration tool introduced in 2008, and automatic repository configuration via geoip.

I love the site DistroWatch! They post all the major Linux distributions and keep track of the current versions. They also keep a daily count of the 10 most popular distributions. I used their data to compile this list. Linux newbies and Linux experts alike will find this list useful. These are 10 solid Linux distributions…

The fourth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release brings recognition of other installed distributions during installation, NTFS-3G (with write support) by default for all NTFS partitions, significant improvements to the Mandriva graphical software management tool and more. See here for download information.