By now, you might have noticed that I'm a big fan of Puppy Linux. It is the distro I'm running on my workhorse ASUS Eee PC 701 4G netbook, and it helps me to stay productive not only in airports, cafés, and hotel rooms but also at home. But if you are still undecided whether you should give Puppy Linux a try, here are five reasons why this little gem deserves a closer look.

Mark Shuttleworth is appealing to community members to send him screenshots of their standard 1024x768 desktops. His aim is to collect ideas that will improve the desktop experience.

The Debian Project has released a sixth update for the current stable version of Gnu/Linux 4.0, codenamed Etch.

The openSUSE Project has released version 11.1 of its Community Linux today. Besides undergoing comprehensive maintenance, the release brings vast improvements to the KDE 4 Desktop.

OpenSUSE 11.1 rolled out today, sporting more than 230 new features, many updates, and a brand new license. The newest release is also the first built entirely on the openSUSE Build Service.

Just in time for the launch of openSUSE 11.1, Novell developers have completed the new Contrib-Repository. The Contrib will act as a bridge between factory (packages officially supported by Novell) and third party packages.

Free Linux distro Debian has been working steadily on its next version 5.0 of the OS, known as Lenny. Now developers have been called in for a vote to determine the course of its general release.

Slackware is widely regarded as the oldest active Linux distributions. Right on time for Christmas, the distro, which once served as a basis for (open) SUSE, is available in a new version.