Answers to letters about the the Virtual Distro Sampler DVD, the Knoppix DVD, and LaTeX on Mandriva.

The latest GCC 4.3 is set to take the programming world by storm with new optimizations, experimental support for the next-generation C++ 200x standard, an optional parallelized C++ STL, and a new Java compiler courtesy of the Eclipse project.

RPath has released version 2 of its Linux distribution which is mainly designed for producing customized software appliances.

The Opensuse Usability Team has launched a mini-survey to find out how users configure their hard disks. The freely accessible survey will be online until May 28, 2008.

The Fedora project, which is supported financially by Red Hat, has just released Fedora 9. The free distribution is based on kernel 2.6.25 and includes the KDE 4.0.3 and Gnome 2.22 desktops.

Clients for Linspire's Click'n-Run Warehouse exist for Ubuntu, Freespire, and of course Linspire. Now, the Ubuntu derivative Linux Mint joins the ranks of supported Linux distributions.

The current Ubuntu version is less than a month old, but Mark Shuttleworth has already published plans for the future version in his blog.

Long-standing Debian developer and former Project Leader Anthony Towns has said that he is withdrawing from current projects. The reasons seem to be a disagreement on distribution of tasks within the free Linux distribution.