The Linux Standard Base (LSB) wants to strengthen the compatibility with various Linux systems. The new beta of the LSB 4.0 is now available for review with specifications and applications tools.

After a year as its head, Jim Whitehurst has issued a financial assessment of the Red Hat Linux distro and spoke of its future plans. He sees the company braced for success, with an advantage over its proprietary competitors, thanks to Open Source.

Corrections and security updates for the current stable Debian have been released.

This issue's DVD brings you two great distros on one disc.

An email appeal by Joey Schulze is calling for hardware donations to support two new Debian projects: snapshot and data archive.

Dag Wieers of Project Centos made a passionate plea for more private users to turn to the free Red Hat Enterprise clone, and stressed that commercial companies with non-critical machines could also benefit from Centos.

Over the weekend the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) took place in Brussels. In his keynote, Mozilla's Mark Surman hoped for Open Source's success and Debian key contributor Bdale Garbee supported its social contract. As an aside, Debian Lenny's target release date was reconfirmed.

Debian, Mandriva and Fedora developers call them Sid, Cooker and Rawhide. OpenSUSE calls them Factory and they are ringing the changes for the Factory development.