Once considered by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer as a plague on all software and the work of the devil, open source software is now accepted with open arms by Microsoft, even evoking their active support.

Opensuse 11.1 is in the starting blocks. With the official version due in December, release candidate RC 1 is available now.

KDE 4.2 Beta1 (a.k.a. "Caterpillar") provides a new user experience: messaging, wallpaper via plug-ins, and Vi input mode for KWrite and Kate.

Free Linux distro openSUSE will from now on release without an end-user license agreement. The project will be using the same license notice as their competitor Fedora.

Six months after Fedora 9, the free project is now releasing its newest version 10 of the popular Linux distribution, code-named Cambridge.

In May 2008 at Linuxtag in Berlin, Nat Friedman had presented SUSE Studio, with which you can build your own Linux distro with just a few mouse clicks. SUSE Studio images are now available for the Eee 701 PC.

Just a month after the release of Ubuntu 8.10, the first alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 has become available. The next distro version should boot more quickly, require less power, integrate more web services and include a backup solution.

Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR), based on Ubuntu 8.04 (LTS), is a live, read-only CD that seals off your private data from the outside world. It does this using encryption and isolation methods.