The company behind the 64 Studio creative distro now provides end user support. We're giving a support package away to the person who writes the best review of the recent 2.0 release. The installer is a free download from BitTorrent or mirrors, and there are 32-bit and live versions available too.

Klaus Knopper has released version 6.2 of his Debian-based live-CD Linux distro. Based on Debian 5.0 ("Lenny"), the new version uses the lightweight LXDE as the default desktop, and includes a new version of the ADRIANE talking menu system for vision-impaired users.

Ubuntu Studio is a tailor made multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu aimed at audio/video, graphic editors, both enthusiasts and professionals. One could setup a decent studio, and connect midi devices, synthesizers, audio/video recording devices, additional sound cards and installing ubuntu studio on the system.

This is a user-friendly tutorial by Nate Figlar for the Jack sound server, an essential tool for free software multimedia production. It's been written with the 64 Studio distro in mind, but is generic enough to be relevant to any desktop distro with sound applications.

Ok it’s time for another distro review and I’m a bit overdue with this one but I’m a big fan of Debian and when I reviewed Etch (4.0) last year I declared that if I were to finally grow up and settle down with just one distro this would be the one.

Consider 64 Studio, which packs a whole slew of free and open source multimedia (music and video) content-creation applications such as Ardour, Hydrogen, and JAMin into a 64-bit Debian-derived Linux distribution. The 64-bitness is pretty deliberate: With applications like audio and video creation, having unimpeded access to as much memory as you can is always a good idea.

Built with Linux-Live scripts 6.2.9, the Debian-based PureOS 2.0 Linux distro has been recently released. This distro and live CD feature the KDE 4.3.4 desktop environment, Linux kernel 2.6.33 w/ Squashfs 3.4 and LZMA. Popular applications you'll find on PureOS include FileZilla, GIMP, Iceweasel, K3B, Songbird, VLC, and much more. Check out the screenshots.

The Elive team has released a long-awaited upgrade to its Debian-based, live CD-ready distro. The New Stable version of Elive 2.0, code-named Topaz, is equipped with the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, but now offers an alternative Compaz desktop, plus new autolaunchers, system-recovery tools, and "configurators."

Choosing an XFCE-based distro is not an easy task, because not all the users are the same...As you can rarely stick the "one size fits all" label to a Linux distro, I don't even try to recommend one XFCE-enabled distro or another. I will just write down a few notes on a selective list of distributions.