Welcome to the this year's 18th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!

Recently the latest version of perhaps the world's most friendly BSD distribution was released. PC-BSD 7.1 is based off FreeBSD and we take a first look at this interesting operating system.

I installed Mandriva 2009 with the new KDE 4.1 desktop by default and was impressed with the over all feel. Compared to older versions of Mandriva, Mandriva 2009 seemed quicker and snappier and gave me a clean feel while browsing. I enjoyed the theme, background and panel tones much more in this latest release of Mandriva.

Welcome to this year's 16th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It's the Ubuntu release week (or Ubuntu "circus", as some prefer to call it), a major event in the calendar of many open source software enthusiasts.

The Fedora Project Team announced yesterday, the release of Fedora 11 (Leonidas) Beta. Getting closer and closer to the final release, Fedora 11 promises to bring a lot of major changes and improvements along with bleeding-edge technologies to enable a modern operating system. Coming in two flavors, Fedora 11 Beta uses the following desktop environments: GNOME 2.26 RC and KDE 4.2.1.

Mandriva one of the leading distro provider has finally released their last testing version for their upcoming spanking distro named 2009.1 Spring ... 2009.1 tries mend the flaws that 2009.0 came with.. 2009.1 brings the latest technology from the Linux world, featuring the cutting edge softwares and tools to enchant audience with a soothing experience...

The second alpha for Mandriva Linux 2009 is now available. There is information about the new release in various places:
* Mandriva Linux 2009 release notes: these will be updated to reflect the status of the current pre-release.
* Mandriva Linux 2009 Errata: these will be updated to reflect the status of the current pre-release.

Tablet PC support and multi-touch stand out in latest Fedora Linux release. The Fedora Project [http://fedoraproject.org] on Tuesday released Fedora 12, the latest version of its open source Linux operating system and the last of the "big four" Linux releases for 2009.

Welcome to this year's 14th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! One of the must-haves in the toolkit of any serious free software enthusiast is a decent partitioning tool. This week we take a look at the newly released Parted Magic 4.0, a live CD for managing hard drives.