After giving this distro a few days of use, one word comes to mind: “polished.”

Pardus 2008 is a Linux distribution created by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology. At its core, it is a Turkish language OS, but the English version shows no lack of attention. It is a KDE-based distribution, and while I’m not a KDE fan myself, the ease-of-use of this interface blew me away. It is clear that a lot of attention went into making almost every aspect of the system professional and easy to use.

Read the rest of Pardus 2008 Review

The Fedora Project has announced the immediate release of Fedora 9, codenamed Sulphur.

The new release features the latest versions of the two desktop environments, GNOME 2.22 and KDE 4.0.3. In addition it also features PackageKit, a new graphical package manager built on top of the yum system, the latest Firefox 3 Beta 5 brower, a new upgrade system for upgrading to new releases of the distro, Upstart as the system startup mechanism and more.

You can read a summary of the changes on the Fedora Wiki here.

You can download the new release from this page, in either BitTorrent or standard HTTP download using a mirror of your choice. There are three variants to download - an Install-only disc, a GNOME Live CD and a KDE-based Live CD.

It’s April, which means that it is the month of a new release of Ubuntu. Hardy Heron (8.04) is going to be the eighth release of the distribution, which has enjoyed enormous popularity in recent times.

I use the KDE variant, Kubuntu as one of my main desktop operating systems, but I haven’t yet tried out the beta of Hardy Heron. I’m putting the standard Ubuntu desktop disc through its paces.

The first thing you notice after booting off the CD is that the boot menu has new options. Instead of just booting into the live CD environment only, you now have the option to boot in and ‘Try without change’, or to jump straight into the installer.

Read the rest of My first impressions of Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) Beta