FreeNAS 8.3.0 has been released

Josh Paetzel has announced the release of FreeNAS 8.3.0, a free and open-source Network-Attached Storage (NAS) operating system based on FreeBSD: "The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE. FreeNAS 8.3.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 with version 28 of the ZFS file system. This is a major milestone in FreeNAS development, bringing in the plugin system with ZFS version 28. Development of the FreeNAS 8.2 branch has come to a halt, as both ZFS version 15 as well as FreeBSD 8.2 are no longer supported. There have been no major changes between 8.3.0-RC1 and RELEASE, mostly bug fixes and minor usability improvements to the GUI."


FreeNAS is a tiny FreeBSD-based operating system which provides free Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services (CIFS, FTP and NFS).

Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.10 has been released

Anke Boersma has announced the release of Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.10, an updated release of the KDE-centric desktop Linux distribution: "The Chakra project team is proud to announce the third 'Claire' release. It took a good six months of preparations to get to this point, but the full switch to systemd is here. To do so udev is merged into systemd, with systemd being updated to 194. This meant a first .so file jump for libudev, meaning many packages depending on libudev were updated and rebuilt. It also meant the removal of ConsoleKit, handled now by Polkit and logind. Among all the other updates on this release, KDE 4.9.2, Linux kernel 3.5.6, kmod 0.10, CUPS 1.6.1, D-Bus 1.6.4, Qt 4.8.3, Calligra 2.5.3 to name a few."

Chakra GNU/Linux is a user-friendly and powerful distribution and live CD originally forked from Arch Linux. It features a graphical installer, automatic hardware detection and configuration, the latest KDE desktop, and a variety of tools and extras.

Puppy Linux 5.4 "Precise" has been released

Barry Kauler has announced the release of Puppy Linux 5.4 "Precise" edition, a small Linux distribution built from Ubuntu 12.04.1 and compatible with Ubuntu 12.04 DEB packages: "This is it, the very first official release of Precise Puppy. Precise Puppy is built from Ubuntu 'Precise Pangolin' 12.04.1+ binary DEB packages, hence has binary compatibility with Ubuntu and access to the vast Ubuntu package repository. Couple that with Puppy's tiny size, speed and ease of use, and this is one incredible pup. It is assigned version 5.4 to indicate its position relative to the other puppies, such as Wary 5.3 and Slacko 5.3.3 (5.4 coming soon). A lot of work has happened at the 'Woof level' since the release of Wary 5.3 in April 2012 - of particular importance to Precise are the many enhancements to the Puppy Package Manager (PPM)."

Puppy Linux is yet another Linux distribution. What's different here is that Puppy is extraordinarily small, yet quite full-featured. Puppy boots into a ramdisk and, unlike live CD distributions that have to keep pulling stuff off the CD, it loads into RAM. This means that all applications start in the blink of an eye and respond to user input instantly. Puppy Linux has the ability to boot off a flash card or any USB memory device, CDROM, Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk, floppy disks, internal hard drive. It can even use a multisession formatted CD-RW/DVD-RW to save everything back to the CD/DVD with no hard drive required at all.

Ubuntu 12.10 has been released

The 12.10 release of Ubuntu has seen Canonical skew the Linux distribution toward a variety of young web technologies for developers eager to get ahead in the cloud.

Along with Juju support and the expansion of its metal-as-a-service bare metal provisioning tool to work for Calxeda servers, 12.10 also brings support for the latest 'Folsom' release of the open-source cloud platform OpenStack.

Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.