Linux Room

Acer Taiwan-based company considered following Dell’s footsteps and included in its offer an Ubuntu-based machine. Despite the fact that the sales for the Ubuntu system went quite well in Asia, Acer said it would not release Linux-based machines for UK, Europe.

According to a statement an Acer official made for ZDNet.co.uk, Acer
changed its mind in releasing a Linux-laptop for the UK, because of the lack of demand:

"Acer models with Ubuntu pre-loaded are available at the factory level. However, there is no demand for it in the UK. Therefore, those configurations are not an option [for UK customers] at the moment. If the demand was there, then Acer would sell it and such demand would have to be reported to Acer by its UK resellers "
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SimplyMEPIS is yet another Linux distribution, initially based on the famous Debian. When it reached the 6.0 version MEPIS switched from Debian to Ubuntu 6.06, mainly because of the long time support and the stable release cycle of Ubuntu.

However, it seems that Warren Woodford, founder of MEPIS, is no longer satisfied with the Ubuntu distro and he considers going back to Debian. According to Warren:

"Dapper was not updated in the way our users expected. Personally, I think the Ubuntu people spoke sincerely and accurately, but perhaps ambiguously. So there was a misunderstanding among users. The fact is Dapper was updated with security fixes, but not with new versions of the applications." "

Wooodford has also stated the fact that Ubuntu is being rebuilt from scratch every six months by using packages from experimental Debian versions but this makes it unstable as a code for new releases.

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Red Hat team released the Linux 5.1 Beta version. For testing purpose only.

The RHEL 5.1 beta is said to be available for all x86/x86_64, ppc. S390x and ia64 architectures. According to the release announcement, the testing period for this version will go on until September 2007 and by then, no benchmark or performance tests should be taken on this version. It seems that the release focused more on bringing numerous improvements and updates in many areas, such as the virtualization area, networking, security or storage while the bugs and malfunctions have been left aside for further correction.

Highlights:

• improved and complete virtualization support on Itanium2 platforms
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