2008 in Distributions

Davyd Madeley Work in Progress

Throughout free software development, GNOME is famous for its release cycle. Since version 2.0, GNOME has made two major software releases every year. This year was no exception, with both 2.22 and 2.24 releasing on time.

According to Distrowatch, almost all of the popular distributions now ship with GNOME 2.24: openSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSolaris, Foresight and Mandriva. Other distributions to release in 2008 (FreeBSD and Gentoo) stuck with GNOME 2.20. The delayed Debian Lenny will also release with GNOME 2.20.

Ars Technica Distros of the Year and Foresight on the Shuttle

The distributions chosen as 2008 'Distro of the Year' by Ars Technica ship with GNOME 2.24.

Foresight has been known within GNOME for some time now because of its close relationship with upstream development (in fact, the GnomeDeveloperKit is based on Foresight), however it had never really be considered a mainstream distribution. This changed in early 2008 when PC manufacturer Shuttle, known for their compact PCs, announced that their upcoming budget KPC would ship running Foresight.

As well as core GNOME, the KPC ships with many GNOME-lover favourites including Firefox, Pidgin, Openoffice.org, Banshee, Totem and F-Spot.

OpenSUSE...

Netbook Revolution

Also new in 2008, Netbooks; lightweight, compact and inexpensive; many of these laptops ship preinstalled with some form of Linux distribution. Although these products might not run the GNOME Desktop as we know it, almost all of them utilise and depend upon GNOME technology and GNOME's platform.

The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and Sylvania G Netbook run Ubuntu's Netbook Remix, based off Ubuntu 8.04LTS. Acer's Aspire One ships Linpus Linux Lite, which uses technology from GNOME and XFCE. The MSI Wind and HP's 2133 Mini-Note both ship SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The RazorBook 400 ships with GNOME Office applications Abiword and Gnumeric.