A few days ago Ubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate arrived for our testing pleasure -- you might still have time to submit last-minute bug reports before the final release on Thursday. Over in BSDland, meanwhile, the first release candidate of FreeBSD 7.2 has been announced, and if the team sticks to the schedule we should see the final version in early May. The NetBSD folks are charging ahead with 5.0 release candidate 4 of the outrageously portable Unix flavour, sporting this whopping list of changes.

Reviewed: With SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, Novell builds upon OpenSUSE 11.1, the community distribution that shipped last summer. It comes in two versions for the enterprise market: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Desktop (SLED). Striking new features are the Compiz Fusion 3D compositing window manager, KDE 4.1, Gnome 2.24 and a redesigned installer, but Mono-haters won't be happy to see the large amount of Microsoft .NET software that ships as standard.

PC Plus has just uploaded an excellent tutorial teaching you how to build your own Linux distro - worth checking out! From the article, "If you find yourself making the same adjustments each time you install a new distribution, it's worth creating your own customised version. Revisor is a tool that lets you do just this, and in this tutorial, we'll show you how..."

Weighing in at a mere 48MB, xPUD boots up before you can even decide how to pronounce it. This mini distro is built upon Mozilla's XUL and Gecko engines, with an interface called 'Plate' which includes a web browser, media player, BitTorrent client and other tools. There's not a great deal of information on the website just yet, but read on for a video of its über-rapid bootup.

Can you hear that noise? It's the sound of a brand new distro coming over the hills. Mandriva 2009.1 (aka 'Spring') is almost here, and the second release candidate is available for testers to iron out any last-minute crinkles. It's available in full-whack DVD incarnations or diet-friendly Live CD versions. Summary of changes since 2009.0 after the break.

Live distros have done a fantastic job of getting timid Windows users to try Linux. No installation, no faffing around with hard drive partitions and bootloaders -- just pop in the CD/DVD and go. But one of the downsides is performance, with optical-based Linux not running as swiftly as its hard drive-installed counterpart. Well, Portable Ubuntu is here to save the day using a crafty combo of free software technology.

Novell's epic-length press release for SLE11 just landed in our inboxes, and there are a few interesting points worth picking out. Read on for Novell's corporate take on the recession, Microsoft .NET, virtualisation and cloud computing...

We didn't hear much from the PCLinuxOS team for about 18 months -- sure, plenty of development effort was taking place behind the scenes, but with the six-monthly release schedules of Ubuntu and co. taking up all the limelight, PCLinuxOS's absence of major releases may have left many to question the distro's lifespan. Well, 2009.1 proudly arrived a week ago, and Raiden's Realm has given it a thorough going-over.

We're just about to record the TuxRadar podcast #4, and this episode our Open Ballot question is: should distros make it easy for users to install proprietary codecs/drivers/apps on Linux? Please give a yes or no answer, and show your workings to get all the marks available for this question. Oh, and Anonymous Penguin, please provide a name that we can reference alongside your comment in the podcast. Gracias!

You'd expect the seventh most popular distro on DistroWatch to pump out new releases more often, but it has been a quiet couple of years for PCLinuxOS. The last release arrived in May 2007 -- which is, like, a bajillion years ago in the distro world -- but we're not complaining. We're super glad, as no doubt many other Linuxers are, that the distro is still thriving and we have a new version to explore thanks to the awesomely named Ripper Gang.