The developers of Ubuntu have released the third alpha of Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron", which is planned as a LTS version.

The Opensuse team has just released an update for the port scanner Nmap that signals the end of support for Suse Linux version 10.0.

The OpenVZ project has released two new virtual machine images which will give administrators the ability to set up a new virtual server in less than a minute.

About one year after the last major release, the Mandriva-based security distribution Annvix has now replaced RSBAC with Apparmor in version 3.0 and updated its collection of programs.

The Debian project has just released version 4.0r2 of its Linux distribution. The second update for the current stable release, Etch, mainly comprises bug fixes.

Based on the release policy of Ubuntu and its KDE derivative Kubuntu, the next version of Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) scheduled for mid January would be a Long Term Support (LTS) version with three years support. Now, Kubuntu's chief developer Jonathan Riddell has announced that there will not be an LTS version; instead Kubuntu is relying on the KDE 4 desktop update.