An email appeal by Joey Schulze is calling for hardware donations to support two new Debian projects: snapshot and data archive.

Dag Wieers of Project Centos made a passionate plea for more private users to turn to the free Red Hat Enterprise clone, and stressed that commercial companies with non-critical machines could also benefit from Centos.

Over the weekend the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) took place in Brussels. In his keynote, Mozilla's Mark Surman hoped for Open Source's success and Debian key contributor Bdale Garbee supported its social contract. As an aside, Debian Lenny's target release date was reconfirmed.

Debian, Mandriva and Fedora developers call them Sid, Cooker and Rawhide. OpenSUSE calls them Factory and they are ringing the changes for the Factory development.

Debian is among the 15 projects that will present their work at CeBIT, offering a free Linux operating system Java-written platform for knowledge management.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client is now pre-installed on the newest Dell thin clients.

Fred Emmott has released the Slackware-based 64-bit distro with 2.6.27.7 kernel.

The countdown for Debian Lenny has begun with the project team putting the code in deep freeze. The release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 is expected mid-February.