Current balloting for Debian Lenny's future has led to strife in the organization. Secretary of the free project, Manoj Srivastava, has resigned his position. A possible consequence is that the next version will undergo further delay in its release.

The Ubuntu Community has laid its second alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04, alias Jaunty Jackalope, under the Christmas tree.

The Debian Project has released a sixth update for the current stable version of Gnu/Linux 4.0, codenamed Etch.

BBC News announced the release of iPlayer for Mac and Linux. The BBC worked with Adobe to develop the new version, BBC iPlayer Desktop.

The openSUSE Project has released version 11.1 of its Community Linux today. Besides undergoing comprehensive maintenance, the release brings vast improvements to the KDE 4 Desktop.

OpenSUSE 11.1 rolled out today, sporting more than 230 new features, many updates, and a brand new license. The newest release is also the first built entirely on the openSUSE Build Service.

Just in time for the launch of openSUSE 11.1, Novell developers have completed the new Contrib-Repository. The Contrib will act as a bridge between factory (packages officially supported by Novell) and third party packages.

Free Linux distro Debian has been working steadily on its next version 5.0 of the OS, known as Lenny. Now developers have been called in for a vote to determine the course of its general release.