Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 boasts enhancements, patches, and security updates.

Faced with the decision to publish kernel 2.6.39 now or wait until after the upcoming LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds announces the immediate release of the new Linux kernel.

In a mailing list post today, Fedora Program Manager Robyn Bergeron announced that Fedora 15 is ready for release on May 24, 2011.

Today BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance. The announcement says that the consortium will "promote examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability and accelerate the expansion of the ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM, providing businesses improved choice, performance and price for virtualization."

In a blog post on May 16, Miguel de Icaza announced Xamarin, a new Mono-based product company.

The 2011 openSUSE Conference, which will be held in Nuremberg in September, announced its call for papers. Talk proposals will be accepted until July 11th.

BackTrack, an Ubuntu-based penetration-testing distribution, offers "major improvements" over previous releases, including support for 32- and 64-bit architectures, KDE 4, Gnome, and Fluxbox.

At this week's Berlin LinuxTag 2011, event cooridinator Nils Magnus discusses the increasing professionalism of the open source community.