FreeBSD 8.0, a major new update of the popular operating system for servers, desktops and embedded devices, has been officially released: “The FreeBSD Release Engineering team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. This release starts off the new 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.X and introduces many new features. Read the release announcement, release highlights and release notes for additional information. Download (torrents): 8.0-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso.gz (1,784MB, SHA256, torrent), 8.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso.gz (1,848MB, SHA256, torrent).
An extract …

Karanbir Singh has announced the release of CentOS 5.4, a free, enterprise-class distribution built from source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: “We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS 5.4 for i386 and x86_64 architectures. CentOS 5.4 is based on the upstream release EL 5.4.0, and includes packages from all variants including server and client. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. And the option to …

Enhancements
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New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is a reorganization of
the release note material. Now the Release Notes are a
condensed set of major release highlights. The Technical
Notes contain the majority of the information regarding
new feature descriptions and bug change notices. Due to
the existence of the Release Notes highlights information,
it is no longer necessary to duplicate that information
in this release announcement. The Release Notes are
available on the media as well as online as part of the
general documentation. …

Patrick Volkerding has announced the release of Slackware Linux 13.0, a major update of the world’s oldest surviving Linux distribution: “After one of the most intensive periods of development in Slackware’s history, the long-awaited stable release of Slackware 13.0 is ready. This release brings with it many major changes since Slackware 12.2, including a completely reworked collection of X packages (a configuration file for X is no longer needed in most cases), major upgrades to the desktop environments (KDE 4.2.4 …