Fedora 9, the latest release from the Fedora Project, goes up for download on Tuesday. The ninth release of Fedora ushers in a number of changes aimed at making the venerable distribution a more newbie-friendly desktop, but longtime users needn't fear a great dumbing down; version 9 packs plenty of power user punch as well.

Pick a kernel, any kernel. With your distribution's stable and testing kernels ready to install, plus the official kernel.org releases and release candidates, who's testing what, and are enough bugs getting fixed?

Alexander Viro discovered a race condition in the fcntl code that may permit local users on multi-processor systems to execute parallel code paths that are otherwise prohibited and gain re-ordered access to the descriptor table.

Nexuiz runs on an improved Quake engine called DarkPlaces. The engine has been undergoing on-and-off development by Lord Havoc, the game's creator, for several years. On icculus.org, Lord Havoc says he developed a custom OpenGL-only engine for DarkPlaces, and other modifications that "support Windows WGL and Linux GLX and have greatly improved graphics and image quality."

Linux has been getting a lot of press over the past six months, particularly populist distributions such as Ubuntu. Dell has installed Ubuntu onto its Linux PCs and laptops, and let’s not forget the phenomenally successful Eee PC from Asus, which runs the Xandros distro.

The next version of the Fedora Linux distribution, Fedora 9 “Sulphur”, has been leaked into the public domain due to a misconfiguration in one of the European download mirrors.

Many IT experts will check the date to make sure it is not the first of April when they hear that Microsoft is to support Linux servers in a beta update to its System Center Operations Manager suite for datacentre management. Microsoft’s antipathy to everything open source, and Linux in particular, has always seemed an intractable chasm, just one of those things to get used to in life.

Much like the Asus Eee PC before it, the Linux-based Shuttle KPC K-4500 will impress the tech savvy--especially the Linux comfortable. You can strip it down, expand it, or simply use it as basic day-to-day desktop. You can even put a photo in the removable front panel. Because of its low price, we can also see bestowing this system on a nontech savvy loved one.

The Linux Equivalents to Windows Software series now contains 228 entries, listing the finest Linux software available.

Read about our latest addition: emesene - an open source instant messaging client, a "clone" of Windows Live Messenger.

In case you missed our announcement, also check out our 80 of the Best Linux Security Applications.