openSUSE 12.3 "Edu Li-f-e"

Lars Vogdt has announced the release of openSUSE 12.3 "Edu Li-f-e" edition, a specialist openSUSE variant designed for deployment in educational institutions: "The openSUSE Education Team is proud to present Li-f-e (Linux for Education) 12.3-1. This first release is based on openSUSE 12.3 with all the official updates applied. Li-f-e incorporates the latest stable versions of all popular desktop environments such as KDE, GNOME and Cinnamon and it includes wide range of software catering to the needs of everyone, selection from openSUSE Education repository, multimedia from the Packman repository, development tools, KIWI-LTSP allowing normal PC or diskless thin clients to network boot from a server running Li-f-e and lot more." Here is the full release announcement with a handful of screenshots. Download the live DVD image from here: openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e-12.3-latest-i686.iso (3,323MB, MD5, torrent).

Pinguy OS 13.04 Alpha

Antoni Norman has released an initial alpha build of Pinguy OS 13.04, an Ubuntu-based distribution with a customised GNOME 3.8 desktop: "Pinguy OS is still being activity worked on. There has been a release for 12.10 and a 13.04 release is being worked on at the moment. If you want to keep up to date with the development of Pinguy OS it's best to follow the Information thread on the forum. This blog will be mainly for news on the LTS releases. I have decided to keep the 6-month releases as betas/snapshots of what the LTS will become. The 6-month releases will be using bleeding edge software that hasn't been fully tested. For an example the 13.04 release is using Gnome Shell 3.8.1 (something that isn't included in Ubuntu 13.04 by default). The 6-month Pinguy OS releases will be missing features that will be in the final LTS, but the release will be very usable." See this brief blog post for more information. Download: Pinguy_OS_13.04-Alpha_i686.iso (2,312MB, MD5).

Zentyal 3.1 (Beta)

José Antonio Calvo has announced the availability of the first development build of the upcoming Zentyal 3.2 stable release, a Linux distribution for small business servers. Like the project's 3.0 release, the new version is still based on Ubuntu's latest long-term support (LTS) release. From the release announcement "We're glad to announce the availability of the first Zentyal 3.1 packages and installer. Zentyal 3.1 is a development version and it will become Zentyal 3.2 (next stable release) in September 2013. Until then we are going to frequently release new versions so you can help us testing the new features and improvements. The highlights of this first beta are: New IPS module; L2TP support in the IPsec module; faster Zentyal administration interface; new headless (remote administration only) installation in the expert mode; faster boot due to better management of daemons." Download: zentyal-3.1-amd64.iso (651MB, MD5).