October is going to be an exciting month for Linux enthusiasts. Three big-time distributions namely Debian, Mandriva, and Ubuntu will unleash their latest and hopefully their greatest distro versions.

Let's start with Mandriva Linux. Just recently, the second Release Candidate of Mandriva 2009 has been released, and if all things went according to plan, the final stable version will arrive this coming October 9. I expect this upcoming edition to be even better than Mandriva 2008 as it will for the first time integrate the shiny new KDE 4.1. Here are other things that we can look forward to with Mandriva Linux 2009:

* Linux kernel 2.6.27
* GCC 4.3
* GNOME 2.24
* Firefox 3.0
* OpenOffice.org 3.0
* overhauled installer
* improved boot speed
* improved DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) management
* enhanced language selection

Here are a few stunning screenshots from the Beta version of Mandriva 2009:

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