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Mandriva Linux 2009 Released
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 09, 2008 05:09 PM
from the still-crazy-after-all-these-years dept.
from the still-crazy-after-all-these-years dept.
Adam Williamson writes "Mandriva has today released Mandriva Linux 2009, the new major release of the popular distribution. 2009 is a bold release which brings the new KDE 4 as the default desktop, along with a re-designed installer and Mandriva Control Center and many other new features. Other significant updates include GNOME 2.24, OpenOffice.org 3, Mozilla Firefox 3, and kernel 2.6.27. Key features include new graphical in-line upgrade capability, netbook compatibility, class-leading hardware support, and further improved support for working with mobile devices. For more details, see the Release Tour and the Release Notes. Get it at the download page, or go straight to the torrent list."
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Wow, now that's a trick! (Score:5, Funny)
It includes a kernel that hasn't been released yet?
Wow!
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Re:Wow, now that's a trick! (Score:5, Informative)
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Choosing_the_right_edition [mandriva.com]
Basically, One is a hybrid live/install CD which includes proprietary drivers and browser plugins. Free is a traditional installer edition (2xCD or DVD) which is 100% free / open source software, no NVIDIA / ATI drivers or anything (though you can add them from the non-free repository after install, if you're that way inclined).
Parent
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I guess they're pulling the same as Ubuntu did with Firefox 3, it's at -rc9 now and on monday Linus said: "If things go well, I might do a final release mid-week, otherwise it's
'next weekend' again." so it should only be a few days away.
Re:Wow, now that's a trick! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Actualy it has been released, but never the less it is almost a guarantee that Mandriva is not using a kernel version released that recently, since Mandriva is very good about thoroughly testing things, and they wouldn't have had time to do so.
Here the proof that 2.6.27 is "released":
[zero__kelvin@bodhisattva ~]$ kernel
[zero__kelvin@bodhisattva linux-2.6.git]$ git pull
remote: Counting objects: 83, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (35/35), done.
remote: Total 58 (delta 29), reused 52 (delta 23)
Unpacking
Worth a spin...? (Score:3, Interesting)
I had Mandrake installed some time back, and was happy with the package manager they had at the time since it finally dealt with some of the dependency hell issues that Red Hat suffered from. But at some point a software update and server migration went funny (on their end), and the package manager couldn't find the right site to update itself, and since I couldn't be bothered to dig into the internals to fix it (some of us use Linux to do other things :) and a reinstall looked like the easiest course, I opted to jump ship and tried out Ubuntu instead. But I'm curious to see what's happened in the intervening years.
Cheers,
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It's been improved... the best way to handle your update repositories is to use the Easy URPMI site at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ [zarb.org] - just click and it will automagically add the sources for you.
I've been running the Beta and RC versions on my laptop and a desktop, it's been working well. Gonna start torrenting the release version shortly.
I miss Conectiva (Score:3, Informative)
Until they got merged into Mandrake, Conectiva was the best distro, IMHO. They had RPM with Apt, the best of both worlds. After the acquisition, they opted to drop that feature, keeping the vastly inferior Mandrake package management. Sorry, guys, I wento to Ubuntu, and never looked back.
The main thing I miss now is the Conectiva keyboard mapping. There are
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Debian is not hard to install and it is the easiest operating system to manage.
Debian is easy to install software system, and the OS management is not harder than on other Linux distributions. Like updating the OS in Mandriva is easy as like "urpmi linux-2.6.27" or if you want you can always crap your new OS version from kernel.org and compile it yourself.
The system management is lots easier than on Debian because you have Mandriva Control Center and you can easily set most needed system settings from there by just waving your mouse.
Of course if you like to do everything trought comma
KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
This comment is not meant to detract from the great work the KDE people have done for 4.x. They are building a GREAT system and I admire their work.
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Well, I guess it depends what you think is best longterm. It's said that to make an omelet you must break some eggs, and KDE4/Qt4 broke pretty much all of them. KDE 4.0 was way premature, maybe it was KDElibs 4.0. but not the K Desktop Environment 4.0. KDE 4.1.2 is really at the point that to make it better you must push it to a greater audience. In a few weeks there's Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE4 as the default, basicly they're all going in that direction. I think longterm it is what is necessary to push KDE4 pa
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They'll upgrade to a new version when it is ready. But I agree, that there are some annoying glitches that might scare away average user (i have 4.1.2 atm).
As for kernel -- the newer the kernel, the more equipment is supported.
Openoffice3 -- bad timing, they'll make a release next week, so I guess that was a right decision too.
P.S. when will slashdot support long dash?! Renders my compose key useless...
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P.S. when will slashdot support long dash?! Renders my compose key useless...
You have asked the right person -- I have no idea.
Way to go mandriva! (Score:2, Informative)
I gave a spin to 2009-RC2 and I found it very lacking in many aspects, including general theme, while KDE4 implementation of the mandriva theme was mostly there small details (but important ones) like desktop icons where left out, if you look at the 2009 errata outstanding issues where not handled, like multimedia keyboard support on KDE4, it reasonably works on 2008.1 why should it stop working in 2009?, passing the blame to kmilo is no way to handle it (they would be better of with KDE3 for now).
I like th
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It's not really 'passing the blame'. KMilo is the bit of KDE which handles multimedia keys. If it doesn't exist for KDE 4 yet then, well, we just can't really handle multimedia keys in KDE 4. There's no way around it.
We can do a partial hack - bind the volume up, down and mute keys to kmix via KDE's own hotkeys support - and I'm trying to get that done as an update.
The question was whether issues on that level should stop us using KDE 4 for this release, bearing in mind the release will be the current one f
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In xorg-7.4 keyboards are handed via hal with evdev driver -- the layout is therefore generic and will make it much more easier for distro makers to configure multimedia keyboards -- all of them will send e.g. the same event on Volume Up keypress.
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We already have this (and have since 2008.1) - the XF86Audio keysyms. The problem is not at that level. That level is there and working fine in 2009 - pretty much all keyboards with multimedia keys pass the appropriate keysyms. The issue is specific to KDE 4 and it's just that it has nothing to *handle* those keysyms. KDE 3 has an app called KMilo which handles them, but it's not been ported to KDE 4 yet.
If you run KDE 3, GNOME, or Xfce in Mandriva 2009, the multimedia keys will work fine.
Useless summaries (Score:5, Interesting)
Each distro includes OpenOffice.org, Gnome, KDE, etc. I can get Gnome 2.24 by upgrading packages within my existing distro. openSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 9 will ship with it. So what actually sets this apart? I haven't used Mandriva since it was Mandrake, and I'm curious.
I hear they got a great "Control Panel" that rivals Yast. What is it like? What unique features does the distro have?
Wouldn't that be the pertinent information to have?
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You might want to look at the Reviewer's Guide: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Reviewers_Guide [mandriva.com]
it contains a lot of that kind of information.
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Yes, but when writing an article reviewing the distro, shouldn't they talk about the unique features rather than just states, "hey, our release has Gnome!"
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I half agree and half disagree, it's also to tell "Why should you upgrade to 2009? What new features are you getting?" for existing Mandriva users. For people using another distro the unique features may matter more, but it's a shame if people aren't aware of the progress made because it's common to all distros. And YMMV but it's not my most important criteria when choosing distros, usually it's about being reasonably current while breaking relatively little - not that my distro is that unique compared to o
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Basically the unique features for any distro are their installer, system administration tools and package management.
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Some distros do have unique features. For instance Fedora 9 had kernel-mode setting if you had an Intel video card. At the time, it was only one of a few, if not the only installers to offer full disk encryption in the installer, etc. Ubuntu offers Wubi.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList [fedoraproject.org]
That is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. When reviewing distros, write about what makes that distro unique.
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The Control Center (i.e. "Control Panel") is probably the best feature that Mandriva has. For me, it allows easy setup of just about everything - from NFS and SMB servers and clients to a backup feature that just works (so long as the hard drive has space - which they also deal with). Much of these things can be edited by webmin, but the control center GUI is easier to use than webmin. Anot
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So you are saying "Why I should get a Ubuntu or OpenSUSE if Mandriva 2009 has everything what others has and even more too".
This is always a comparising a Linux distributions, not Linux Operating System. Every new release of distributions is just "a snapshot" of the current work what FOSS community has done in sertain projects.
You get Linux OS (kernel) + new versions of libraries (GNU+others), developer tools (GNU+others) and what important, new versions of desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, LXDE, XFCE) and
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"I thought KDE4 was supposed to use less resources?"
I don't think they've ever actually said that, and it's certainly not the case :). There was a random comparison run by that ever dependable figure Some Guy On His Personal Blog which claimed 39% lower memory usage for KDE 4 or something, but it was basically utterly wrong. I did test this for my own curiosity - there's nothing insanely broken about our KDE 4 build, but on a clean 2009 install, the memory usage figures booted to a default desktop with a te
Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
But does it run on Ubuntu?
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
Via VirtualBox or VMware, yes. Yes it does. :) And, of course, vice versa.
Parent
Concerned about Pulse Audio and older video cards (Score:3, Interesting)
My major concern is going to be Pulse Audio. When 2008.1 came out, I migrated from 2008.0. I found out there were patches made to SDL that broke compatibility with many Linux games. It took weeks of "digging them out." to solve the problems. Now sound works the way it should. I'm frightened that it will mean more digging up bad patches in SDL to stop annoying crackling effects in games.
Also, not every computer I own has a "nice" Nvidia FX5200. A few of them have older Sis, Matrox, Intel, and my Cooker Box which has one of the 2009.0 release candidates on it has a Voodoo 3. The Voodoo 3 card crashes when DRI is enabled. Not due to a proprietary driver, but due to some older cards development falling by the wayside.
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I'm not sure how it could take you weeks - SDL is just one source RPM, so all the patches applied to it are right there...
http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/SDL12/current/SOURCES/ [mandriva.com]
there's two Pulse patches.
We provide the latest code X.org has for all drivers, and the hardware detection database is maintained. Aside from that there isn't an awful lot we can do to help older neglected drivers - even if we had the time to devote to maintaining ancient X drivers (which we mostly don't), w
Once Upong a Time... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Once Upong a Time... (Score:4, Informative)
Um, Mandrake/Mandriva has *always* been a commercial company with commercial offerings. But they have also *always* offered free versions of the distro. And this is what Redhat did before they went completely commercial-only, and what SuSE still does.
http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free [mandriva.com]
Parent
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Mark is not actually correct.
There are no longer any paid Club memberships (we abolished that system last year). There's only the Powerpack subscription, which gives you no privileges, it's a simple product which gives you access to the Powerpack edition for 12 months; nothing else.
The only software that is exclusive to the Powerpack edition is software that is not only non-free, but commercial: that is, software we *could not legally include* in any edition that's free to the general public. Software that
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This changed after Ubuntu and Fedora came along and they (Mandrake/Mandriva) saw that people were l
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It is true that they do try to make money. As a commercial company, they have to in order to survive. They give preference and perks to club members. Personally, I think the rates are reasonable and the product is superior to Ubuntu (to use your example) in significant ways, so it is worth it. They have experimented with different concepts, settling on one that seems to work the best for themselves and their customers.
I do wish all the perks were open to everyone, but I can see where giving something ot
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It's rather because Slashdot didn't put the story on the front page (only as a between-stories bar, which is easy to miss). When they make a Mandriva story a full front page story, it still gets hundreds of comments.
Mandriva has always been a commercial distribution, ever since 1998. It's only got *more* open over time, never less.
Gave it a whirl (Score:2, Informative)
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Oh great. (Score:2)
Just when I finished downloading 2008.1!
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About a Mandriva release? Apathetic?
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There is no x86-64 One. Really, for most workloads, you may as well run i586 on x86-64 systems. If you really want a native edition, install x86-64 Free.