Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released

AdamWill writes "Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Download the hybrid live / install One or the purely free / open source software Free. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring includes the latest software (KDE 3.5.6, GNOME 2.18, Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0) and several major new features: Metisse, the most innovative accelerated 3D desktop technology; open source telephony with WengoPhone; Google desktop applications including Picasa and Earth; updates and improvements to many of the Mandriva configuration tools, and the brand new drakvirt for configuring virtualization; significantly improved hardware support, including greatly improved graphics card detection and support for several common laptop memory card readers; and a brand new desktop theme. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring is available in the full range of editions, including the freely downloadable One and Free, as well as the commercial Discovery, Powerpack and Powerpack+. For more information see the Spring product page and the Wiki page, where you can find download and installation instructions, the Release Tour, the Release Notes and the Errata."

Re:Why?

[Osty]

It is a bit ironic that you say that, because Mandriva is a consolidation of Mandrake and Conectiva.

Both of which were forks of Redhat, leaving us with two distros where initially there was one.

Re:Why?

[solanum]

Firstly because this is open source and free (as in speech) software*, so people can do whatever they like with it. If I want to release my own Linux distribution it's up to me, I don't need anyone else's permission.

Secondly, I personally rate Mandriva way above Ubuntu, I've used Mandriva for about three times as long as Ubuntu has even existed. After all the hype I did ditch Mandriva for Ubuntu for a while, but it was so frustrating that I switched back. The installer for Mandriva is second to none (whereas Ubuntu wouldn't even let me install grub to anywhere other than the MBR - yeah, I found out later there is another version of Ubuntu that would - yet another download). Also, the admin tools for Mandriva were better and there were more of them and finally, when I tried it Kubuntu was a very poor second cousin to the base Ubuntu (I wanted KDE) and there were all sorts of problems with it. Dunno whether that has changed since they said they would improve KDE support.

*Yeah, I know Mandriva push their commercial versions, but you don't have to buy 'em and all the software is available elsewhere, e.g. PLF.

I'm still on Mandriva

[rmm4pi8]

Mandrake 8.1 was my first Linux distro, and it's just kept getting better since then, with perhaps the two low spots of 10.0 and 2006.0, both of which very unstable for me--I think the former correllated to bankrupty and the latter to the round of mergers. 2006.0 actually drove me to try Kubuntu (I'm solidly in the KDE camp) which I found very lacking from the perspective of a Mandriva user--difficult to uninstall packages I didn't want (because of the way Kubuntu is really just a package which lists all of the KDE packages as dependencies...), with less good wireless configuration support, a less good partition manager, less good multimedia support, etc.

I am now a full time Linux admin, and while I typically use either RHEL/CentOS or Debian on the server, the few Linux workstations in my company are all running Mandriva. The partitioning tool and hardware support are just the best of any distribution I've tried, and with a quick trip to easyurpmi to set up the external repositories, the userland is the best out there as well. I find PLF way easier to use than all the tricks required to get media codecs and such on Ubuntu.

And I still like it enough that even though I do Linux administration for a living, I still offer free Mandriva email support, which perhaps 10 of you have taken me up on, some of you frequently. Seriously...have a problem, I'll help you out if I can. Nothing against the other distros, but despite its reputation as being for beginners, I haven't found anything about it that's less friendly to experienced admins (for instance, the drak tools don't overwrite hand-edited config files the way SuSE's YaST does). Can anyone tell me what has started the 'less good for experts' tagline, other than that experts don't like to be seen using the distro that all the new users are trying out?

Re:adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent summary. I might add that this is an excellent distribution to give to a family member - the configuration menus are not *too* overwhelming. It's an easy competitor to opensuse 10.2 in the automatic patch management realm, but to be honest I haven't used this current release so I can't speak to the stability of their patch process. Security updates were easily setup and non-intrusive.

The application menu was *horrid*, I hated how everything was laid out. This is the best example I could find quickly of their menus - not that great [mandriva.com] - but I didn't look that hard. But really, that's the worst thing I could say about it. USB devices always detected out of the box, and using other (out of the US) servers to bring in DVD and other 'proprietary' codecs, it was a perfect desktop system.

easyurpmi?

[robbo]

You've never heard of easy urpmi [zarb.org]? I just update the mirror and run 'urpmi.update -a'. I've had smooth upgrades all the way from Mandrake 9.2 to Mdv 2007.

Re:adverts

[AdamWill]

RPM is not 'basically dead'. Mandriva Linux does not use an APT derived package manager. It uses urpmi and rpmdrake, developed in house at Mandriva. Mandriva Linux Free and the GNOME version of Mandriva Linux One are composed of 100% free / open source software and are entirely free to download. We have been producing the Free edition of Mandriva Linux since 1998 and it has always consisted of 100% free / open source software. The KDE version of Mandriva Linux One is free to download but does contain some proprietary drivers for the convenience of those who use them (NVIDIA, ATI, Centrino wireless etc).

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[Dionysus]

With Feisty.
To install beryl in Kubuntu: aptitude install beryl-kubuntu
To install beryl in Ubuntu: aptitude install beryl-ubuntu

To start beryl, type beryl-manager in a terminal.

That's it.

Re:Yawn

[Knuckles]

Well what is this with "Metisse"?

Heard of Google? ;) Look here [insitu.lri.fr]

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

You used to be able to download the source files for everything from the download site. Now all they link to is mirrors for the ISOs. You have to goto a mirror and then navigate up several directories to find the source repositories to do a old school build or net install.

This is frustrating because I like the FTP installs and have some hardware that needs a few changes to the drivers before they are compiled. It seems easier to start from scratch and build the kernel and all after downloading the source tree with the driver in it then to disable the driver in the kernel and insert the working version of the driver as a mod.

either way, from the Mandrake/Mandriva site, it will only show links to the ISOs for download. It is annoying and didn't happen until after they got rid of Gaël Duval was removed from his position at Mandriva.

Re:easyurpmi?

[AdamWill]

Well we're trying to keep things simple and easy and having network install stuff on the download page isn't really the way to achieve that. It's not hiding anything, just not exposing overly complex stuff on what's meant to be a simple page.

The 'installing Mandriva' page on the wiki - http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Installing_Mandri va_Linux [mandriva.com] - has full instructions on doing a network install (among other types). It's linked from most of the release PR.