Mandriva Linux 2008 RC 1 Released

AdamWill writes "The first release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Galilee, is now available. The release notes are also available via the wiki. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate), and the detailed technical specifications are also available. This release candidate is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer, and as a mini-CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. A One combined live / install CD edition will be released in the near future (problems with unionfs prevented the One edition from being release at the same time as the other editions)."

Re:Hopefully

[flyingfsck]

Hmm, things got decidedly better since the 2006 version. If 2008 is anythink like the 2007 Spring edition, then it will be suuuuuuupuuuuuuuurrrrb...

Re:Hopefully

[Steel Shepherd]

I used Mandriva for a few years and switched, eventually to Kubuntu. I tried Suse, Fedora, and Mepis. I really liked Mepis (based on Ubuntu) but switched to Kubuntu based on a sound driver problem. The switch was almost effortless. There is no question Mandriva is a polished distro. Desktop usability is certainly it's forte. My problem with it was package availability, especially when it's popularity began to slide. I ended up running cooker to try to keep up to date and try packages that were not available as stable. Switching to Mepis, based on Ubuntu, solved that for me. The management tools are not as good or as complete as the drake tools, but they are generally sufficient. I can't say though that I recall desktop usability being a strength of Ubunutu's. It's for everyone, as in many languages and affordable to all. If Mandriva gives you what you need, VERY COOL! If something isn't there, doesn't work, or isn't being kept up to date, a switch to Ubuntu will probably solve the problem.

Re:RC is the new pre-alpha?

[pieleric]

I'm using this version right now and the only listed feature that seem missing is the hybrid suspend mode. IIRC, this feature is mostly implemented but there is still a little more work required. All the other features seem already here, excepted of course gnome 2.20 which is currently 2.19.92!

So, no this is not a pre-alpha version ;-)

Weeks after exploits available? I call BS

[vdanen]

5. Security updates would be made available weeks after exploits became known.

Care to provide some proof on that one? A general and very broad statement like that calls for some proof to back it up.

Unless you're referring to the kernel itself (which there were issues with, due to a certain kernel developer that's no longer with Mandriva), most (and I do say most... there are exceptions, just like any other distribution unless you're using Gentoo and can emerge the latest upstream version the moment it's released) updates were released in a very timely manner. Unless it was a "0-day" vulnerability, updates from Mandriva are more often than not released within ~24hrs of other major vendors if not earlier.

I'd love to get some proof on this one.

Re:Actually

[setagllib]

Ubuntu does this too, where 7.04 means "month 4 of year 2007". It's not very obvious.

Re:RC is the new pre-alpha?

[AdamWill]

Honestly, I've been copying and pasting the same release announcement since Beta 1 and I forgot to take that bit out. :)

Almost everything on that page is now included. However, it's true to say that Mandriva RCs are not really true release candidates - they're not builds that we honestly believe could be the final release unless someone finds a bug (well, the *last* one usually is, for 2007 Spring that was RC3, for instance). They should really be considered more as late betas. We didn't even hit version freeze yet (it's tomorrow). It's always been this way with MDV, it's a bit odd but we're used to it...:)

Re:Actually

[imr]

anchoring the product to a time
You are so right. And it was really thought as a representation of the technical reality and timeline of the distro, not for pure marketing reasons.
Here is the complete story that is behind this names, if that interrests you...

The naming convention came from the switch to a one year release cycle for the 2006.
Since the distro was going to be there for one year, and since most of this year was going to be 2006, it made more sense to call it 2006 and have it called 2006 for 3 months in 2005 than the other way around.
The decision to switch to a one year cycle came from users requests for more stability.

Unfortunatly, this move, despite having been made at the users requests, wasnt a popular success. Just read the comments on this page and you will see that a lot of people want the last version of many apps as soon as possible. Which has some sense in the free software world where some apps just move so fast and sometimes a newer version means more stability.
So with the 2007.0 the distro came back to a 6 months cycle.

But some aspects of the one year cycle remained in order to have the best of both world and again, it had to be reflected in the naming convention.

So, 6 months later the 2007.1 was built from the 2007.0 with no revolutionnary change to its foundations (like kernel, glib, gcc) but instead with many improvements and polishings in the desktops, fixing all those little bugs that were so irritating with every mandrake/mandriva release up to now, and a lot of work has been put into improving the existing mandriva tools, like the package manager and now the connexion manager.
So the 2007.1 was a really stable yet up to date distro.

Another nice aspect of the distro since that time is the backporting infrastructure.
Since the distro was going to stay for one year, in 2006 a lot of work has been put into making the softwares from the development version available easily to the previous version of the distro through a process that should not be a burden for the contributors. So the distro was back to a 6 months cycle, but this infrastructure was and is still there, and now important fast evolving apps like firefox can be backported quicker, which was one of the complaints made often to the distro. (You can see the importance of backporting in MEPIS recent swith to debian).

So all this led to chosing a name that would convey the fact that the 2007.1 was very close to the 2007.0, an evolution in time: "2007 spring".

Take all that with a grain of salt, I'm managing the Mandriva french forums for Mandriva, but I'm coming from the mandriva community and it really is my distro of choice.

For all those who haven't tried Mandriva lately

[AdamWill]

For all those who haven't tried Mandriva in a while, quite a lot has changed. It'd be great if you could try Mandriva again before posting comments. For instance, managing remote repositories is far easier than it used to be: you can configure a full set of official repositories from within the Mandriva package management tools. Instructions are at http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Insta lling_and_removing_software#Making_more_applicatio ns_available [mandriva.com] .

We've made big improvements in overall polish and stability since the releases that many people remember badly (2005, 2006). 2007 Spring looks much better, has far fewer package quality problems and runs more stably than those releases on most systems. 2008 will be better again, there's been a lot of work done on improving overall package quality, and it includes a very good and recent kernel build with very good hardware support. For instance, we have probably the best graphics card detection and configuration system in a major distro. I'm pretty sure that 99% of cards from major manufacturers (Intel, NVIDIA, ATI) will be correctly detected and configured in 2008. Our support for VIA / S3 (Uni)chrome chips (which are used on VIA's popular mini-ITx motherboards, for e.g.) is better than any other major distro to my knowledge.

Since 2007 Spring, we have a public non-free repository (that is configured when you set up repositories following the instructions above), so it's easy for anyone to get stuff like the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Sun Java and so on. For instance, for the NVIDIA / ATI drivers, just enable the repository and then re-run the graphics card configuration tool, and it will give you the option of using the proprietary driver.

Since 2007, we have official /backports repositories (in 2007 Spring and later, these are configured when you set up repositories, but not enabled by default for stability; you can enable them with a single click in the repository configuration tool). These contain up-to-date versions of popular applications. For instance, the 2007 Spring /backports repositories have amaroK 1.4.7, Compiz Fusion (0.5.2), VirtualBox 1.5.0, k3b 1.0.3, pidgin 2.0.1 (will update to 2.1 soon), avant-window-navigator latest SVN, brasero 0.6.0, deluge 0.5.4.1, gimmie 0.2.7, jokosher 0.9, mediatomb 0.10.0, miro 0.9.8.1, ntfs-3g 1.516, powertop 1.3, seamonkey 1.1.4, smplayer 0.5.21, tovid 0.30, transmission 0.72 and a *huge* amount of other updated packages (these are just some examples I picked). These are not officially supported, but they *are* built in a clean environment on the official Mandriva buildsystem and all built against each other, so they represent a contiguous set of packages that you will never have trouble using together, which is far better than the case on many other distributions where you have to use dozens of single-purpose or tiny third party repositories that are unofficial, not necessarily cleanly built, and often conflict with each other. There's a couple of other distros with /backports repositories to my knowledge, including Ubuntu, but Mandriva's are far bigger than any other distro and include far more useful packages.

so, yes, Mandriva is changing, quite a lot in fact. It'd be great if you'd give us another chance with 2008, read up on the forums - http://forum.mandriva.com/ [mandriva.com] - and the Wiki - http://wiki.mandriva.com/ [mandriva.com] - and see if your issues aren't improved.

On the Bugzilla situation - N7DR is not at all wrong in his criticism as it relates to earlier times. During the 2008 release cycle, we created a Bug Squad and I was appointed Bugmaster. The Bug Squad now triages all bugs reported, which has helped immensely with the response rate and time for newer issues.

Re:Got Torrents??

[AdamWill]

Where are you?

In North America, I'd recommend ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/ mandrivalinux/devel/iso/2008.0/ [psu.edu] . In South America, ftp://ftp.c3sl.ufpr.br/MandrivaLinux/devel/iso/200 8.0/ [c3sl.ufpr.br] . In Europe, ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Man drivaLinux/devel/iso/2008.0/ [jussieu.fr] , or ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrakelinu x/devel/iso/2008.0/ [nluug.nl] if that one's slow.

We don't do torrents for beta releases as the demand is not usually high enough to warrant it - the FTP mirrors usually cope with the demand easily.

Re:For all those who haven't tried Mandriva lately

[AdamWill]

Well, let me give you more concrete examples, then - during the 2008 development cycle, I personally have gone through and rebuilt almost every package (there's a few which simply can't be built any more, but over 95%) in the main repository with a mdk* release tag (indicating that it hasn't been built since Mandriva 2006 or earlier) or a 2007.0* release tag (indicating it hasn't been built since Mandriva 2007), making sure they build, run, and are compliant with our current packaging policies. This has never been done for any previous release. I'm hoping to get quite a lot of the 2007.1* packages (those that haven't been built since 2007 Spring) before we ship, too.

As I wrote in the post to which you're replying, we provide up-to-date packages in the /backports repositories. These aren't part of the Club, they're alongside all the other public repositories on the official mirror sites. The Club is not really used for providing packages any more, except for a very few packages that are non-free and that we cannot legally redistribute to the general public for license reasons (the most significant here are Flash and Acrobat Reader). You absolutely don't have to join the Club to use Mandriva: apart from that small group of packages, everything is available to non-Club members.

The admin tools are written in perl for a couple of reasons: it's what our coders know, it works, and we have a rather neat system which lets us write the tools once and have them work in both graphical and console (curses-based) mode. Rewriting them all in some other language and toolkit would be a lot of work for no real return.

I find they generally work pretty well. If you find problems in them, please do file bug reports. We do fix the bugs, honest. :)

Thanks for the good luck wishes.

Re:Hopefully

[AdamWill]

Mandriva 2008 introduces Suggests: support, actually. :)

Re:RC is the new pre-alpha?

[Petrushka]

So, to summarise your post: there is a feature missing; therefore it is not pre-alpha. Well, OK, if that premise necessarily implies that conclusion for you, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and back away slowly and quietly.

Just to clarify, it is surely obvious that this is not an RC but an alpha version. "Alpha" is after all the standard way of denoting "not feature complete". That's what "alpha" means.

I trust no one is going to claim that "one feature missing" = RC. RC should mean "finished in absolutely every conceivable respect, and completely absolutely bug-free as far as we are able to tell (and believe us, we've tried), but we just want to make extra extra quintuply sure that there's nothing wrong before we really release for good". That is clearly not the case here.

Re:Hopefully

[urbanradar]

My problem with it was package availability, especially when it's popularity began to slide. I ended up running cooker to try to keep up to date and try packages that were not available as stable. Switching to Mepis, based on Ubuntu, solved that for me. The management tools are not as good or as complete as the drake tools, but they are generally sufficient. I can't say though that I recall desktop usability being a strength of Ubunutu's. It's for everyone, as in many languages and affordable to all. If Mandriva gives you what you need, VERY COOL! If something isn't there, doesn't work, or isn't being kept up to date, a switch to Ubuntu will probably solve the problem.

For the record, another good distro to try in situations like these is PCLinuxOS -- it's originally based on Mandriva, so it includes many of the Mandriva management tools, but has incredibly comprehensive package repositories of its own (easily accessible through Synaptic) and the best hardware support out of any distro I've tried. The community is generally also very helpful and friendly. Style-wise, the default theme is a little tacky IMHO, but that's certainly no show-stopper.

(I'm not associated with the PCLinuxOS project, by the way -- just a happy user.)