Mandriva Linux 2008 Now Available

AdamWill writes "Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site and on the network of public mirror servers. In 2008 you will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you've come to expect. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards, and wireless chips). There is a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, a new network configuration center, and a set of improvements to the Mandriva software management tools. Read about the new features in depth in the release tour, or view the release notes. The One installation CD is the recommended download: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included."

Link leads to archive

[LiquidCoooled]

Proper link should be: http://www.mandriva.com/en/download.html [mandriva.com]

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[Zombie Ryushu]

Its still in Drak3d as far as I can tell, you can use that or Compiz Fusion.

Re:Link leads to archive

[AdamWill]

Yes, I submitted a correction to the story about five minutes after I submitted the story. The editor obviously missed it :(. That is indeed the correct link. There are also torrents at http://torrent.mandriva.com/public [mandriva.com] .

Re: bells and whistles

[IBBoard]

Compiz Fusion does have some advantages that aren't just bells and whistles: Expose-style "show me the windows" so you can see what's in different applications and which you really want, negative and ADD modes, fading so that only your most prominent window is catching your attention, a widgets layer so you can have things easily accessible but not on any desktop, screen annotation, window grouping/tabbing,...

Okay, so most people put it in for "I can make my windows do silly transitions", and it would be better if more functionality were added instead, but the eye candy can be the basis for functionality as well :)

Oh, go to Hell.

[Zombie Ryushu]

This guy's pissing me off, and I'm going to tell him one thing Mandriva Linux has that is very practical that no other Linux has unless you want to start your own mirror system. Domain based parallel application installation. In particular, using LDAP and Kerberos, you can use Kerberos authentication to mass deploy an entire network of application in one command. It uses LDAP to check it, Kerberos to authenticate it, SSH to copy it, and urpmi to install it. This is something I have not seen with any other Linux.

Linux has Active Directory authentication out of the box, an easy front end to ndiswrapper, an easy method for adding Internet software repositories. I really hate this guy. e all work so hard and he tramples on everything we have done.

Mark my words, I will see you using a Linux Desktop yet!

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[AdamWill]

Metisse is still there. You can choose between Metisse and Compiz Fusion with drak3d. Mandriva has shipped Compiz since the release of 2007. 2007 came with Compiz. 2007 Spring came with Compiz, Beryl and Metisse. 2008 comes with Compiz Fusion and Metisse.

Re:Non-Free

[AdamWill]

We give you the choice. The One and Powerpack editions include non-free stuff for convenience. For those who value free software principles, the Free edition includes nothing but free software. if that's your preference, use the Free edition.

Re:Outdated Firefox?

[Lumenary7204]

Why wouldn't it come with the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.7?

Because the people who compile and package the distro from source need to draw a line somewhere, and test for proper functionality with what they have.

If they kept updating distro packages every time a minor thing changes before release, there would never be time for any real testing, and overall quality would suffer.

Bleeding Edge...

[Lumenary7204]

However, if you're adventurous and would like to build your own Linux box with all bleeding-edge components, you could try the guidelines posted on the "Linux From Scratch" website (not an endorsement, just a place to start):

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ [linuxfromscratch.org]

Re:Outdated Firefox?

[AdamWill]

2.0.0.7 included only a security fix that is not relevant to Linux users. Since we were already in version freeze, it would have been silly to break it in order to include a package that has absolutely no benefit.

Re:Ubuntu

[AdamWill]

You never actually had to do that to install software on Mandrake / Mandriva, though some people got the idea that they did. Ever since the very early releases Mandriva has had a dependency resolving package manager, urpmi, and a proper set of online repositories. For information on how the system works in the current release, see http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software [mandriva.com] .

Re:Outdated Firefox?

[AdamWill]

as I said, that vulnerability does not affect Linux. See the advisory, http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2007/mfsa2007-28.html [mozilla.org] : "On his blog Petko D. Petkov reported that QuickTime Media-Link files contain a qtnext attribute that could be used on Windows systems to launch the default browser with arbitrary command-line options." (my emphasis)

Re:64 bits?

[AdamWill]

The Free x86-64 edition is available, from the download mirrors or at http://torrent.mandriva.com/public [mandriva.com] . There's no x86-64 One at the present time, I'll have to update that text. If you get to www.mandriva.com/archives/ , that means you hit a broken link. We just changed www.mandriva.com , concurrent with the 2008 release, but the new site is still having some kinks worked out. www.mandriva.com/archives/ is the old version site, preserved for now in case we need it. As it's the old site and it won't be used any more, nothing on it was updated for 2008. We are currently sending all broken links under www.mandriva.com to www.mandriva.com/archives/ , on the basis that whatever you were looking for is probably still in there somewhere. As we get all the kinks worked out of the new site, you won't see this happening so much. We would've liked a few more days to polish the new site, but we couldn't push 2008 release without the new site, and we didn't want to delay the release solely to finish the website. Slashdot initially ran this story with a broken link to www.mandriva.com/download.html (should have been www.mandriva.com/en/download.html ), so you may have got to the /archives page that way.

Re:Ubuntu

[GooberToo]

RPM-Hell is why I dumped Redhat!

I constantly see this touted. I've tried various distributions with different package formats. Frankly I found debian to be the exact same as RPM based systems. Both have their problems. Both have their advantages. Both have pretty much the exact same problems, differing only in implementation details. IMO, to say one is better or worse based only on the package format is to be ignorant of the subject matter. Heck, I actually had a harder time managing packages on debian based systems than I had on RPM based systems at one point in time. And I'm sure the inverse is true for others. It all depends on what you're trying to do.

There is no such thing as a magical package format which makes dogs love cats, in a romantic kind of way. Ultimately, it all boils down to the utilities available to manage those packages. And these days, they are all more or less the same. With tools like urpmi and yum, anyone that has RPM hell is suffering from a self imposed affliction. Heck, it is pretty easy to turn tar files directly into RPMs these days too. Most RPM distros addressed "RPM-hell" some three to five years ago, if not longer. It happened about the time debian guys started claiming they had resolved the issue. Seems so many listened, they missed that most other distributions had too.

I do agree RH (commercial version) was probably the last, or at least one of the slowest, to address this of modern distributions. Not long ago up2date was their tool of choice. These days it is yum.

Long story short, anyone complaining of RPM-hell is either living in the past or flat out suffering from denial.

Re:transitionary distro?

[ewhenn]

Personally, I find it *easier* than Ubuntu.

I installed 2007 Spring as my fist linux distro in 5 years. Mandriva auto detected everythign and set it up. My Wireless and sound worked out of the box. Not something I can say for Ubuntu. Ubuntu was a PITA to get wireless working. And I never got sound working on Ubuntu. That alone was a deal maker for me. I don't want to mess around for hours trying to get stuff to work. I jsut want it to work. I actually like Mandriva better than XP for internet/office stuff.

Keep in mind this is coming from a novice with linux, so if you want someone who's opinion would be comparable to the everyday-joe's opinion, yeah you found it here. I can stick a disk in and follow the on screen instructions, and that's about it. Mandriva worked, Ubuntu didn't.

Re:64 bits?

[AdamWill]

"A great percentage of the complaints against Mandriva stem from their maze of homepages and subverted, hidden or missing download links. It's just not completely obvious where to get Mandriva. It should be." as I said, we're still working on the new page. once that's completed it'll be as easy as you can wish. I mean, go to www.mandriva.com . Note the gigantic green button marked "Download". :)

Re:64 bits?

[GooberToo]

I've been totally impressed with the 2007.1

Mandriva definitely went through some growing pains. Okay, okay, it was growing leprosy. The three releases prior to 2007 had some real crufty bugs and lots of things which just didn't work right. These problems brought into question the viability of the entire distribution. Since 2007, they have finally come full circle and now offer a high quality, robust (fat) distribution, like what originally made them popular. The 2007.1 release only continued to improve and polish.

Don't be afraid to try Mandriva. I've tried many different distributions and went elsewhere during their dark days, but I came back. Personally I like it much better than Fedora and especially Red Hat. I consider in on par with Ubuntu for package completeness. And the wizards is a real bonus for most inexperienced users.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[mashade]

Compiz and Beryl came way before Vista's release, buster.

Admittedly, many of the composite features are similar to what's been available in MacOSX for a while, but it's hardly a ripoff of Exposé.

Re:And now we present...

[Random Destruction]

I used Mandrake 9.0 up until they switched to mandriva, and never had to edit a grub file manually. Especially considering it used (still uses?) lilo instead of grub. I'm with the AC here.

Re:Package repositories?

[AdamWill]

"Is this any better now? Do you still have to hunt for 3 hours on the interwebs to figure out how to install anything that didn't come with the distro?"

No. No, you don't, and you haven't for several years, as I said. Please read:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software [mandriva.com]

it explains it all rather clearly.

Prob w/ QuickTime, not Firefox per se...

[Lumenary7204]

It should be noted that a careful reading of the advisory does not make any mention of the vulnerability being related to the use of Firefox per se, but rather to the use of QuickTime in conjunction with Firefox.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to use a specially crafted QuickTime object to launch the default browser within Windows. This implies that the initial vulnerability resides within QuickTime, and is supported by the following:

... QuickTime Media-Link files contain a qtnext attribute that could be used on Windows systems to launch the default browser ...

This vulnerability is compounded, however, by the ability to launch the browser with arbitrary command line options. For example, an attacker could theoretically launch an instance of Firefox (presuming it was the default browser) and use the

-chrome

switch to execute scripts that could spoof a browser user interface. For example, portions of the real Firefox interface could be hidden and a counterfeit section rendered [mozilla.org], in conjunction with a cloned web page that shows

https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn

when in reality the person is really logging into

http://www.my-identity-theft-site.tld

The ability to execute scripts from the command line was probably a feature, at least initially, but when the ramifications became clearer MFSA 2007-23 [mozilla.org] was issued and the capability removed. QuickTime bypasses this fix.

It is very likely that the code to execute said scrips exists in most, if not all, Firefox 2.0.0.6/operating system combinations.

It's the hole in QuickTime that makes the hole in Firefox more easily exploitable. On Linux this point is moot, since Apple has not yet released an official version of QuickTime for Linux.

Re:Ubuntu

[trenien]

To be completely honest, urpmi does have one drawback, as compared to apt-get: it's slower to update the packages database - and slower to parse it when you boot up rpmdrake.

Or you can go for the smaller sized packages listings, but then you get pretty much no information as to what one package is.

I wish they'd do something about it. It does make me look longingly the debian-based distros way each and every time I want to install something I mostly can't use the CLI for.

Re:transitionary distro?

[AdamWill]

Actually, sound is becoming troublesome again with recent motherboards. A lot of new motherboards use slightly differing implementations of the HDA audio codec, and each different ones needs minor tweaks to the snd-hda-intel driver to make it work 'out of the box'. I think we're up to dozens or hundreds of these tweaks now. If you went out and bought a random sample of modern laptops, the onboard sound in a lot of them would not work with, say, kernel 2.6.21.

Re:And now we present...

[Hucko]

Mandrake was the first to auto-magically dual boot for me... I think even on separate hd.