Mandriva Linux 2009 Alpha 2 Released

AdamWill writes "The Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring Alpha 2, marking the first public pre-release of the upcoming Mandriva Linux 2009. This alpha introduces several significant changes, most obviously the inclusion of KDE 4 — 4.1 beta 2, specifically — as the default version of KDE, and the latest development version of GNOME, 2.23.4. The kernel has also been updated to release 2.6.26rc7. Another feature of interest to many users will be the addition of orphan package tracking (and optional automatic removal) to the urpmi package manager. Of course, many applications have been updated (although the default version of Mozilla Firefox is still currently 2.0.x), and most of the distribution has been rebuilt with a new GCC version, 4.3. Mandriva warns that this is a true alpha, likely to contain many bugs related to the new version of KDE. Please install it only in a test environment, and especially do not use it as an upgrade from any earlier Mandriva Linux release."

Re:What is Mandriva's market anymore, anyways?

[davmoo]

I swear I don't mean to be difficult here, I'm just stating my own experiences.

>What market is Mandriva serving these days?

The market that wants the stuff to work. Out of the box. With no bit twiddling.

My PCs are not bleeding edge, and they don't use anything non-standard. Same for my laptops. And I have not even once been able to get any version of Ubuntu, or any of its derivatives, to install correctly on anything I own without having to majorly fight with it. And that includes Hardy Heron.

Mandriva, on the other hand, is just the opposite. It has never once failed to install correctly, straight out of the box, no hammering required.

Contrary to what everyone here likes to report, I've never had problems installing any version of Windows on any hardware I own (and that includes Vista). I expect Linux to be no different. If I have to fire up so much as a text editor to make alterations to get the distribution to install, then its garbage. I should be able to put the DVD in a drive, fire it up, answer some questions, and get a working installation. Just like I do with Windows. Mandriva, and Mandrake before it, is the one distribution of Linux that "just works" for me. Each and every time, on each and every machine I put it on.

I'll probably install the alpha on a test machine tonight.

Re:News?

[AdamWill]

The main point is configuration utilities. Of the other mainstream distros, only SUSE's YaST has anything like the range of the Mandriva Control Center, but it doesn't take kindly to you altering the files it controls manually (it tends to just reset them, completely overwriting your manual modifications). MDV doesn't do this. That was what the OP meant with that point. Ubuntu and Fedora (and derivatives) have nothing like MCC / YaST.

Re:paid ad?

[AdamWill]

Slashdot don't take paid ads as news. I submitted this through the submission form same as everyone else (and as noted above, /. rejects 95% of MDV-related stories). My contact address is .mandriva.com, so whoever reads the submissions knows I work for MDV.

And, yes, of course we're relevant. We're probably the fourth biggest distribution overall (behind Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora / RH). We're the largest remaining independent commercial desktop Linux distributor (excepting Canonical, which is not really a conventional company but basically entirely funded out of Mr. Shuttleworth's pocket) - if you want a company that exists by providing Linux distributions to end-users (and doesn't do it as a loss leader or a development spin off), Mandriva is basically it. And 2008 Spring got probably the best overall reviews out of the crop released at the same time, as noted by Distrowatch this week.

Re:What is Mandriva's market anymore, anyways?

[AdamWill]

The same market as always, better than Ubuntu does. ;) No, seriously, give it a try, you might be surprised.

We do actually have a reasonably large enterprise business, mainly in Europe (and particularly France, obviously). We also have several significant OEM deals, including a pre-load deal with one of the largest Brazilian PC manufacturers (several thousand PCs are shipped pre-loaded with Mandriva in Brazil every month). We also have an involvement with Intel's Classmate PC program, we're involved in a large project in Angola to basically revamp its entire national IT structure, and there's a netbook / mini-laptop / whatever you call them coming out with Mandriva pre-loaded later this year - the Gdium (http://www.gdium.com). But yeah, we still have a significant (and growing) user base among normal every day Linux users. Sales of the Powerpack and Flash are pretty strong, and there's many times more people using the free editions.

Re:News?

[AdamWill]

When you find a package with an error like that, please report it on the forums or (preferably) to Bugzilla - it'll help in getting it fixed. It does happen sometimes, mostly to contrib packages when the package gets rotten (because a maintainer leaves or stops maintaining a package for some reason). For 2009 there should be no such problems within the /main repository, we are working on ensuring that at present.

Re:What is Mandriva's market anymore, anyways?

[AdamWill]

We don't use full hdlists any more; it was replaced with a system where the information is split across several .xml files. This allows the necessary file to be downloaded on-the-fly (for instance, if you try to look at a package's file list in rpmdrake - or run urpmq -l - then the .xml file that contains file lists for all the packages in that repository will be downloaded at that time).

If you'd rather have one big wait when you update your repositories rather than a smaller wait the first time you try and access a specific type of data for a given repository, you can go to the repository editing program, go to Options / Global Options, and set "XML meta-data download policy" to Update-only. That should give you basically the same behaviour as you used to have with full hdlists. I'm not aware of any general problem with the packaged NVIDIA drivers. They work normally for most users. If you give more specific information about the problem (maybe in our forums or by email), I will try and help.

Re:Who does Mandriva appeal to? Me!

[ReinoutS]

I used to be a silver member in Mandrivaclub (two years back I think) - but I got a bit fedup having to pay for access to repositories that provide DKMS versions of proprietary nvidia drivers and such and I didn't like the 3rd party repositories for that stuff because they were messy.

This policy has been abandoned. All repositories except the commercial software ones are available to all at no charge. That includes the repository with the proprietary drivers.