Mandriva Linux 2006 Released

mhrivnak writes "Today, Mandriva Linux 2006 was released to Club members, and the tree will be publicly available on October 13. New features include the Kat Desktop Search Environment, an interactive firewall, and enhanced wifi support with Mandriva being the only Linux distribution certified for Centrino hardware. The integration of technology from Conectiva and Lycoris has led to improved installation (in 40+ languages), better package management, and quicker boot time."

Comments

Re:You mean released today, right?

[timbo234]

Or is there some aspects of the system that aren't GPL and can't be uploaded?

Yep. The powerpack versions (either the full DVD or 7 CD set) contain closed-source software and aren't redistrutable. The 4CD version (1 more than the publicly available download version) that's available to the lowest level of club membership should be alright though.

As always with Mandrake all the software available in the powerpack, except the closed-source stuff, and more is available through the mirrors listed at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

Re:KAT

[Anonymous Coward]

KAT is similar to Google Desktop Search -- it needs to build a huge database before being able to search -- and that takes time and HD space. (It takes multiple hours on my AMD64 to index my 20GB Home directory). After indexing however, Kat's pretty instantaneous to search (it takes a few seconds to search for a phrase inside my home directory -- not bad at all! That's the advantage over grep/find/locate, not to mention that these tools can't search inside PDF's or ODT/SXW's without a struggle!

Compared to Beagle, I have to rank it below. Beagle searches virtually instantaneously with the help of Extended Attributes, with no need for a giant search index.

Re:They could have been more specific

[pterjan]

Err the developpers don't know how much time it will spend to boot on your machine with your set of services activated...
Some examples on tuxmachines for the RC1 http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/2551 vs http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/2569

AMD 2800+, kt400 mb, 512mb 333ddr ram, and a NVIDIA 6800.

        * Boots: 20 seconds
        * KDE: 12 seconds
        * OpenOffice: 4 seconds
        * Mozilla: 3 seconds
        * Shutdown: 15 seconds

Compared to opensuse on the same machine :

        * Boot up: 26 seconds
        * KDE: 22 seconds
        * OpenOffice: 7 seconds
        * Firefox: 3 seconds (not counting loading the default Novell webpage)
        * Shutdown: 20 seconds

Re:You mean released today, right?

[imr]

The CDs available to standard club membres now countains the proprietary drivers. It's not equivalent to the download edition that should hit the mirrors in 2 weeks.
The standard members complained that they didnt get much for their 60$/ and have been listened to.

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[imr]

kat is not really ready for primetime. It has been included already as a gesture of faith toward the developper and his solution.
The mandriva KDE guy is working a lot on this, and they are hosting the site of the developper.
I expect it will improve and get updated frequently, but tight now, the best solution is to disable it:
Before login do this in your home directory
touch ~/.mdv-no_kat
or for all new users:
touch /etc/skel/.mdv-no_kat

Simpler, remove it:
urpme kat

Now, that I said that, I think they did the wise thing in choosing kat. Kat is the first brick in what will be tenor, the underlying search engine of KDE4.
They have to make a move in this direction because google and others are already moving toward it. And if linux is not to be left behind once more, distros need to move now.
By not choosing beagle, they imply they don't want to go the (patented) mono road. (beagle will still work on a mandriva, one dev wants to have it soon because he doesnt like kat :) ).
All this is pure speculation on my part.

fatal flaw in LG's CD-ROM firmwares

[buchanmilne]

Come on, you can read, you should know by now that:
1)Mandrakesoft tested on LG hardware (including affected models) for this release, but none of the CD-ROM drives they tested had an old enough firmware to be affected
2)Gentoo had the same bug in their ready-for-the-world live gaming CDs (and hadn't tracked it down).
3)The bug was on LGs side, using a valid CD-RW command to flash the drives on their CD-ROM drives, violating standards
4)LG replaced/fixed drives
5)Mandriva did their bit in tracking down the issue, re-issuing installation media, providing a list of affected devices
6)If Mandriva hadn't merged the patch, some other popular distro would have, and would also likely not have picked it up until the release was out the door. Since Mandriva found it, the packet-writing patch was fixed to use another means to check if the drive has write capabilities, and now all linux users can have the feature without danger.

Stop bringing this up, hardware problems due to a vendor's faulty firmware is irrelevant.

Some tips and first impressions

[InodoroPereyra]

Allright, I am running it (from the development branch, Cooker, when they froze all checkins).

If you are planning to run it, you may consider a quick look at: The Mandriva 2006 Twiki Page. It has links to the Errata Page, Release Notes and the Distro Changelog

My first impressions:

• Very Fast. Boots fast (see the link above). It runs very fast, I guess because of the use of gcc4. Very, very responsive.
• Sexy. Fonts look great, KDE 3.4.2 looks fantastic. It also is very useable, again, mainly because of KDE in my setup. The Mandrake tools are, as always, greatly appreciated, including urpmi. Haven't tried using s.m.a.r.t. yet.
• No Kat, No ACPI. YMMV, but Kat brings my desktop down ot its knees. It takes way too much CPU usage. I uninstalled it. And there is a know bug (follow the links above) in X org that they will try to fix soon, but the quick workaround is to disable ACPI. Please don't bitch, if you can't live without it (like if you have a laptop), just wait a couple weeks for the fix and then you install
• OOO 2.0. I am running the Open Office 2.0 from the contributed packages, it runs great, I am really loving it. Point your software manager to the Contrib medium and install (or join the Club and everything will be even easier). There is a nice ooo-kde package to integrate (not perfect yet) with KDE. Sweet.

Cheers,
Don Inodoro

Re:You mean released today, right?

[arivanov]

Intel will not allow you to use Centrino BRANDING if you cannot deliver the battery life and WiFi features promissed by Intel Marketing in the Centrino marketing campaign shots. This essentially means that you cannot mention the name Centrino in any of your promotional literature, adverts and compliance statements.

In order to comply with this spec (and use the name)you must have a system that is capable to use runtime frequency alteration and do it effectively enough to deliver the battery life promissed for an average load. No linux kernel prior to 2.6.7 can do it. 2.6.9-2.6.11 with a correctly configured cpufreqd gets close, but not quite enough. If you want to really do it you need to have the on-demand CPUfreq kernel policy manager working. Which means IIRC 2.6.12+ or a heavy dose of backported patches. Further to that you have to have Intel wifi drivers and improvements to the 802.11 stack which are not mainline kernel yet.

There are also a few other conditions, but these are the important ones.

Frankly, the only reason to get through all this idiocy is if there is a laptop manufacturer there waiting to start shipping Linux as an option on their laptops. Wonder who this is...