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."
I'm currently downloading the M2006, and I wonder how will it work with SP8000 mini-ITX motherboard.
It took me a while to decide upon actually buying such a slow system, but I presume it will be fast enough for a job at hand, which is: "quietly sit in my living room, act as a web, DynDNS, login and file server for my local network, and do the multimedia stuff when needed (mp3, TV, DVDs and DivX).
The problem is that VIA doesn't really play nicely with Linux, and one had to do quite a lot of work on his own in the past before getting a reasonably well working system. Wonder how much work has been done in this direction (if any) by Mandriva folks since 2005LE?
Naming Products Is No Game
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This version of Mandriva still has Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6
... so there is no reason Firefox should be exempt (though the Firefox team seems to believe all linux distros should treat Firefox differently to the other 5000 packages they ship).
... it's easy enough to provide updated packages for the distro later.
Why are version numbers important? Do you check the version number of every single package you use, and always update it even if it is one point release behind?
Realise that a distribution has a release schedule, and usually that involves imposing a version freeze, to prevent new bugs creeping into an otherwise well-understood release (with it's known bugs that must still be fixed etc). Regressions have occured in Firefox releases
I think that major work should have been done on Heimdal Kerberos Support
So do I, but there are more important issues. And, since we don't build any packages against the heimdal libraries at present
Because better LDAP backend support for Kerberos is critical to doing thinngs like Linux's "Almost but not quite" Active Directory.
Well, part of that requires a stable, supported LDAP server, which was one of those more important issues. The OpenLDAP packages we ship are quite decent, and all packages were rebuilt against the new major version, plus we are committed to shipping updates as 2.3.x matures (although most users of 2.3.x seem to find it more stable than 2.2.x already).
Of course, real "Active Directory" features will come with samba4, which won't be available any time this year.
So, delaying the release for one aspect would not compare to the commercial comittments Mandriva has to shipping this release in time for stocking shelves ahead of the festive season.
But, the work in preparation for samba4 will continue, and as always, packages for older releases will be made available as well.
Dependencies are really not a problem with urpmi, as long as you stick to official mandrake/mandriva rpms. As soon as you go on pbone or get rpms from other distributions, problems will probably happen.
Usually if it's not in the mandrake main or contrib repositories (that's pretty rare) then the best option is to either search for a mandrake rpm, look for a .i386.rpm (one that isn't distribution specific) or failing that compiling from the tar file.
Mandriva isn't for everybody of course, if you've got debian working great then that's the way to go. I really like it because I just don't have to waste time (though debian is pretty awesome, if you know what you're doing).