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

You mean released today, right?

[ReformedExCon]

After all, it is just Linux, so it should be covered by the GPL. Any "club members" who want to can upload a torrent.

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

Re:You mean released today, right?

[soikoban]

Certifications usually cost money. No money == no certification.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

The images available to silver and above members contain proprietary programs like Sun's Java, drivers, Flash and other Adobe Acrobats, which are free as beer but not as speech, and cannot be legally redistributed.
So it is legal to redistribute the first 4 CDs, but not the whole shebang.

I guess the distributions that get away with 'freely' distributing those are simply low-profile enough to not fear the lawyers (and yes, PCLinux OS or Buffalo Linux for example are low-profile, commercially speaking).

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: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: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...

Re:You mean released today, right?

[opkool]

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...

Mandriva already has a deal with Dell to sell Laptops with Mandriva pre-installed. http://www.mandriva.com/company/press/pr?n=/pr/pro ducts/2567

Regards

Yawn...

[Anonymous Coward]

This time of morning... if it doesn't make coffee, I don't want to know about it.

Damn, Linux is fast

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even 2006 and Linux is already there.

Interactive firewall ?

[HawkingMattress]

Knock knock, can i enter ?
I'm sorry sir, but i've been charged to disallow any bad guy to enter this particular port 25.
Uh bad news, but i have a very important message to send my grandma, and couldn't find any open relay to send it to her. it's a matter of life and death.
mmmmmm i see, since i'm not in a bad mood i'll let you pass this time but %@dùù%ù^$
Broadcast message from root (pts/6) :
The system is going down for system halt NOW!

Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[deno]

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?

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[imr]

Well, there is a lot done by via toward linux and open source.
More than other at least.

There are drivers that are released, some are even free and concern their graphic adapters.
I think this is part of one of their strategy which is to take a big part of the asian market where there is a demand for low cost low end solutions.
They are also very interrested in low energy solutions for the same reasons.

I kinda think they are wiser than some other who rely on selling high end more power hungry closed solutions in a world where oil price and therefore electricity prices are going to rise.

I go weekly there:
http://www.viaarena.com/
to find infos about this very interresting company. They even have tutorials for installing their new drivers on Mandriva and Fedora over there.

Nope, I don't have shares or anything.

Its too soon.

[Zombie Ryushu]

Its too soon. This version of Mandriva still has Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6, with backported patches. I would have waited until Christmas. I would have waited to refine some more. I think they moved too fast on this. I think that major work should have been done on Heimdal Kerberos Support. Because better LDAP backend support for Kerberos is critical to doing thinngs like Linux's "Almost but not quite" Active Directory.

Re:Its too soon.

[buchanmilne]

This version of Mandriva still has Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6

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 ... 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).

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 ... it's easy enough to provide updated packages for the distro later.

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.

Re:Its too soon.

[FullCircle]

I agree with the Firefox team.

Firefox is too much of a high-profile application and web browers are an easily hit target. IMHO, Apache and SSH among others, should be treated similarly. The risk factor is too high not to give them special attention.

The fact that the team wants everyone to keep Firefox updated is just quality control and looking out for the end user. They may have regressions occasionally, but they are trying and it works more often than not.

who comes up with this names?

[AnonymousYellowBelly]

I really want the source code for the IA software that 'invents' this names for Linux distributions and every little piece of OS/GNU/libre software out there. What comes next?

- RTFA, an 'HTML' editor?
- CowboyNeat, a file duplicator?
- IMHO, a trolling tool for /. posters?

Just in case some OSS developer reads this post, use the following names for your next text editor: Tlaloc, Escuintle, Vivanderix or Parangaracutirimicuaro. Highly descriptive names, right?

Re:who comes up with this names?

[Al_Lapalme]

Vista?

Re:who comes up with this names?

[TubeSteak]

You might mock them, but there are companies whose sole job is to pick out names for stuff.
Naming Products Is No Game

Coming up with catchy product names is a lot harder than the layman might imagine, especially in this Global Age, when a word that might inspire admiration in one country can just as easily inspire red faces or unintended guffaws in another

Release date...

[Mad_Rain]

Mandriva Linux 2006 [...] will be publicly available on October 13.

Funny, that's also Ubuntu's 5.10 (Breezy Badger) final release date. I wonder - does "Ubuntu vs. Mandriva" sound like a knock-off of a Japanese monster movie to anyone else? Or is this a "friendly" competition between linux distros?

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:Kat vs Beagle?

[Gibberx]

Cats vs. Dogs! Now that's taking a shovel and widening the trench between GNOME and KDE!

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:improved wifi support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love it to just work out of the box.

You are barking at the wrong tree. Blame the HW vendors...

Not the only centrino certified Linux

[stm2]

Linspire people said they also were centrino certified, the even sell laptops with Linspire on in.

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.

By supported file types:

[a.different.perspect]

Beagle:

Office: OpenOffice.org 1.0 (SXW, SXC, SXI, and more), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (ODT, ODP and more), Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), AbiWord (ABW), Rich Text Format (RTF)

Standard: PDF, HTML, Plain text

Documentation: Texinfo, Man pages, Docbook, Monodoc, Windows help files (CHM), Application launchers

Multimedia: Images (JPEG, PNG, SVG), Audio (MP3, OGG, FLAC)

Network: Evolution mail, calendar, and addressbook, Gaim IM and IRC logs, Firefox/Epiphany web pages (as you view them, through browser extensions), Blam and Liferea RSS feeds, Tomboy notes

Kat:

Office: OpenOffice.org 1.0 (SXW, SXI, SXC, SXM), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (ODT, ODP, ODS, ODF, ODS, ODC), Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), Rich Text Format (RTF), Gnumeric, KOffice (KWD, KPR, KSP, KFO), Lyx, Tex, Device Independent Document (DVI)

Standard: PDF, PostScript, HTML, Plain text

Documentation: Man pages, Debian Package (DEB)

Other: BibTex Bibliographic database (BBL, BIB), Molecular Database Limited Molecule (MDL), DocBook Document (DBK)

Re::Sighs:

[jellomizer]

But is everything part of this distribution GNU? Or does it have apache?

RMS is actually quite wrong about it. He just want to gain attention by saying it should be called GNU/Linux Linux is the kernel the Operating system is actually different from each version. I think in order to have an Operating System called GNU Linux all the parts need to be GNU not just some of the parts. RMS needs an other hobbie something that will help him release some of the stress in his life, maybe he should take voice lessons or something, or skiing. If not having you license as part of a name really makes you annoyed you should reconsider your life.

Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Azureflare]

I installed it on my desktop and laptop, and this version of Mandrake/Mandriva is definitely one of the best in a while. Everything just works (wireless setup/installation has become a breeze). If you haven't used Mandriva before, wait until the Discovery shows up on some torrent sites or wait for the public release. It's well worth it. Especially after the Connectiva merger, Mandriva seems to have gained a lot in terms of stability. I don't use KDE all the time so I can't speak to the features, but when I fired it up it looked very nice

A lot of the artwork has changed to a much more professional look than 2005LE (You will know what I'm talking about if you installed/used 2005LE).

I'm using the powerpack since I'm a silver club member and I volunteered to be an early seeder so I got it early, and I couldn't be happier. If you want a linux distro that Just Works, try it out some time.

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Maqueo]

Mandrake 9.2 was my first linux distribution, and I have to say, it was the ONLY distribution that supported everyhting out of the box correctly on my laptop (except wifi, but that was quite easy to install). Stuff that still nowadays takes me a good while to get going on another distribution.

What I really didn't like was Mandrake's logo all over the place, and the rpm installs. Dependencies were a real pain in the ass.

How's the package handling? I prefer downloading it from the net, as opposed to installing from the CDs (that is if they had what I needed on them).

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Azureflare]

Yeah, really in the long term downloading from the net is the way to go. After the urpmi mirrors come up, usually a few days from release due to propogation delays, I uncheck all my removable media and use only net sources. It's the only way to go; it's so convenient since the internet is always on.

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).

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Rinnt]

A lot of the artwork has changed to a much more professional look than 2005LE (You will know what I'm talking about if you installed/used 2005LE).

Yeah, I do know what you mean. I'm assuming you're refering to that crazy, star-eyed looking penguin that is displayed on boot. Man that's embarrassing. My wife seriously though it was Daffy Duck! So now whem I'm booting my LE2005 install at work, I have people thinking that Daffy Duck is built into my OS?

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[chawly]

Daffy Duck you say. You sure that they didn't think it was Daffy Duck that was using the computer ?

Re:Great day for linux

[a.different.perspect]

Actually, according to DistroWatch, the top ten distributions are:

1 Ubuntu 2724
2 Mandriva 1739
3 SUSE 1415
4 Fedora 1268
5 MEPIS 1115
6 KNOPPIX 931
7 Debian 888
8 Damn Small 679
9 Gentoo 612
10 Slackware 597

Perhaps my counting skilz are not as honed as yours. Really, though, DistroWatch visitors are notoriously fickle, and the rankings for the distributions in #2-4 usually depend on how long ago their last release was. Expect to see Mandriva's numbers soar shortly, and Fedora's to decline further, at least until FC5.

Re:Elitism

[GraemeDonaldson]

Yes, because it's totally Mandr[ake|iva]'s fault that LG decided to use a certain ATAPI command (which, according to ATAPI spec, should do nothing or return an error) and make it nuke the firmware. For the record, I experienced the same problem on 2 other mainstream distros which I shall not name, to minimise flamewars.

Re:hardly newsworthy

[Thanatos Starfire]

OSX gets further along than linux not just because of one vision, but also because of one set of hardware specs. They are the manufacturer of the equipment, making development of an OS a helluva lot simpler. Also, they charge for their software.

Re:KAT

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to refute this. Beagle does not use extended attributes for searching. It uses a (possibly equally large) lucene repository for that.
Beagle, like Kat, uses bxtended attributes for remembering what files have already been indexed to avoid to reindex them.

Re::Sighs:

[Nasarius]

No no no. The operating system is more than just the kernel, but it does not encompass everything in the distro. In particular, glibc is a crucial part of the OS. That said, "Linux" has come to mean any Linux-based OS, so RMS will just have to deal.

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:Some tips and first impressions

[lbbros]

You can just stop logrotate from rotating acpi (see Errata on the wiki)log and you'll workaround the X 99% CPU usage.

Re:They could have been more specific

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Why is everybody obessed with boot/shutdown times on Linux boxes? Thought the whole point of Linux was to avoid reboots.

Re::Sighs:

[synthespian]

The operating system is more than just the kernel

The funny thing is Andrew Tanenbaum doesn't agree with you (or Stallman).

Non-Existant Mandriva Documentation

[algae]

It seems like Mandriva have put out a fine operating system, but as an admin, it sucks to not have any kind of documentation or bug support. For example, both Debian and FreeBSD have extensive documentation easily accessable from their web sites. Where's the equivelant for Mandriva? Same goes with bug reporting; I'm not going to track down the links, but it's pretty trivial to submit bug reports for any of Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, even RedHat, but I looked all up and down Mandriva's site and didn't see any kind of bug tracking system, not even a mailto: field.

So, like I said, as an IT admin, I'm not going to support an OS that isn't going to support me.

Re:Non-Existant Mandriva Documentation

[lbbros]

There is bugzilla and a wiki.

Install went fine

[deno]

Installing the ML 2006 on this MB is quite eventless. It works. Watching DVDs works fine (i.e. it`s not too slow for this task) out of the box. Haven't tried the divX yet. No idea how much faster the SP8000 will be when I re-compile the Xorg, but "out of the box" the 3D stuff is deadly slow.

I added the plf and contrib as urpmi sources, and installed the pre-copiled ivtv and myth* rpms. Also seems to work OK, but m still missing the fb device associated with PVR350. Now I'm stuck on trying to get a frequencies list for Austria. :-(

In the meantime I tried recompiling the kernel, which just proved what we already know: this machine shouldn't be used for CPU intensive tasks.

BTW, the machine needs ca. 40W, and runs withouth any fans. Its getting somewhat warm, but seems to be stable for now. Let's see hw long will it survive. .-)