Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released

AdamWill writes "Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Download the hybrid live / install One or the purely free / open source software Free. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring includes the latest software (KDE 3.5.6, GNOME 2.18, Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0) and several major new features: Metisse, the most innovative accelerated 3D desktop technology; open source telephony with WengoPhone; Google desktop applications including Picasa and Earth; updates and improvements to many of the Mandriva configuration tools, and the brand new drakvirt for configuring virtualization; significantly improved hardware support, including greatly improved graphics card detection and support for several common laptop memory card readers; and a brand new desktop theme. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring is available in the full range of editions, including the freely downloadable One and Free, as well as the commercial Discovery, Powerpack and Powerpack+. For more information see the Spring product page and the Wiki page, where you can find download and installation instructions, the Release Tour, the Release Notes and the Errata."

Comments

Re:Why?

[AvitarX]

If they are funding projects like Metisse I think we need more.

Re:adverts

[goombah99]

Let's write our own adds. Post below why you think Mandriva is good. What's its forte. What sets it apart. Why would I choose this distro? Be sure to post a soundbite too. for example "Ubuntu: it's the desktop linux for people who aren't experts". Or Debian "Steady and depandable, and an awesome package (manager)". etc.. Damn Small " Small and fast, in and out quickly".

Re:Why?

[Osty]

It is a bit ironic that you say that, because Mandriva is a consolidation of Mandrake and Conectiva.

Both of which were forks of Redhat, leaving us with two distros where initially there was one.

Re:Why?

[solanum]

Firstly because this is open source and free (as in speech) software*, so people can do whatever they like with it. If I want to release my own Linux distribution it's up to me, I don't need anyone else's permission.

Secondly, I personally rate Mandriva way above Ubuntu, I've used Mandriva for about three times as long as Ubuntu has even existed. After all the hype I did ditch Mandriva for Ubuntu for a while, but it was so frustrating that I switched back. The installer for Mandriva is second to none (whereas Ubuntu wouldn't even let me install grub to anywhere other than the MBR - yeah, I found out later there is another version of Ubuntu that would - yet another download). Also, the admin tools for Mandriva were better and there were more of them and finally, when I tried it Kubuntu was a very poor second cousin to the base Ubuntu (I wanted KDE) and there were all sorts of problems with it. Dunno whether that has changed since they said they would improve KDE support.

*Yeah, I know Mandriva push their commercial versions, but you don't have to buy 'em and all the software is available elsewhere, e.g. PLF.

Re:adverts

[zippthorne]

Actually.. Mandrake used to be the "desktop linux for people who aren't experts." I remember buying my first copy of it in Best Buy about 7 years ago. Came with a good deal of documentation, and worked pretty well right outta the box. I think it was somewhat of a Red Hat fork at the time (it used RPM, and claimed to use DEB too IIRC, but I don't remember trying anything but RPM.) During the time when Red Hat was a bear to download (at my university connection, it would've taken me weeks to get the ISO) the next version of Mandrake was a quick 2-hour d/l away.

Anyway, I've always found Mandrake easy to configure (with their drake- graphical utilities). In some ways it was easier than Ubuntu. It certainly had a friendlier (though not easier) install process. Drakedisk was the most intuitive, stable, and asthetically pleasing graphical partition manager I've used. It was far better than Ubuntu's offering in that area.

The thing that Ubuntu did better than mandrake enough to make me switch though was package management. Mandrake had OK management, actually, good management for the pay-version, but the free version had to either hack something together to use their freely accessable but intended for-pay package servers or hunt down updates for every package manually.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[Coryoth]

Unlike Beryl and Compiz, Metisse actually seems to be based around the idea of increasing productivity. That's nice to know, because that's not the impression I got from their demonstration videos which feature "folding windows", tilting windows at weird angles in 3D, and a weird sort of mirror reflection effect. That's nice to show off what the engine can do, but in principle all the other fancy 3D managers can do those too -- what really interests me is, as you discuss, actually using all that power to add productivity. I agree that the pager looks nice (although the other effects in that video are a little underwhelming in the productivity stakes). The shading effects shown here could be used nicely to gray out unfocussed windows which, I agree, might be nice (as long as it isn't carried too far). Still, I'm waiting for people to get bored with the gee whiz effects and the more useful things to start to shake themselves out.

Re:my dream...

[Coryoth]

I'm not talking about merging all the open source projects, I'm just talking about all the redundant putting together of all the projects (aka distributions). This will inevitably happen as "Linux" slowly gets more mainstream and greater desktop market share. What do I mean? Well it isn't going to be "Linux" as the amorphous mass of distirbutions that mainstream users will come to know, but rather a very small handful of distributions. As market share expands it will be that very small handful that will be gaining in audience, while all the other distributions will continue to be the small niche items that they are. Right now, because everything is relatively niche, the difference between "mainstream" and "niche" distributions is not that apparent. Once Linux becomes less of niche desktop OS (and that will happen, just very slowly) the difference will become more clear.

Re:Google Earth is compelling?

[Frosty Piss]

I mean, cool for Google to make it OSS, but does the availability of Google Earth mean anything from a practical perspective?

Well... If you troll Google Earth over the San Fernando Valley (home of the American porn industry), you can spy in on all the outdoor porn shoots.

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

Mandriva is a legitimate zero cost commercially supported desktop Linux distribution. There is only one other distribution in that category: Ubuntu. Having a bunch of distros in the same niche would be redundant, but having two is a good thing. Mandriva is definatly one of the major players, and they have been for a very long time.

Re:Here's why:

[Chandon Seldon]

Simple desktop distros: Ubuntu and Mandriva.
Enterprise-priced server support: Red Hat and SuSE.
Community supported for techies: Debian and Gentoo.
Localized in Chinese: Red Flag.

I wouldn't really consider any of the other distros to be "major" (ignoring non general-purpose PC platforms).

I'm still on Mandriva

[rmm4pi8]

Mandrake 8.1 was my first Linux distro, and it's just kept getting better since then, with perhaps the two low spots of 10.0 and 2006.0, both of which very unstable for me--I think the former correllated to bankrupty and the latter to the round of mergers. 2006.0 actually drove me to try Kubuntu (I'm solidly in the KDE camp) which I found very lacking from the perspective of a Mandriva user--difficult to uninstall packages I didn't want (because of the way Kubuntu is really just a package which lists all of the KDE packages as dependencies...), with less good wireless configuration support, a less good partition manager, less good multimedia support, etc.

I am now a full time Linux admin, and while I typically use either RHEL/CentOS or Debian on the server, the few Linux workstations in my company are all running Mandriva. The partitioning tool and hardware support are just the best of any distribution I've tried, and with a quick trip to easyurpmi to set up the external repositories, the userland is the best out there as well. I find PLF way easier to use than all the tricks required to get media codecs and such on Ubuntu.

And I still like it enough that even though I do Linux administration for a living, I still offer free Mandriva email support, which perhaps 10 of you have taken me up on, some of you frequently. Seriously...have a problem, I'll help you out if I can. Nothing against the other distros, but despite its reputation as being for beginners, I haven't found anything about it that's less friendly to experienced admins (for instance, the drak tools don't overwrite hand-edited config files the way SuSE's YaST does). Can anyone tell me what has started the 'less good for experts' tagline, other than that experts don't like to be seen using the distro that all the new users are trying out?

easyurpmi?

[robbo]

You've never heard of easy urpmi? I just update the mirror and run 'urpmi.update -a'. I've had smooth upgrades all the way from Mandrake 9.2 to Mdv 2007.

I'm sick of Linux

[tsa]

I've been using Linux for ten years now and I get more and more disappointed by it. Ten years ago there weren't many user-friendly distros out and I started with Slackware. I'm still very happy my friend dragged me into using that because I am now a savvy *nix amateur. But! During the last ten years I kept hearing that, yes, Linux is now really almost ready for the desktop, and world domination is just around the corner. I tried some other distros over the years (Suse, Redhat), but I kept coming back to Slackware. About a year ago I changed to Ubuntu because I didn't like all the configuration I had to do after every Slackware upgrade anymore. 'Ubuntu works out of the box!' the website assured me. After install I spent hours getting X to work right. It only wanted to run in 1024x768 @ 60 Hz. Thanks to my experience with Slackware and my backups I could edit xorg.conf to fix that. Now I have a working install, but Ubuntu is so slow that it's a pain to use. And I haven't been able to watch a movie on it yet. Configuring Gnome was a pain, and there isn't much documentation on how to start on the Ubuntu website either. I find the whole Ubuntu experience very disappointing. The only thing that keeps me from changing to a Mac completely (I have a MacBook Pro which I love) is the lack of choice in hardware. Changing to Windows is of course no option; I never understood why that OS is used so much. So I keep using Linux, but I almost never use my main machine as anything other than a file server anymore. Linux is very good at that, no matter which distro you use.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Vintermann]

Perhaps you could try... oh, I don't know, Mandriva?

I use it, wouldn't switch to a mac for the world. They don't even have the keys where they should be!

Re:adverts

[AdamWill]

RPM is not 'basically dead'. Mandriva Linux does not use an APT derived package manager. It uses urpmi and rpmdrake, developed in house at Mandriva. Mandriva Linux Free and the GNOME version of Mandriva Linux One are composed of 100% free / open source software and are entirely free to download. We have been producing the Free edition of Mandriva Linux since 1998 and it has always consisted of 100% free / open source software. The KDE version of Mandriva Linux One is free to download but does contain some proprietary drivers for the convenience of those who use them (NVIDIA, ATI, Centrino wireless etc).