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Mandriva Linux 2008 Now Available
AdamWill writes "Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site and on the network of public mirror servers. In 2008 you will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you've come to expect. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards, and wireless chips). There is a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, a new network configuration center, and a set of improvements to the Mandriva software management tools. Read about the new features in depth in the release tour, or view the release notes. The One installation CD is the recommended download: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included."
Proper link should be: http://www.mandriva.com/en/download.html
liqbase
Mandriva already had shiney window manager effects didn't they? Have they dropped Matisse in favor of Compiz?
http://www.mhall119.com
I'm a bit of a "man driver" myself, sweety.
XXXX
You thought my name meant what? How very dare you!
What is the deal with every single large distro out there incorporating 3d acelerated desktops and shining bells and whistles as the main features in all new releases? Sadly, this says mush about the state of computing today (and not only Linuzzz, but desktop computing in general). We had a time when functionality was the fundamental thing, and shining features were secundary. The, in the end of the 90s, bells and whistles became more importand, and real features were cecondary. Gladly, in the begining of the 00s we semmed to have a resurrection of the sobriety: good features were added and pwoplw were cautious when adding flashing crap. Now, we have the return of the insanity, once again, and no desktop Linuzz or no-Linuz distro seem to miss some fatual features like a rotating cube, transparent borders or trembling controls...Oh well...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
It's interesting they are including all this NON-Free stuff by default, it seems like they are trying to be linux mint.
I don't applaud their inclusion of proprietary binaries in GNU+linux as default
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
This seems to be a follow up to the ask slashdot about POS linux?
Ubuntu has basically stolen all the hype mandriva used to have hasn't it?
Mandriva used to be one of the only 'gratuis' distros which had a nice desktop by default
didn't it pioneer the way towards 'point and click', 'just working'?
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
No love for the black man?
This guy's pissing me off, and I'm going to tell him one thing Mandriva Linux has that is very practical that no other Linux has unless you want to start your own mirror system. Domain based parallel application installation. In particular, using LDAP and Kerberos, you can use Kerberos authentication to mass deploy an entire network of application in one command. It uses LDAP to check it, Kerberos to authenticate it, SSH to copy it, and urpmi to install it. This is something I have not seen with any other Linux.
Linux has Active Directory authentication out of the box, an easy front end to ndiswrapper, an easy method for adding Internet software repositories. I really hate this guy. e all work so hard and he tramples on everything we have done.
Mark my words, I will see you using a Linux Desktop yet!
using GNU/linux
>>**
varients accepted:
using GNU/unix
uning GNU/minix
using GNU/some_thing_else
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
How does this compare to say Ubuntu for people who are still somewhat new to Linux? Last time I remember Mandriva requiring manual editing of the grub file off the bat which isn't so bad now, but I question if it'll put off new users.
Seems to be most new linux releases are adopting Compiz Fusion in place of what they had/didn't have before. Ubuntu's new release (Gutsy Gibbon) will be using Compiz Fusion by default also. Hopefully Compiz Fusion isn't too buggy, its on the newer side, or there are going to be alot of angry Linux users.
I mean, well, y'know...
I can't tell if my inability to find the 64-bit version of One or Free is due to their confusing site design, my incompetence, or because those versions don't actually exist. Several places on their site say that all versions are available from "the official download site": http://www.mandriva.com/archives/ But there's no indication there at all of how to get the 64-bit versions (at least, not at the time I'm writing this). I can't say that I'm impressed by the apparent lack of internal coordination on their website for this release: several links point to the Spring 2007 edition as still being current.
I hate to draw the conclusion that this is (yet) one more sign of Mandriva's decreasing relevance, but I would be very surprised if Ubuntu's upcoming release exhibited any of these kinds of quirks.
Pretty much all the latest "releases" from mandriva look like untestrd betas: broken package dependencies, not working releases etc, the worst one being 2007.0. Somehow i doubt this one is any better than the previous releases. Mandriva has always been the one to put the latest and quite often not the greatest, not thoroughly tested software. I agree with the previous poster: Linux has mostly become about appearance and not about functionality/usability.
Why wouldn't it come with the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.7?
Someone tell them that it's not 2008 for another 12 weeks. Is this going to be like cars, where the "2008" models were actually made in early 2007 - and when you sell it, it looks a year newer than it actually is?
Sorry, car analogy.
RC1 was out what... maybe 1 month ago? I tried it and after countless bugs, widgets/controls that didn't work, and other annoying nuisances that I didn't feel like fixing - I dropped it. I was surprised to see a final version released so soon.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
I hope by "improvements," they mean returning some of the functionality the software management tools used to have. There was a time when the software manager would give you basic information, like the total number of packages selected and their sizes, overall progress etc. Then, a couple of releases back, all of that info disappeared. There may be a way of getting "verbose" output, but the default is decidedly minimalist.
I don't care why you're posting AC
However, if you're adventurous and would like to build your own Linux box with all bleeding-edge components, you could try the guidelines posted on the "Linux From Scratch" website (not an endorsement, just a place to start):
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
Please subscribne mwje towo yours newslettesd!
While the feature-list and included packages is very impressive, the default KDE desktop is truly hideous:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/uploads/9/9a/2008-kde-desktop.png
I realize this is a matter of personal taste, and that one can easily alter the look of the desktop, but still... I challenge someone to claim that the taskbar and menu-button look nice. Even the easter bunny wouldn't pick that light pastel blue as a default color. First impressions do matter.
It is definitely Ubuntu for me.
I just can't bring myself to using a distro whose name is dangerously close to "Mangina"
Gee, an announcement of a new distro! Is that an invitation to discussion? On /.?
/. "editors" might sincerely want to encourage dialog and discussion, but they have created a framework where such comments will be targeted for destruction. It does not work very well. No wonder /. is becoming an increasingly minor anachronism while the rest of the Internet continues to grow and develop rapidly. It's called coasting to oblivion.
/. these days. I'm not joking, even recursively. [Or am I?] I do appreciate humor, but I'm sadly humor impaired when it comes to producing jokes. Is the death of humor on /. due to the punitive moderation of +funny, or have the authentically interesting and humorous people simply been completely bored (and negatively moderated) out of the place? The ghosts of /. want to know why! (That was supposed to be a joke about a tabloid newspaper advertisement, but I can't even remember the original ad, which makes it hard to imagine the joke.)
/., I see no reason to care.
An announcement of a new distro would certainly seem to be an invitation to discuss the features and merits and even compare them to other distros. Of course, if you do a good job of presenting your position, then people who disagree with you but who are too lazy or incompetent to say why they disagree will simply make make your position go away. After all, the negative mods are anonymous, so no one will ever know who the lazy cowards are, right?
Actually, I do have a fair bit to say on these topics. I was just testing two new distros last night, and I could say something about the features and problems I found. I do have a favorite distro and several years experience with it, and my company uses a different distro, and I've experimented with at least one one other (off the top of my head). Even though I don't know Mandriva, it would be reasonable to ask about various features in relation to Mandriva or to seek general advice about distro testing.
And the more carefully I present interesting or useful information, the more likely it becomes that my post will disappear into the black hole of negative mods. Why don't I feel motivated?
I could even go deeper than that to consider the question of freedom. Hint: It's about choice. Obviously there would be no freedom to pick OSes if Microsoft had its way, but within the Linux community the interesting question is how much choice is too much? At what point does excessive choice simply blind you to the possibilities?
I could easily contextualize any of these topics based on my experiences with the various distros. I might even be amusing with some of my dumb questions, or possibly be enlightened by unexpected wisdom--but most likely writing too clearly will offend some cowardly anonymous moderator who will simply shoot my comment in the head with a truly meaningless "overrated" mod.
In engineering terms this is called negative dynamic stability. I suppose that the
Actually, the part that pisses me off is that there is almost no humor left on
Now I predict that if I have made my comment clearly enough, a bunch of anonymous negative mods will be piled upon it, presumably destroying my karma and causing me to effectively disappear as a contributor to any future discussions. But you know what? Given the quality of the typical discussion on
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I won't use Mandriva. You know why? Because I don't like the sound of the name. I would have tried Mandrake before they changed the name but never did. Mandriva sounds like a dribbling or driveling, drooling man. Is this a valid reason for rejecting a distribution?
Anyone have a copy of "Why trolls post anonymously?" I've been looking all over for a copy and could use it right about now.
Did you know that in Russian "srobert" means "a guy named Robert who takes a dump"? (you have to interpret it with a grain of slang)
I am sorry that I am posting this; I do not mean to be offensive; I'd hate it if someone used it against me (my name is also Robert); but this is true, ask anyone. Do not let the fact that I am posting this as an AC trick you into thinking that this is a lie.
I'm genuinely curious. One of the main things that has kept me from both Fedora and Mandriva is the package management/repositories of Debian-based systems. I just cannot live without that anymore. I mean, software might be available in RPM format, but then you have to hunt dependencies yourself. No thank you. And last time I tried, it was possible to get repository-like functionality via tools like yum, but you still had to track down a thousand different repositories (the safety of which was typically unknown).
Is this any better now? Do you still have to hunt for 3 hours on the interwebs to figure out how to install anything that didn't come with the distro?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
It should be noted that a careful reading of the advisory does not make any mention of the vulnerability being related to the use of Firefox per se, but rather to the use of QuickTime in conjunction with Firefox.
The vulnerability allows an attacker to use a specially crafted QuickTime object to launch the default browser within Windows. This implies that the initial vulnerability resides within QuickTime, and is supported by the following:
-chrome switch to execute scripts that could spoof a browser user interface. For example, portions of the real Firefox interface could be hidden and a counterfeit section rendered, in conjunction with a cloned web page that shows
https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn when in reality the person is really logging into
http://www.my-identity-theft-site.tld The ability to execute scripts from the command line was probably a feature, at least initially, but when the ramifications became clearer MFSA 2007-23 was issued and the capability removed. QuickTime bypasses this fix.
It is very likely that the code to execute said scrips exists in most, if not all, Firefox 2.0.0.6/operating system combinations.
It's the hole in QuickTime that makes the hole in Firefox more easily exploitable. On Linux this point is moot, since Apple has not yet released an official version of QuickTime for Linux.
Just try 'sudo su', it will get you a root session -- as long as you are in the admin group ;-)
... but is it as good as Amiga 5?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
There isn't a perfect distro out there. I install and fiddle with them as a hobby of sorts. Also as a business aside. There are some that are rock solid, but conservative and not appealing. There are other bleeding edge distros that just don't work. I tend towards the pretty distros with lots of features. There are a few that I had to spend a great deal of time finding pieces to make everything work. You know, codecs, plugins, yadda yadda. Ubuntu takes alot of time making me do this stuff. I prefer KDE anyway. So....Mandriva by default supports KDE. They also are pretty close to the edge, but their stuff works. I thought Sabayon had alot of sex appeal, but it locked up alot. One thing though, their inclusion on LinDVD is limited. I use the SPDIF on my machine for digital audio output, and LinDVD doesn't support changing your audio settings. That is kinda lame. 2008 is the best distro I have ever used. I'm going to have to get all those unspeakable codecs for Xine again to play DVD's. But....Mandriva 2008 is a keeper. Rudeman
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Just a heads up, if you're upgrading from an earlier version... well I've been using Mandriva since 10.1, I have not had a fully successful upgrade yet (usually end up wiping my / /usr partitions and starting anew). So get ready for an evening of fun, backup your fstab (you may need it later) and your xorg.conf (if your current one is making you happy).
Presently I've completed the upgrade to 2008, sadly now I have only one monitor working (out of a dual head setup), no applications under KDE (woo, lets play name that app in the Konsole window ^_^), and approximately half the glxgears performance I had prior to the upgrade.
No luck installing a repository either. Why... Why oh why didn't I wait till the *weekend* to do this!!!
So any progress in porting the DrakTools to Kubuntu? Pretty much only thing keeping me with Mandriva atm.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
To begin with, I was a Mandrake user and even paid for a Silver account or whatever it was for a couple of years. I used other Linux distros also, and liked them. I love the idea of Linux in general, free software, package management and all that. It's all great stuff, in theory. But today, as I read this announcement, there are many reasons I continue to be completely unimpressed with the "progress" of Linux distros over the years since I stopped using it. In the vain and ridiculous hope that someone is listening without their finger poised over the "troll" button, I'd like to just point out a few things for the umpteenth time...
KDE 3.x has been in use for way too long. I was reading about KDE 4.x literally (in the literally literal sense) years ago. I got very excited about the possibility of having "native" KDE 4.x applications running on Windows and Macs as well as Linux, without needing special intermediary layers of software on those other platforms. I gave up on Linux a long time ago, but I sure would love to be able to run some of the nicer KDE applications without needing to use Linux or set up some complex Cygwin or X11 environment. Yet, several years later (years, not months), there is no stable KDE 4.x release in sight. Yes, I'm sure many bugs have been fixed and features have been added between 3.0 and 3.5.7, but it still isn't KDE 4.x with its promise of true cross-platform goodness. WTF?
Mandriva 2008? What is it, a quarterly magazine? Is it a car? It isn't going to be 2008 for another 2.5 months. WTF?
OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.6, in a distro that was just released? OO.o 2.3 and FF 2.0.0.7 have been out for a while now. It's been about a decade since I started using Linux, and development methods are still so ridiculously inefficient and unstable that they still need to do weeks of stability testing before including the most up-to-date versions of desktop software? There is something seriously wrong with that, in my not-so-humble opinion. Part of which is rooted in the fact that every type of Linux distro still seems to need its own special software repository, separate from all the others, where different people are responsible for compiling the same software in different ways for each family of Linux distros. Good God, when I think of all the man-hours that are being wasted with all this idiotic redundancy, and all the time spent by users complaining in forums that their distro-of-choice doesn't have the latest version of package X yet because the package maintainer is on vacation, it makes my head hurt.
Yeah, package management is a great idea, in theory. For servers it really is great. For desktop usage, it falls so short of actually simplifying things that it's ridiculous. After almost two decades of Linux development there is no grand unified package management system in sight. The few pieces of software that have pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions still need at least three different types of packages just to cover "most" of the popular Linux distros. And then we wonder why nobody bothers to develop for "Linux". There is no "Linux", that's why. There are only Linux-based families of distros, each requiring a different packaging procedure. And there is no single clear-cut procedure for installing software completely outside of the native package management system in a way that neither will ever interfere with the other. That too is different for every distro, and not something that is easy for non-geeks to implement on their own personal computer. WTF?
"Reworked hardware detection sub-system". "New network configuration center". I see things like this in almost every distro release announcement I bother to read. Yes, improvement is great. No, redesigning systems constantly is not great. Having to completely rework things means you did it wrong before. This happens entirely too often. It also means that many Linux distros have completely different interfaces to various important system functions. This is one of the many things that confuses the hec
Every linux distro needs one.
I have been picking at the cooker (pre-release) of 2008.0 of Mandriva to find problems in it, and overall it is better than 2007.1 (Spring).
The most important thing I think is the switch to the most recent kernel which has speeded the computer up no end compared to the 2007.1 kernel, and at long last small things like the motherboard & processor sensors / fan speeds details work without lots of voodoo from the users side.
The merger of Beryl back to Compiz was not 100% IMO, you'd think the best code would be used, but Compiz uses far more processor resources then Beryl, and has other small faults Beryl didn't. Also, when I moved from Beryl to Compiz, it took some work from the user as it didn't disable this and that before the upgrade and as a result mangled the xorg.conf and compositing-wm configuration. The menu system has changed a bit, and takes some getting used to.
Worth of note, they changed the way the kernel is named a little, so it's now kernel-desktop-xx instead of kernel-xx.
Having said all that, probably most users will download the ISO's and install that way instead of urpmi method.
If you have Mandriva 2007.1, I think it's worth the update, if only for the better speed from the newer kernel.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I wonder how does PCLinuxOS compare to modern Mandriva?
And I'm a troll. Now, since I'm a troll and I just sort of walk away, as all the arrows bounce off of me, does that really mean that I'm a golem... like a golem would be someone who trolls but doesn't take the wrath too personally...like, made out of stone.
This is my sig.
Well, just want to say after using several distro that Mandriva is for me still one of the best "overall" best distro for desktop usage and newbie to linux :
-Distro is rich, and experienced (world wide first class ditro since 1998, 16000 packages, etc)
-Technology and innovation are great (best of class hardawre detection, 3D, control center, etc)
-Support is solid (both by community or as a commercial service is needed)
-Open to external contributors and full respect for free philosphy (all devpt are GPLed, full distro given back to commnuity)
-try to find win-win self founded community / commercial business model (no need for millionaire to serve community, you can vote with your money if you agree the model)
IHMO, the major default relies for me in "branding" the distro and communication with wide community (something Ubuntu does really well at the contrary). Hopefully with this release some communication effort are comming (the club is dissolved for a "plain" open and free of charge community services, prices of commercial offers for individuals are cheaper, web site is revamped, etc).
I invite people who didn't follow up mandriva to come back and look by themselve the changes, I find personnaly, that mandriva is recovering pretty well and as i user from the 9.2 version (2003-2007), I am really satisfied by the current version and also happy with the direction taken by mandriva.
regards.