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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
Compiz Fusion does have some advantages that aren't just bells and whistles: Expose-style "show me the windows" so you can see what's in different applications and which you really want, negative and ADD modes, fading so that only your most prominent window is catching your attention, a widgets layer so you can have things easily accessible but not on any desktop, screen annotation, window grouping/tabbing,...
:)
Okay, so most people put it in for "I can make my windows do silly transitions", and it would be better if more functionality were added instead, but the eye candy can be the basis for functionality as well
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!
We give you the choice. The One and Powerpack editions include non-free stuff for convenience. For those who value free software principles, the Free edition includes nothing but free software. if that's your preference, use the Free edition.
2.0.0.7 included only a security fix that is not relevant to Linux users. Since we were already in version freeze, it would have been silly to break it in order to include a package that has absolutely no benefit.
You never actually had to do that to install software on Mandrake / Mandriva, though some people got the idea that they did. Ever since the very early releases Mandriva has had a dependency resolving package manager, urpmi, and a proper set of online repositories. For information on how the system works in the current release, see http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software .
as I said, that vulnerability does not affect Linux. See the advisory, http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2007/mfsa2007-28.html : "On his blog Petko D. Petkov reported that QuickTime Media-Link files contain a qtnext attribute that could be used on Windows systems to launch the default browser with arbitrary command-line options." (my emphasis)
The Free x86-64 edition is available, from the download mirrors or at http://torrent.mandriva.com/public . There's no x86-64 One at the present time, I'll have to update that text. If you get to www.mandriva.com/archives/ , that means you hit a broken link. We just changed www.mandriva.com , concurrent with the 2008 release, but the new site is still having some kinks worked out. www.mandriva.com/archives/ is the old version site, preserved for now in case we need it. As it's the old site and it won't be used any more, nothing on it was updated for 2008. We are currently sending all broken links under www.mandriva.com to www.mandriva.com/archives/ , on the basis that whatever you were looking for is probably still in there somewhere. As we get all the kinks worked out of the new site, you won't see this happening so much. We would've liked a few more days to polish the new site, but we couldn't push 2008 release without the new site, and we didn't want to delay the release solely to finish the website. Slashdot initially ran this story with a broken link to www.mandriva.com/download.html (should have been www.mandriva.com/en/download.html ), so you may have got to the /archives page that way.
I've been totally impressed with the 2007.1
Mandriva definitely went through some growing pains. Okay, okay, it was growing leprosy. The three releases prior to 2007 had some real crufty bugs and lots of things which just didn't work right. These problems brought into question the viability of the entire distribution. Since 2007, they have finally come full circle and now offer a high quality, robust (fat) distribution, like what originally made them popular. The 2007.1 release only continued to improve and polish.
Don't be afraid to try Mandriva. I've tried many different distributions and went elsewhere during their dark days, but I came back. Personally I like it much better than Fedora and especially Red Hat. I consider in on par with Ubuntu for package completeness. And the wizards is a real bonus for most inexperienced users.
Compiz and Beryl came way before Vista's release, buster.
Admittedly, many of the composite features are similar to what's been available in MacOSX for a while, but it's hardly a ripoff of Exposé.
Technology tips and tricks.
"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?"
No. No, you don't, and you haven't for several years, as I said. Please read:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software
it explains it all rather clearly.
Actually, sound is becoming troublesome again with recent motherboards. A lot of new motherboards use slightly differing implementations of the HDA audio codec, and each different ones needs minor tweaks to the snd-hda-intel driver to make it work 'out of the box'. I think we're up to dozens or hundreds of these tweaks now. If you went out and bought a random sample of modern laptops, the onboard sound in a lot of them would not work with, say, kernel 2.6.21.