since reading the distrowatch weekly about 3 weeks ago that said the first beta of mdv08 would be released that next week i got overly excited and began watching the mirror. upon checking the mirror that next week it said the release was moved back. indeed the next distrowatch weekly also reflected as such. upon checking the mirror again the next week the beta was again moved back to aug 01. last night before retiring for much needed sleep i checked the mirror and it said between aug 1 and aug 16. i knew i would wake to a great day. but alas, upon checking the mirror this morning it says aug 6. arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggg.
so the moral of this story is, a watched pot never boils.

so to whom it may concern i'm not complaining i'm just kidding about saying arg but rather i would like to offer my gratitude and well wishes for the great work that is being done. i'm sure 08 will be a superb release. thanks much.

You can always get the ~10 MB boot.iso image and do a netinstall from there (provided that you do have a fast connection). This is what I've been doing for the last 3 years with Mandriva.
The image should be present at any major Mandriva mirror - check in the .../devel/cooker/i586/install/images FTP folder.

Distrowatch were initially listing the internal snapshot we did last week as the first beta. This was my fault as I initially had the internal snapshot listed as a public release by mistake.

Beta 1 was always going to be the first public release, and it was originally scheduled for today. We have delayed it to the start of next week because there were several major issues in Cooker (including a recurring RPM error and a major X breakage) which would have been in Beta 1 if we shipped it today, and we didn't want to release in that state. The short delay will also allow us to include updated ATI and NVIDIA packages, probably.

So it's a good thing really =) and the only true delay has been the one for beta 1 from August 2nd to August 6th. The initial snapshot did in fact happen on time - it just wasn't a public release.

Sorry for the confusion.