The general technical specifications are here. The release schedule is here.

It's nice to see them imitating Fedora and moving to PulseAudio as the default audio server. everybody is fed up with the buggy alsa softmixers.

Well, I heard from a new Fedora 8 user that he was having trouble with audio after switching from Ubuntu to Fedora, and had had no problems before the switch. He said that sound would work pretty randomly, he opens an audio player, sound works, closes it and after he opens it again, sound doesn't work.

Uhm, would that mean that openSUSE and RedHat RPM:s would be compatible with Mandriva...?

Anyway, can't wait to try out the new release in April... Mandriva just keeps getting better.

Briefly: no.

In more detail: no, because we're talking about RPM *the application*, not using Fedora / SUSE RPM *packages*.

The short story - RPM development hit some controversy a while back and basically split into two forks, one maintained by Jeff Johnson (the original author of RPM) and one continued by the Red Hat folks. Both RH / Fedora and SUSE use this fork. We initially went with the J.J. fork, but now we're switching to the other one. It really doesn't have any implications for cross-distro package compatibility.

It's not really imitating Fedora - we've had Pulse in MDV for a while, and I've been running it on my system for a year or so now. The idea of switching to it by default was mooted during 2007 development and again (by me) during 2007 Spring development, but at that time it was rejected. Just that now Pulse has reached a point where it's really a viable alternative. All distros have been wanting something like it for a long time now.

Of course, the work that Fedora's done so far has been great, and we have adopted a few of the things they've worked on into MDV as part of this change, so of course that's a helpful foundation.

We are testing Pulse quite extensively and working on fixing as many problems as possible, so hopefully people shouldn't have any bad experiences with it. Of course it'd be great for people to test the alphas / betas and report any problems, when they come out.