Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 1 'thornicrofti'. This beta includes the newest release of KDE 4, KDE 4.1 final, GNOME 2.23.5, Firefox 3, and kernel 2.6.26 final. The new beta also switches to using splashy (rather than bootsplash) for boot and shutdown graphics, and adds synchronization support for Windows Mobile 2003 devices. As always, we remind you not to use pre-releases in any critical situation; install them only on a test system or partition, or in a virtual machine. Additionally, we strongly discourage using this pre-release to upgrade from any earlier release of Mandriva Linux, as the transition process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not yet fully implemented and you are likely to end up with an unusable system. Please make sure to read the Errata and Release Notes, and file any bugs not covered in those pages on Bugzilla.

Well I finally had some time on my hands and tried this release. KDE4 is shaping up very nicely indeed. It's still a little slow (maybe that's because I running from cd) but a lot of the bugs have been ironed out. The whole environment now seems joined together and not like a patchwork piece. As for the 'Folder View' once the size has been adjusted and the widget locked into place, it's great. I'm really looking forward to the final release of 2009. Great going adamw and co.

One question: Are you going to include an option to create encrypted drive(s) at the install stage like Fedora 9 does??

i hope this will have a better chance of getting the wifi to work on the msi wind. i am sick of booting into windows just to get some wireless connection. :(

ciao!