Mandriva 2009 Release Candidate 2 is now available on public mirrors. The main new features of RC2 (detailed on the wiki) are:

* Improved boot speed
* Support for encrypted partitions in installer and DiskDrake using LUKS
* Improved support for netbooks hardware
* Support for Intel G41 graphics chipset
* GNOME 2.24
* KDE4 theming complete (still some small issues to fix)
* kernel 2.6.27rc7
* installer new design is finalized.

Nice, I'll have to try this out I think in VMware.

I'm using the 64-bit 2008.1 Powerpack edition. How do I upgrade to 2009 RC-2 using urpmi?

1. Open the MCC and remove the software repos that you have configured there.
2. Go to the easyurpmi site and add Cooker mirrors.
3. Update and upgrade the system.

Beware: Cooker is experimental and only used for testing/development purposes. It should not be used on producting machines and by relatively inexperienced Linux users. Problems are expected to abound when using cooker, things are expected to break from time to time.

Well...hopefully not so much now we're at RC2.

I did the upgrade via urpmi and my system was pretty much intact, other than some files not being able to be installed during the upgrade process. Grub didn't pick up my Vista partition, and my Ethernet card was not detected due to supprt being disabled since it is one of the effect cards, so I had no internet connection, so I reinstalled 2008.1 Powerpack edition. Hope this corruption issue with the ethernet cards gets fixed soon!

Am i able to "upgrade" my mandriva 2008 FREE desktop to mandriva 2009 POWERPACK in 1 try?or will i have to download FREE 2009 then move up to powerpack?

You should be able to upgrade it. I wouldn't advise going from say two releases more than 2009.0 - so definitely not from 2007.1 to 2009.0 but 2008.0 and 2008.1 will be fine for upgrade. There would be no need to upgrade to free and then move up to powerpack as they are more or less identical anyway.

Is there a 64-bit CD version? Could only find the DVD version.