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Mandriva Linux 2008 now available


adamw
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We're proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download via BitTorrent, and on the network of public mirror servers.

 

The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. 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 from the latest Mandriva Linux release. 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). Also, the addition of new features and ongoing improvements to the renowned Mandriva tools continues, including a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, the new network configuration center, and improvements to the Mandriva software management tools.

 

You can read about the most exciting new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The Release Notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The Errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

 

Mandriva Linux 2008 was developed by the Mandriva development community, based around the Cooker development distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available, for which we thank our contributors greatly. We're proud of the standardization efforts included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including support for the Freedesktop.org XDG menu, user directories and icon theme specifications.

 

Mandriva Linux 2008 is available for download free of charge at the Mandriva website. The One installation CD is the recommended download with everything you need to start using Mandriva Linux 2008: 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.

 

Enjoy your brand new Mandriva Linux 2008 system!

Edited by adamw
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Hi Adam,

 

I have been using Mandriva Powerpack for a couple of days and I really like it. I have not found any significant issuest, so hopefully it will be a great success.

 

It takes time to become familiar with each release, so it is difficult to give detailed comments, however this is my mini review.

 

In my opinion Mandriva should ditch lindvd and cedega. One of the worst things about Mandriva is these packages.

 

Lindvd may be legal, but it looks like DBs (dogs balls - an Australian expression) and it is not user friendly. Is there an alternative that is also legal? Perhaps it would be in Mandriva's corporate interests to assist the development of an alternative. Regarding cedega, the more linux tries to cater to reluctant windows migrants, the less it is likely to succeed. Linux can stand on its own two feet. Mandriva has many excellent native games available, and if it is a compelling platform games will come. This is a chicken and egg scenario.

 

There are also many highlights to Mandriva 2008. I have had no crashes or system lock ups, despite extensive testing. There is huge number of applications and games available from the DVD and from online sources including some new and exciting programs. The task packages are a great idea as it makes it easy to install a package of applications for a particular purpose.

 

As a Gnome user I am pleased that Mandriva has included the latest version of Gnome, released less than a month ago, and which includes some nice improvements.

 

To summarise, Mandriva continues to be an excellent combination of user friendliness and power. In my my opinion Mandriva 2008 is much better than suse, fedora, the buntus (yawn), pclinuxos and others which I have tried.

 

To really achieve its potential Mandriva needs to improve its marketing so that Mandriva communicates to potential users about their excellent product with a consumer focus. I have read that some positive changes in this area are planned. One improvement would be dropping the title of club (whch suggests an exclusive group) and using the title community, which is all embracing.

 

Good luck Mandriva, you have an excellent product and deserve great success.

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apbsa: there's one other legal DVD player for Linux - PowerDVD. we evaluated both and made a choice for LinDVD. it's not a *big* field. :)

 

Cedega was hugely popular in 2007. Yes, there are good native Linux games available, but very little on the scale of professionalism and quality that you see in the best Windows games.

 

Thanks for all the kind words :)

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Regarding cedega, the more linux tries to cater to reluctant windows migrants, the less it is likely to succeed. Linux can stand on its own two feet.
I don't think including Cedega is about catering to reluctant windows migrants. I am not a reluctant Windows migrant, I have used Linux as my main OS for over 6 years and have been tinkering with it for a good 9 or so. I still see Cedega as useful to people who want to run Windows games in Linux (I still use it from time to time myself). And besides all that, Linux is about choice. If people want to choose to use Cedega, awesome, good thing Mandriva includes it. If they don't? Well, then they don't. Don't try to push your opinions and choices on others ;) - that's not what open source is about.
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Great news! I actually took out my creditcard and bought the PowerPack version (for €39 which is a quite nice price). It's the first time I've bought something from Mandriva. But the fact that I liked 2007.1 a lot, I figured why not support Mandriva. It downloaded really fast I had 2MB/s from the ftp... very nice :-)

 

Well.. now it's time to install....

Edited by ppcrulez
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Hey, good luck! :mandriva::bdparty:

 

Since I haven't seen the 2008 release I can't express my opinion about it, but I would like to repeat something that I already said when 2007 Spring got out: I think that the One release is important to attract new users, but it's also important not to leave the existing users behind. I'm not sure it's possible technically (though I believe I did see a few distros supporting this feature), but IMO the best way to enable the upgrade is through a network connection. If I'm not mistaken (And if I am, please stand me corrected), the only way to upgrade Mandriva is through the DVD release. The One CD and the full 3-cd's version don't support this option. Personally, I don't have a DVD burner. What are my options?

 

And another question: In the mandriva site it looks like only KDE version is available. Where can I get the Gnome version?

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Another comment on that download page - it's very confusing if I want to choose "Austria" - the list of download sites is empty when you go in but Austria is already selected in the dropdown (this is using Firefox on 2007.1). So to see the Austrian one, you have to click the dropdown, select France, click the dropdown again and then select Austria. Only then do you see the link for the Austrian site, which however is dead anyway. (The Vienna link should be "mandriva" not "mandrakelinux" but even if it were correct it just says "This subdirectory is currently empty. Let me know in case you think it should't be. Tks.").

And why do all the "company news" items just go to http://www.mandriva.com/archives/ ?

 

PS/ It's also quite funny that the word "professional" has a typo on all the pages! :D

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neddie: congratulations, you have successfully detected that the new website was let out of its cage about a week too early. :)

 

the thing is, we didn't want to waste a bunch of time updating the old website (whose CMS sucks *rocks*) for 2008, as we knew the new one was coming. but the new one wasn't really quite finished off in time for 2008. we took the decision to get the site just-about-working and release 2008, as we felt it'd be silly to delay the distro itself for several days just to finish off the website.

 

so, yes, the new mandriva.com - while it's tons better than the old one - isn't quite finished yet. yes, the download script is a bit wonky, we are working on it. and yes, I spotted the 'professionnal' typo (it should really be 'enterprise', anyway) days ago but I don't actually have the power to edit that particular bit, sigh. and yes, there are a lot of broken links. all broken links are currently redirected to www.mandriva.com/archives . That's the old site, archived, and the idea is that whatever you were looking for is probably still in there somewhere. :)

 

so, yep, you're right - sorry, and please bear with us while we finish up the site. we are working on it actively and it should be okay within a few days.

 

for now if you want to download 2008 it's probably best to go with the torrents - http://torrent.mandriva.com/public - anyway. the mirrors will be getting overloaded.

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Hey, good luck! :mandriva::bdparty:

 

Since I haven't seen the 2008 release I can't express my opinion about it, but I would like to repeat something that I already said when 2007 Spring got out: I think that the One release is important to attract new users, but it's also important not to leave the existing users behind. I'm not sure it's possible technically (though I believe I did see a few distros supporting this feature), but IMO the best way to enable the upgrade is through a network connection. If I'm not mistaken (And if I am, please stand me corrected), the only way to upgrade Mandriva is through the DVD release. The One CD and the full 3-cd's version don't support this option. Personally, I don't have a DVD burner. What are my options?

 

And another question: In the mandriva site it looks like only KDE version is available. Where can I get the Gnome version?

 

There are several ways you can upgrade Mandriva via a network connection. You *can* upgrade from one edition to another simply using urpmi: remove your 2007.1 repositories, set up 2008.0 repositories, do 'urpmi --auto-update' , and you've got 2008, basically. this method sometimes hits problems and needs a bit of hand holding, but it does work.

 

You can do a network installation of Mandriva (this has always been possible), and the installer has an upgrade option. For instructions on doing a network install, see http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Installin...or_the_Internet .

 

Indeed you cannot do upgrade installs via the One CD, but you can do upgrade installs via the 3-CD Free edition.

 

There's no GNOME version of One for the present. There may be one in future. Once we have a definite plan about that, we'll make it known.

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Wow, thanks for the info. It's all news to me. It's a bit late and I've got a (too) long day tomorrow, but I promise to read this guide in the wiki ASAP. So actually, you are saying that not only I was wrong and *there is* a way to upgrade through the network, there are actually two ways. Again, I'm going to read all about it tomorrow night (24 hrs from now).

 

Adam - You are all doing a great work, already wrote you in the blog that I am envy of you. Keep up, the results are fantastic.

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for now if you want to download 2008 it's probably best to go with the torrents - http://torrent.mandriva.com/public - anyway. the mirrors will be getting overloaded.
That's a great tip, I was surprised that the torrents weren't advertised more heavily anyway. In the past I think the torrents were out a few days before the http / ftp links anyway, just to take the initial load off the servers a bit.

 

On the website's download page, you can see the links to the torrents in the source html of the page, but because of all the layers it doesn't become visible until you actually select a country and then select a download site for the iso. I would have thought that info should be up front, it's confusing if you go to the download page looking for a torrent.

 

PS/ Sorry if I sound negative, I don't mean to be, I'm trying to be constructive! :)

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