One day after the scheduled release, the first alpha of Mandriva Linux 2010 was launched by the Mandriva team. The announcement was made yesterday, on the 21st of June, and states that this version is only available as a "Free" DVD version for both 32- and 64-bit architectures.

Mandriva 2010 Alpha 1 brings the current development versions of KDE and GNOME and the latest version of Xfce. The Linux kernel was also updated to the recently released 2.6.30.

The development cycle of Mandriva 2010 will continue with a second alpha in July, one beta in August, two release candidates scheduled for September and the official public release that is expected to arrive on the 15th of October.

"This development release is the first one realized without mkcd, our historical build tool, but using bcd available also on Mandriva svn. This new tool should improve global quality of our release and make tests much easier and efficient.," was stated in the official release announcement.

Highlights of Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1:

· Linux kernel 2.6.30;
· KDE 4.3. Beta 2;
· GNOME 2.27.3;
· Xfce 4.6.1;
· X.org Server 1.6.1.901;
· OpenOffice.org 3.1.0.


Mandriva Linux 2010 Release Schedule:

June 19th, 2009 - Alpha 1
July 16th, 2009 - Alpha 2
August 6th, 2009 - Beta
September 3rd, 2009 - RC1
September 24th, 2009 - RC2
October 15th, 2009 - Final release

Download Mandriva 2010 Alpha 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an alpha release and it should not be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. Please report bugs to the Mandriva Bug Tracker.