Madriva Linux 2008 Overview

Mandriva has currently released some more details regarding its forthcoming Mandriva Linux 2008. According to Mandriva's wiki page, the 2008 version would be released most probably this September and the company has also provided a quick view of what we should expect from this release.

But those are not all the new features said to be added to Mandriva Linux 2008. The company said that other new features should be added as they move to the development cycle. An approximate schedule for the release cycle has been already drawn and it is available here. According to the schedule, the new version’s freeze is planned for September 10th, 2007 and after that only package updates where the version number does not change will be automatically accepted. The version updates would then have to be requested on the maintainer’s mailing list and manually approved.

Highlights:

• the latest release of GNOME at that time (development releases will feature the latest available releases of GNOME 2.19)
• the latest stable KDE release (3.5.7 ) - KDE 4 will be also available as experiemental preview
• improved packages for XFCE 4.4.1 which will also be moved into the supported /main repository
• (probably) an XFCE-based Mandriva Linux One image for 2008 in addition to the GNOME and KDE-based One images
• new kernel version -2.6.22- where support will be added for new hardware but also new features
• new Devicescape wireless networking stack
• Compiz Fusion to replace Compiz and Beryl
• X.org 7.3, featuring the new XrandR 1.2 framework
• OpenOffice.org 2.2, featuring improved text rendering, improved PDF exporting and enhanced compatibility with Excel spreadsheets

There would also be many other significant updates and additions. For example, it is said that Mandriva Linux 2008 aims to be a more distribution independent system for detecting and configuring hardware. There is also expected a complete migration to the XDG menu standard from the old Debian-based menu system, fact that has been underway for several releases. For a better resource management, a single tool to configure and manage network connections will be introduced, which comes to replace the several separate applications from the previous releases. For an improved server packaging and an improved system security, all server packages will be rebuilt with buffer overflow protection.

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