14 DAY TRIAL // The second release candidate of the Spring edition of Mandriva 2008 was introduced a few days ago and includes some new fantastic features, such as KDE 4.0.2, ATI Radeon HD 3xxx series support, easy multimedia codecs installation system, a brand new Spring graphical theme and many more. But, let's have a detailed look at them, shall we?
Easy multimedia codec installation system powered by the Codeina framework. This allows Mandriva users to play multimedia files in formats a codec is not available for in the default installation.
Easy mobile synchronization support in both KDE and GNOME desktops has been implemented in this release. It supports Windows Mobile 5, 6 and 6.1 PDAs and smartphones, Blackberry smartphones and many Nokia phones.
Support for the ATI Radeon HD 3xxx graphic cards has been added in this second release candidate. It is available as the popular fglrx (proprietary driver) and the rookie radeonhd open source driver. If you own a Radeon HD 3xxx video card, then it should be automatically supported.
The brand new 2008 Spring graphical theme is now finalized and fully integrated in this second release candidate. It includes a new time-based background feature, just like Fedora introduced in the Werewolf release, which makes the background to change gradually depending on the time of the day.
KDE 4.0.2, the latest maintenance release of KDE 4, is now available on the official /contrib repository. However, the default KDE version in Mandriva 2008.1 RC2 is still KDE 3.5.
The latest version of the ALSA sound driver is included in this release to bring improved sound hardware support for a good part of the new sound devices, such as the HDA codec that can be found in the newest laptops.
The interface (GUI) of RPMdrake received a few improvements: packages can be sorted by size, the flat list view has been re-introduced, the package pane can now be resized and the large grey banner at the top of the tool is not displayed at lower resolutions.
It is now very easy to install a complete set of LAMP packages with the brand new metapackage that was added in this RC of Mandriva 2008 Spring. This makes it extremely easy to set up a regular web server on a Mandriva powered computer.
Mandriva 2008 is available in the following editions:
￭ as a Free edition for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, on one DVD, with a traditional installer ￭ as a One (KDE-based) combined live / install CD edition
Download and test Mandriva 2008.1 RC2 right now from Softpedia and don't forget to drop a line or two about it!