Mandriva 2008 has arrived today and it brings new software, innovations, improvements and a little bit of magic to the Linux world: "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."

Through the major software components that can be found in this new release are:

￭ Kernel 2.6.22.9
￭ GNOME 2.20
￭ KDE 3.5.7
￭ KDE 4 preview
￭ Compiz Fusion 0.5.2
￭ OpenOffice.org 2.2.1
￭ Mozilla Firefox 2.0
￭ Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0
￭ GCC 4.2

The Mandriva installer received some numerous fixes and improvements, such as:

￭ Revised hardware detection system
￭ Support for modular IDE drivers and new libata stack
￭ Package selection
￭ UUID support
￭ Faster operations on partitions
￭ Package management
￭ Chroot environments
￭ Suggested packages
￭ New menu layout

The following hardware components are now better supported in Mandriva 2008:

￭ NVIDIA Geforce 8400, 8500 and 8600 series graphics cards
￭ Intel 4965AGN wireless chipsets
￭ Intel Santa Rosa drive controllers
￭ ATI SB700 chipset motherboards
￭ Many newer onboard sound devices using the High Definition Audio codec, particularly on motherboards using Intel chipsets
￭ Wacom Graphire and Intuos tablet input devices
￭ Realtek 8187 USB and ZyDAS ZD1211/ZD1211B USB wireless controllers

Moreover, the following drivers and firmware are also available in this release:

￭ Broadcom wireless adapters
￭ Alternative open source drivers for ATI graphics cards
￭ RandR 1.2 support in X.org
￭ Default NTFS write support
￭ Support for the Belgian eID card
￭ Changes to TV card support
￭ Kernel source and headers
￭ CFQ scheduler
￭ AppArmor
￭ Modular IDE drivers
￭ New devicescape wireless stack

Other improvements that can be found in Mandriva 2008 are:

￭ Liberation fonts included
￭ Main pages now compressed with LZMA
￭ X Font Server no longer used
￭ New development package naming policy
￭ Compiz Fusion replaces Beryl
￭ Services no longer restarted when updating glibc

Mandriva 2008 is available in the following editions:

￭ One is a single CD edition which includes the latest proprietary drivers, available for download free of charge. It can be run as a live CD as well as installed to the hard disk.
￭ Powerpack is a DVD edition which includes support, services and important third-party proprietary software like LinDVD, Cedega, the Fluendo multimedia codecs, Flash Player, Scilab and 03 Spaces.
￭ Free is a 3-CD / 1-DVD edition made up entirely of free / open source software, without any of the non-free software bundled with other editions. It is available for download free of charge.

You can download Mandriva 2008 now from Softpedia.