Mandriva announced last night the immediate availability of Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC2. Once again, we thought it would be nice to please our readers and offer them a visual tour of this second release candidate of the upcoming Mandriva 2009 Spring.

What's new in Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC2? Well, the most obvious thing is the new artwork, which consists of new wallpapers for both One and Free editions and a new theme called ia_ora, for KDE. Moreover, Mandriva and the KDE team successfully ported the popular K3b CD/DVD burning application to KDE4.

Being powered by the stable version of Linux kernel 2.6.29, Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC2 comes with faster boot times and the EXT4 filesystem available in the installer, but not enabled by default.

Last but not least, let's have a quick look at some of the included packages in Mandriva 2009.1 RC2: Syslinux 3.73, KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26.0, Xfce 4.6, X.org server 1.6.0, Qt Creator 1.0, Qt 4.5.0, OpenOffice.Org 3.0.1, GIMP 2.6.6, KTorrent 3.2.0, Kopete 0.70.2, Scribus 1.3.5, Sweeper 1.2, Quassel 0.4.0, showFoto 0.10.0, Dolphin 1.2.1, K3b 1.63.0, Amarok 2.0.2.

A Live CD, DVD for the 32-bit or 64-bit architecture and a Dual CD providing support for both the aforementioned platforms are available for download (see below for links). Without further ado, we'll let you enjoy the screenshot tour of Mandriva 2009.1 RC2.

Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC2 One Edition with GNOME 2.26

Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC2 Free Edition with KDE 4.2.2

Mandriva Linux 2009.1 Release Schedule:

December 23rd, 2008 - Alpha 1 release
January 19th, 2009 - Alpha 2 release
February 12th, 2009 - Beta release
March 10th, 2009 - Release Candidate 1
April 6th, 2009 - Release Candidate 2
April 29th, 2009 - Final release

Download Mandriva 2009.1 RC2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an unstable release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only. Please report bugs to the Mandriva Bug Tracker.