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Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 Brings You a Beautiful KDE 4 DesktopSupport for ATI's Radeon HD 4xxx and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 2xx series is also present! |
By Marius Nestor, Linux Editor
11th of July 2008, 10:10 GMT
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Mandriva announced last night the second alpha release of Mandriva 2009, which brings KDE4 (default desktop), GNOME 2.23.4, and support for the newest NVIDIA and ATI/AMD video cards.
The development cycle of Mandriva 2009 will continue with two beta editions (one at the end of July and the other in middle of August), two release candidates in September, and it will conclude with the final release in early October, 2008. With the 2009 edition, Mandriva Linux will try to compete with the current release of openSUSE 11.0 and the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), and even to "steal" some of their devoted users. Below are some of the interesting features that will be introduced in Mandriva 2009:
￭ Linux kernel 2.6.26
￭ GCC 4.3
￭ GNOME 2.24
￭ KDE 4.1
￭ Firefox 3.0
￭ OpenOffice.org 3.0
￭ revamped installer
￭ improved boot speed
￭ improved DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) management
￭ improved language selection
￭ implementation of the PolicyKit and PackageKit technologies
￭ improvements to the Mandriva Windows Migration and Parental Control utilities
￭ Live Upgrade (same as Ubuntu's update-manager tool)
￭ initscript improvements
￭ Splashy will replace the actual boot splash
￭ Lots of desktop improvements
There are also some rumors that X.org 7.4 and GRUB2 will be included in Mandriva 2009. Until then, let's have a look at the KDE 4 Edition of Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2:
and the GNOME Edition...
Mandriva 2009 Release Schedule:
June 25th, 2008 - Alpha 1 release
July 10th, 2008 - Alpha 2 release
July 29th, 2008 - Beta 1 release
August 19th, 2008 - Beta 2 release
September 3rd, 2008 - Release Candidate 1 release
September 23rd, 2008 - Release Candidate 2 release
October 2nd, 2008 - Official Internal release
October 9th, 2008 - Official Public release of Mandriva 2009
Mandriva 2009 will be delivered, as usual, on 100% FREE edition CDs and DVDs for 32bit and 64bit platforms and the One edition with KDE4 and GNOME Live CDs.
Download Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an alpha release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only. Please test the hardware compatibility, hibernation functionality, missing software and report bugs to the Mandriva Bug Tracker.
Also, you can download the stable release, Mandriva 2008.1, right now from Softpedia.
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Excellent (5.0/5) |
2 vote(s) so far |
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User opinions: |
| Comment #1 by: Adam Williamson on 12 Jul 2008, 00:05 GMT |  reply to this comment | Please note that the current appearance of Alpha 2 is no indication of the final appearance of 2009. KDE 4 has not been customized at all yet, and GNOME is still using the 2008 Spring theme. Later pre-releases will include Mandriva customizations to KDE 4, and a new theme for 2009 for both KDE and GNOME.
Please also note that not everything in your list of new features - which was pulled from the tech specs, I guess - will necessarily happen. Tech specs lists everything we aim to work on during a cycle, but often not all of it gets done due to unforeseen problems.
Adam Williamson
Mandriva |
| Comment #1.1 by: Marius Nestor on 12 Jul 2008, 06:12 GMT | Thanks a lot for the notification Adam! However... we really wanna see those hot new features in the final release, or at least a big part of them :) Keep up the very good work!
Kind regards,
Marius Nestor |
| Comment #2 by: Neja on 12 Jul 2008, 10:53 GMT | reply to this comment | I have just installed this and it is working surprisingly well for an alpha release with a beta desktop. The new KDE 4 also looks awesome and I expected it would be much more demanding of the computer than KDE 3.5, but it's great to see this isn't so and it stayed about the same. I have the feeling it works even quicker. Great to see all this innovation in KDE 4. I love the idea of a desktop composed out of little building blocks (widgets). Can't wait for the final version of all this. |
| Comment #3 by: Jeni on 12 Jul 2008, 15:51 GMT | reply to this comment | I'm a bit concerned about the Intellectual Property issues involved here. How much Windows GUI code does KDE use? |
| Comment #3.1 by: v krishna on 12 Jul 2008, 17:00 GMT | You're kidding, right? Sure, the UI *looks* somewhat like Windows Vista, but it's all original code. |
| Comment #3.2 by: Grunt on 16 Jul 2008, 10:01 GMT | True, everything in KDE is built from scratch, and it's open source. |
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