14 DAY TRIAL // 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.