A long, long awaited pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here! This fourth pre-release - Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring Beta 2 Orchis - brings you recognition of other installed operating systems during the setup, NTFS-3G with write support by default for all NTFS partitions and many more interesting features! Read on and find out!

Orchis brings you very important improvements to the Mandriva graphical software management tool and it's available in Free and One edition. The Free version comes on DVDs for i586 and x86_64, while the One edition comes on KDE-based and GNOME-based CDs for i586.

The Mandriva graphical software management tool, rpmdrake, received a lot of bugfixes and some interface improvements. The latter relates to the new XML-based metadata system that made its way into Beta 1. Thanks to a new display filter, you are allowed to browse only metapackages. When new packages are installed, rpmdrake will show the total size of these packages. Now, when you view the details of a package that has a newer version available, the differences between the installed version and the newer one are shown in italics, so you can see exactly the changes made.

This pre-release brings a major update, mkinitrd 6.0.28. Some of its packages were dropped while the older ones were modified. The developers added one of the most requested features for Mandriva Linux, which is implemented for the first time in Orchis. The installer tries to find other distributions that are installed on your system and include them into the boot menu. This feature will be one of those on which a lot of attention will be concentrated, because of its importance.

The final release of Mandriva 2008 Spring will be available in a few months, and to be more exact, it will hit the web on the 2nd of April, this year. Until then, you can test the Beta 2 "Orchis" and help the developers by reporting bugs.

Download Mandriva Linux 2008 right now from Softpedia!
Download Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring Beta 2 right now from Softpedia!