The first release candidate of Mandriva 2008.1, codename 'Serapias', was released. While the previous pre-releases continued to use the artwork from Mandriva Linux 2008, this one will include the fresh 2008 Spring theme. This brings you new installer appearance, wallpapers, bootsplash images, bootloader themes and screensavers.

A new feature in Serapias is the background which changes gradually with the time of day. For the moment, this is active only in GNOME, but will be available for KDE too, in the second release candidate.

The urpmi and rpmdrake software management tools now let the user know how much data will be retrieved from the repositories for each transaction and how much space will be used or freed up on the hard disk, when the process is complete. The tools have improved support for falling back to the old package information system, in case there is a repository which was not converted to the new XML-based system.

The graphical configuration of ndiswrapper is functional again, allowing one to configure wireless cards to use ndiswrapper through the graphical Mandriva network configuration tool. The issues that rendered it unfunctional were related to the changes in the Linux kernel's module loading mechanisms. The Mandriva network configuration tools support from now on the WPA-EAP authentication method.

The latest pre-release of OpenOffice.org 2.4 is included in Mandriva 2008.1 RC1. In the final release of Mandriva 2008 Spring, we will have the stable version of OpenOffice.org 2.4. Speaking of software, a few new applications made their way into the default GNOME configuration, like Transmission, which replaces the Deluge BitTorrent client, Brasero for CD/DVD burning, and HomeBank, taking the place of GNUcash as default personal finance application.

The login managers KDM and GDM will display a list of user accounts to choose from when you log in, instead of the old way when you had to type the user name.

Download Mandriva Linux 2008.1 RC1 right now from Softpedia!