After Canonical showed off their latest operating system, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), it is now time for another Linux mammoth to take the spotlight. In other words, Mandriva Linux 2010.0 was just released a few minutes ago, after two Alpha versions, one Beta and two Release Candidates, totaling more than four months of hard work. With this article, we are proud to present the new features that are included in the new Mandriva Linux release. Don't forget that Mandriva 2010.0 can be downloaded for free either as a Live KDE and GNOME CDs or a 100% Free DVD/Dual CD/Mini CD, for both i586 and x86_64 architectures (see download links at the end of the article).

Under the hood of Mandriva Linux 2010.0:

· Linux kernel 2.6.31;
· GNOME 2.28.0 desktop environment;
· KDE 4.3.2 desktop environment;
· EXT4 filesystem;
· X.Org 7.5;
· X.Org server 1.6.5;
· Moblin support;
· New artwork.







The Mandriva Linux 2010.0 feature tour:

· Improved boot performance - through various tweaks and hacks, the boot performance has been greatly improved since Mandriva 2009 Spring. The suspend, resume, hibernate and shutdown functions are also a lot faster;
· Amazing new boot splash - powered by Plymouth, the new boot splash looks much better than in previous releases of Mandriva Linux;
· Better installer - the hard drive partitioning step in the Mandriva Installer has been redesigned to be more user friendly;
· 4 new themes - Mandriva 2010 comes with four themes, one for each edition (Free, One, Powerpack and Flash). The themes can also be used independently, by installing the "mandriva-theme-< flavour_name >" packages;
· 10 new, beautiful wallpapers - both KDE and GNOME desktops include many new and interesting wallpapers from various photographers around the world. By default, the wallpapers are designed to change depending on the hour of the day;
· Landscape screensaver - a new screensaver offers a slideshow of various beautiful landscapes from around the world;
· The KDE 4.3.2 desktop environment - as the default desktop, KDE 4.3 comes with the beautiful Air theme, Plasma enhancements, file previews and video thumbnails in Dolphin, new effects, new Plasma widgets, Nepomuk integration, KDE 3 data migration support, Amarok 2.2, KMess 2.0.0 instant messenger for MSN Live, KOffice 2.0.82 and Digikam 1.0;
· The GNOME 2.28.0 desktop environment - available in the GNOME One Live CD, it offers better Webcam and Bluetooth support, an improved Time Tracker panel applet, the Empathy instant messenger, the Epiphany web browser, the Evince document viewer (with support to save and edit annotations), the Pitivi video editor, improved Totem (with DVD navigation and playback resume support), better GNOME Power Management that supports multiple batteries on laptops and hard disk spindown, Snowy sync support for Tomboy, and many more;
· Moblin support - Mandriva Linux 2010 is the first Linux-based operating system to include a full Moblin environment. The "task-moblin" package needs to be installed. After that, choose "Moblin" from the session list in the connection manager;
· Sugar Desktop support - like Moblin, the Sugar desktop is also present in Mandriva Linux 2010. By installing the "task-sugar" package, the Sugar desktop environment will be available in the session list, on the login screen;
· Better support for Intel graphics cards - thanks to the new UXA acceleration method and DRI2, the new driver for Intel graphics cards improves the overall performance/stability (including suspend and resume) and reduces display flickering during boot;
· Support for modern netbooks - the support for hardware components found in latest netbooks on the market, such as Asus Eee PC models, the Acer Aspire One or the MSI Wind, has been greatly improved;
· Mozilla Firefox 3.5 - as the default web browser, Firefox 3.5 offers an improved performance, support for HTML5 < audio > and < video > tags, support for Ogg Theora videos, support for Ogg Vorbis audio streams, private browsing mode, location sharing and new themes;
· OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 - everything is improved in this release, from the Microsoft Office 2007 filters, the screen appearance, the file locking, the Comments, the Calc performance, KDE4 and the grammar checker integration;
· VirtualBox 3 - the latest version of the powerful and free virtualization software from Sun Microsystems offers Guest SMP for no more than 32 virtual CPUs, support for playing Direct3D 8 and 9 games on Windows guest machines, support for OpenGL 2.0 for Linux, Solaris and Windows guests;
· Elisa Media Center - with a brand-new interface, this project is now known as Moovida;
· Wine 1.1.32 - with improved support for DirectX 10, OpenAL, HTML, JavaScript, Gecko integration and overall performance improvements;
· Phoronix Test Suite - the famous system benchmarking and testing suite is now included in Mandriva Linux 2010;
· USB Startup Disk Creator - just like Ubuntu, Mandriva also provides a little tool, called Mandriva Seed, to make a bootable USB stick that will help you install Mandriva Linux 2010 on netbooks or workstations without a CD-ROM device;
· New network monitor tool - replacing the old net_monitor, Network Monitor will provide users with a complex network traffic monitoring application.









Download Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Free DVD Edition right now from Softpedia.

Download Mandriva Linux 2010.0 One KDE4 and GNOME Live CD Edition right now from Softpedia.