Mandriva, the famous worldwide Linux provider, has just announced its plans for the next major release of its popular Linux distribution, Mandriva Linux 2009. Starting with two alpha builds at the end of June and beginning of July, the development of Mandriva Linux 2009 will continue with two beta editions at the end of July and middle of August, two release candidates in September and it will conclude with the final release in early October, 2008. With the new version, Mandriva Linux will try to compete with the current release of Ubuntu Linux (Hardy Heron) and the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 and even "steal" some of their devoted users. Therefore, without any further introduction, here's what you should expect from Mandriva Linux 2009:

￭ a revamped installer
￭ improved boot speed
￭ improved DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) management
￭ improved language selection
￭ Linux kernel 2.6.26
￭ GCC 4.3
￭ GNOME 2.24
￭ KDE 4.1
￭ Firefox 3.0
￭ OpenOffice.org 3.0
￭ 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. Let's have a look at the release schedule for Mandriva 2009:

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 KDE and GNOME Live CDs.

We will have more details about Mandriva 2009 next week, when the first alpha release will be available. Until then, you can download Mandriva 2008.1 right now from Softpedia.