Mandriva flashes its small aggressive penguin
It's Linux for 2010
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The end of year race to update product names has begun in earnest, with Mandriva becoming one of the first to launch a product with 2010 in its moniker.
The Paris-based Linux outfit flagged up Mandriva Linux 2010 last night. If that's too much of a mouthful for you, you can just stick with the codename, Adelie.
The big push is Smart Desktop technology, which the team says comes from a "European research project".
Apparently the desktop is now "tasks oriented", allowing users to organise data such as mails, docs and images, and add notes, comments and tags. "This is an exclusivity for Mandriva," apparently.
At the same time, Mandriva claims improved boot time, and three new designs, with community members contributing another 11.
Both KDE and GNOME are integrated. The package also includes Firefox and Open Office, as well as Xserver,1.6.5 and VirtualBox 3.0.8.
The PowerPack Version, which includes additional goodies and support will cost you €59, plus €10 for the box set, or €5 for the slim pack DVD - though you'll be waiting till the end of the month for it to arrive. The One and Free versions can be downloaded. More info here http://blog.mandriva.com/2009/11/04/mandriva-linux-2010-is-out.
The outfit is pitching the latest release as fast and attractive, and some might be forgiven for thinking that the codename - Adelie - is part of this saucy image. Those in the know will realise, of course, that the Adelie is a small and particularly aggressive penguin. ®
COMMENTS
Feel your guests.
No, really.
"Feel your guests like home."
Don't mind if I do!
http://www2.mandriva.com/linux/features/
Better than 2009.1 - but many irritations remain.
PulseAudio now works better - there's now balance / fade controls. They also appear to have boosted the internal amplifier. However, tweaking individual speaker channels still requires mucking about with alsamixer in a terminal.
Plymouth replaces Splashy as the loading screen - complete with a 3D effect throbber instead of a progress bar. There's also a built in guest account, which saves userdata to a RAM disk rather than the HDD, so it all gets erased on logoff. Handy for showing a friend around your system without worrying about setting up a special account for them, or them trashing your existing setup and config.
Rpmdrake is still as painfully slow to refresh itself as ever - but the repos are bang up to date - even including FF 3.5.5 Epiphany is now Webkit based and gets a 100% score on Acid3 (compared to 91% for FF, or under 21% for Bill's Browsers - most of which still fail Acid2)
Been a while
since I've tried Mandriva. I'm happy with Ubuntu, but it's great to see releases like this improving the breed!
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