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Suspend/hibernate with bootsplash support? Is that bootsplash as in the huge kernel patch that's basically been deprecated? Gensplash, usplash, splashy and redhat's gtk based thing (forgot the name) are all far more maintainable than bootsplash.

People have been talking about how they are losing money etc but still I like how this distribution is packaged. Everything seems to be designed with a non geeky user in mind and "it should just work" attitude.

Some people may not agree but I like their urpmi utility better than redhat/fedora's Yum. Also they have some nice configuration tools to aid non savvy users.

Mandriva along with SuSE and a few others have had one of the most polished KDE desktops that is a pleasure to use and more recently they have been putting some work in the Gnome Desktop as well with their new themes and a nicely packaged Gnome 2.16 desktop in 2007.0

I am also a big fan of their installer which is one of the most user friendly installers around - the part where other installers lack user friendliness usually, drive partitioning is a breeze with their installer.

Mandriva, then Mandrake was the reason I switched to Linux in the first place back around 2001. I still use it on my laptop.

I look forward to the final release of 2007.1.

should note the new versions of the bits everyone cares about these days...

compiz 0.36
beryl 0.2.0 beta 2 (rc1 got in just too late to make this beta, but you can get it from cooker)

there's KDE 4 stuff in contrib, but obviously not usable, just for poking. also metisse in contrib.

I've really tried to stay out of the Gael Duval issue, but it keeps coming up so I'll dive in. Mandriva is a company, with stock holders. It's responsibility is to those stock holders, period! I would imagine that even includes Gael.It is managements responsibility to do what is best for the company by way of the stock holders. Often hard choices have to be made. Some are right, some are wrong. Either way, what happened with Mandriva is more of the norm NOT the exception. Companies grow and change, often out growing founders, very often. Out with the old, in with the new and all of that. It takes a different kind of person at some period. IMHO, Gael probably should have left earlier on his own, and on to doing what he does best, and that is STARTING something great, not running something great.

About Mandriva . . .
I was a huge Mandriva fan boy for many years, starting with the first release. I continue to believe that urpmi is hands down the best package management available. At our company we used Mandriva on a regular basis and at one time we even handled the North American support for a good number of their products.

While the "geek" in me would like to see Mandriva do well, the business man in me has to move on. Dealing with the company on a business relationship was nothing less than horid. We (I) stuck in there much longer than we should have, hoping things would change, but they just never did.

So good luck to Mandriva, I'd like to see you revitalized . . . I just don't believe it's going to happen.

Jacob, the ISO is truly 4.4GB. Some clients have trouble downloading files larger than 4GB. Try using a dedicated FTP client rather than a browser to download the file.

ou_ryperd, I don't expect anyone to forget about Gael, it just seems silly to keep bringing it up every time any piece of news about Mandriva is posted. Everyone has their own position on what happened. It's not like anyone comes up with anything *new* - someone will post "Mandriva killed Gael!!!!", a few people will agree, then someone will say "it was just a business decision, get over it!" and a few people will agree with that person. Every time. There's no new information, no new perspectives, nothing. It's just a bunch of hot air. Why keep doing it?

One other thing: blino let me know beryl isn't actually on the beta 1 DVD, so scratch that from the list of stuff that's 'included'. However, you can just pull it from Cooker, then drak3d will let you configure it.

If somehow package dependencies haven't been met *all* the packages are being downloaded again.Rather irritating bahaviour.

Important note: please don't use the One ISOs currently on the mirrors, codenamed 'doctor'. These are an internal test version that shouldn't have been uploaded. The final One ISOs will be uploaded some time ahead of the official announcement of this beta on Monday.

The conventional installer DVD ISO, codenamed loolapop, is fine.

I've mailed Thom to ask him to add this info to the main story.

If you don't mind hosing your existing Mandriva install (ie: not a mission critical box) then you can try this build by going to easyurpmi http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
and selecting Cooker from the repository lists.
Su or Sudo and remember to type urpmi.removemedia -a first, in order to reinitialize urpmi's setup.
Then paste in the results of your script into a console:

urpmi.addmedia Cooker_Mirror_main http://mandrake.mirrors.pair.com/Mandrakelinux/devel/cooker/i586/me... with media_info/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia Cooker_Mirror_contrib http://mandrake.mirrors.pair.com/Mandrakelinux/devel/cooker/i586/me... with media_info/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia Cooker_Mirror_plf-free ftp://gsa10.eps.cdf.udc.es/plf/mandriva/cooker/free/binary/i586/ with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia Cooker_Mirror_plf-nonfree ftp://gsa10.eps.cdf.udc.es/plf/mandriva/cooker/non-free/binary/i58... with hdlist.cz

Once urpmi setup is complete, just type:

urpmi.update -a
urpmi --auto-select -v

These commands are the Mandriva equivalent of apt-get dist-upgrade and work very very well.

Since Adam West posted this hint the first time last year, I have used these commands to upgrade my packages regularly and they really work very well.

Cheers

Matt