Submitted by The first release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Copernic, is now available. The release notes are available here. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate) is available here, and the detailed technical specifications are available here. This release candidate is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer, and as a mini-CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. A One combined live/install CD edition will be released in the near future (problems with unionfs prevented the One edition from being release at the same time as the other editions).
I was running Cooker some weeks ago and it was looking pretty good. I still think Mandriva offers the best KDE desktop among the big distros.
By the way, they were using the CFS scheduler backported to kernel 2.6.22. I’m not sure if they’ve decided to stick with it, but probably yes, since it seemed to work very good.
Happy testing
Yep, we’re using CFS.
It seems to me that mandriva has lost a lot of mind-share in the linux arena.
Once it was the most promising desktop linux while today is almost irrilevant.
Does someone agree with me on this?
Why are you modding him down? OK, saying that Mandriva has become “irrelevant” isn’t true, but he does have a point when he says that Mandriva has lost mind-share.
It’s great to hear from them that they’re working on cool stuff soon to be unveiled, and this new RC is a solid step. But it’s obvious that Mandriva, specially in the Mandrake era, enjoyed better times
they are doing better than many think. Many see mostly the community on the web, and more specifically the english-speaking part of that. Mandriva is big in Brazil, and not doing bad in France either. And yes, they are working on some pretty cool stuff, like the whole Nepomuk thing. They might bounce back big, when KDE 4 is out… Esp now Ubuntu won’t have it anytime soon.
Modding down because endless discution, and I’m tired that any time there is a news regarding Mandriva, people are talking about Mandriva being irrelevant and not about the news. The news here is: new release, so let’s focus please!
What makes it irrelevant? The fact that you don’t use it or understand its history or how much they have done for free software on the desktop?
In every single Mandriva thread, there is somebody posting drivel such as yours, which is bereft of any technical content or real insight.
Mandriva is seemingly still contributing to free software by having many of its developers work on the kernel, kde and so forth and still delivering a distribution periodically. Does this bother you?
Are you one of those people that think that everyone should switch to the one true distribution, which happens to be whatever you are currently using right now?
There is strength in diversity.
What makes it irrelevant? The fact that you don’t use it or understand its history or how much they have done for free software on the desktop?
No, the fact that nobody is talking about it anymore, or at least not as much as before.
And, for your information, i’ve used all the FIRST releases of mandriva (when it was called mandrake), so I perfectly understand their history.
In every single Mandriva thread, there is somebody posting drivel such as yours, which is bereft of any technical content or real insight.
If you took the time to read my post, you would have seen that I was only wondering if it were an impression of mine, or if it was shared by someone else.
You must be such a mandriva fan boy that you see an attack in everything different from “Mandriva rulez” and so on.
Are you one of those people that think that everyone should switch to the one true distribution, which happens to be whatever you are currently using right now?
No, I’m just someone who likes to understand what’s happening around, and who likes to talk with other people and hear their opinions.
Something that you are clearly not able to do.
Yes, all of your insight boils down to the fact that it makes you doubt your own choice of distribution because not as many people you know use it or the sites that used to post more about Mandrake now post less.
So what? Yes, there are more distributions and each has it strengths and weaknesses, but since you are not going to get any form of meaningful statistical analysis on OSnews, your question amounts to little less than a rhetorical device to cast a shadow on Mandriva.
What else do you contribute to the discussion? Puff, you call me a fanboy, you could have also called me a zealot. Those two seem to go together well when people run out of logic or anything to say.
Except as I have mentioned in other Mandriva threads, I don’t currently use Mandriva. Family members and friends do and I set it up for them and have a VMware installation to be able to answer any specific questions they ask, but it’s not my main work or development environment.
Yet I am tired of people pissing on somebody else’s work, which is what your implicit question about mind-share really was.
Look at every Mandriva thread and there is always someone like you repeating the same meme possibly looking, as you were, (“Do others agree?”)for some form of validation.
Edited 2007-09-06 14:06
What else do you contribute to the discussion?
Nothing else, because you completely move the point elsewhere from where my post was.
you call me a fanboy, you could have also called me a zealot. Those two seem to go together well when people run out of logic or anything to say.
The logic of my post was to clear to everyone, except to you. The logic was: “I think mandriva is loosing attention from media and from user”.
Yet I am tired of people pissing on somebody else’s work, which is what your implicit question about mind-share really was.
Again, acting like a fanboy (or zealot, if you prefer).
I wasn’t pissing the work of anyone. Saying that mandriva is loosing mindshare is not the same of saying that their work is a shit.
(“Do others agree?”)for some form of validation.
Yes, I was searching for validation.
I know you think you know the ONLY TRUTH, well, I don’t.
Since the popularity of a Linux distro is not an easy thing to estimate, i asked other OSnews reader if they are getting to the same conclusion i did.
That said, learn to read or learn some logic before replying to my posts again. Maybe you’ll get to reply something related to what i write.
It is laughable to hear someone as incongruent as you tell others to “learn to read”. It is even more hilarious that you do so with the spelling of a three-year old.
Have you actually read what you wrote? And no, your question wasn’t an honest inquiry. It was a facetious question used as a rhetorical device with the only aim of discrediting the hard work of the people that work on Mandriva.
Do you honestly believe that you are going to get anything resembling an statistically valid or meaninful response at a place like OSNews?
Edited 2007-09-06 17:05
It is even more hilarious that you do so with the spelling of a three-year old.
Did you know that there are people whose native language is not English?
Well, English is not my native language, so, my spelling is not perfect! Wow, thank you for that great discovery! I guess that your Italian is much better than my English…
Do you honestly believe that you are going to get anything resembling an statistically valid or meaninful response at a place like OSNews?
Listen, re-read all my previous post, and find a place where I mentioned, even in indirect mode, the concept of “statistic”.
I express an OPINION and I was asking for other people’s OPINION. If you don’t know the difference, that’s not my fault.
You are still putting words in my mouth that i’ve never said.
I’m sad that mandriva is not on 99% of the desktop.
I’m sad that Ubuntu is much more used and relevant these days.
I’m sad that Redhat is driving the linux market.
But saying that, doesn’t mean that I’m shitting on mandriva people’s work.
Stop acting like a 13 years old child, please.
Yes, I completely agree, unfortunately. Firing the company founder was a huge strategic blunder for them, and IMO something that they will never completely recover from.
Have you tried it?
It is the best looking big distro and the config tools are the best (with those os PCLinuxOS obviously).
urpmi is a bit slower than apt-get but a lot faster than yum.
I use it as my main desktop because I care for look and it’s far from irrelevant.
Have you tried it?
yes, i did it several times, since the first Mandrake release.
I use it as my main desktop because I care for look and it’s far from irrelevant.
Well, beside the fact that I personally don’t like it, I’m sure it has its strength.
But the question I posed was different: it seems to me that it is getting less and less attention from media (especially from the non-tech ones) against, just say, ubuntu and redhat.
Have you tryed 2008 or 2007.1?
Anyway, I don’t think Mandriva has lost mind share.
The *BIG* media didn’t pay attention to Mandrake then and they don’t do now. Actually they don’t pay much attention to GNU or linux at all.
When I watch CNN, I don’t expect to see this release on the news.
Relatively speacking, Ubuntu and Red Hat get much more attention from small media, that’s right, and linux in general get more attention. But that is quite a different thing. Mandriva didn’t get less attention as a result. I hear as much (or as few) about Mandriva as I heard about Mandrake : some articles in tech mags, some offer a free CD and OS News talk about it when there are new releases.
Ubuntu and Red Hat got big but they didn’t got it at the expense of Mandrake/Mandriva but in addition to on different markets. Ubuntu attracts new users who didn’t try linux before thanks to its shipit program and a big budget. Red Hat is in big corp business. You hear about them both in financial news and tech news, but we don’t hear much about Red Hat in desktoplinux news.
Dell’s adopting Ubuntu is good for Ubuntu but it’s not bad for Mandriva. I’ll buy a Dell and install Mandriva as I did before, except I won’t have to pay for Windows this time
Everybody is happy. I can’t wait to test this new release.
Edited 2007-09-06 13:21
A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate) is available here
Dunno about the current Mandriva release schedule, but Release Candidates are not supposed to be feature complete, not fully tested software, or I miss something.
Mandriva RCs have always been more late beta than RC – RC1 is never seriously what we intend to ship as the final release. (If we were really taking ‘release candidate’ at its face value, we would obviously never *schedule* an RC2 :>). Bit odd, I know, but you get used to it.
Actually, I’ve just been copying and pasting that little disclaimer from announcement to announcement – to be honest, almost all the stuff listed on that page actually is in RC1. I’ll probably take that bit out for the RC2 announce.
I read somewhere about the amount of software that Mandriva has in its repositories and was impressed. I downloaded and tried the last beta copy.
They weren’t kidding about the software. Besides the typical software, they had dynamips and dynagui and some other lesser used programs.
My only issue had to do with SageTV. For some reason, when I ran the SageTV client, the picture was jerky. I went back to Debian and it worked fine.
Something must be up with the laptop (HP nc8000) and the x-driver. Mandriva isn’t the only one with issues about it.
Still, I might give it another try when the software is finally released.
were you using the 3D desktop feature?
I stopped all of the 3D features (the laptop isn’t that powerful).
One day I really need to compare my Debian xorg.conf to Mandriva’s and figure out why it doesn’t work as well.
If it’s an Intel chipset, they’re likely using very different versions of the driver (the new ‘intel’ driver in Mandriva, the old ‘i810’ driver in Debian…I suspect Debian hasn’t gone to ‘intel’ yet, correct me if I’m wrong). It may be an upstream regression.
Well, I resized a partition and installed the Beta 2 I had again. This time I used Gnome for the desktop.
I didn’t have to do anything with the CPU frequency as I did in KDE, and after configuring my screen, SageTV works fine.
My only 2 complaints so far is that Samba isn’t installed by default which is awkward when you use Gnome to search the network.
And the other complaint is that once I have Samba working and used the Mandriva Center to mount a Windows share, it doesn’t put an icon on the gnome desktop, like it would if I mounted using Gnome. Relatively minor complaints.
So far, I really like the new 2008 distro.
Why oh why did they have to choose mandriva as there new name….
Anybody know of a torrent for this? The mandriva docs only reference ftp mirrors.
We don’t do torrents for beta releases – the demand is not enough to make it necessary. Our FTP mirrors can easily cope with the demand.
If you’re in the U.S. I’d recommend downloading from ncftp ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrivalinux/de… , it’s a very fast mirror.
I think you should also consider the new wiki layout :
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Home
Many things are now open to everyone. The feeling of freedom in Mandriva is becoming greater these days.
For example, every one can write an article in the wiki.
regards,
glyj.
I used mandrake as my first linux distro and used it for many years. I have fond memories of 8.2, but unfortunately I think not long after that I switched to suse and was very impressed.
I’ve since used kubuntu but am now again using opensuse and have decided that it will be staying on my system for a lot longer…
I think what I didn’t like about mandrake was its lack of polish. Too many broken apps (maybe too new?) and just a bit rough around the edges. It was actually quite a good OS, but not good enough to be the best (not for me anyway).
But a big thing I didn’t like was how different it was from the others. My suggestion for mandriva is to make their linux more mainstream, so that switching from another distro is seamless and so there is nothing new to get used to.
The other big thing is overall polish. It needs to work smoothly for all common tasks like web/multimedia/office etc.
I’m not trying to criticize when I mention this, but have a look at opensuse and you’ll see what I mean by a very tidy and polished distro. You dont need to match all the features, just the quality.
This was as constructive as I could be
Of the major RPM distros, it’s actually more accurate to say that Fedora and Mandriva are quite similar and SUSE is rather different from both. SUSE is the oddball in that set. For an example, try comparing the spec file for a simple application (say gedit) in Mandriva, SUSE, and Fedora.
And honestly, if you switched shortly after 8.2, then you’re not very qualified to talk about current Mandriva – after all, we’ve done…9 releases since then, and 2008 will be the 10th. It’s a completely different distribution, really. Give 2008 a try and see if it’s different from your recollections.
Edited 2007-09-06 03:41
Well I started to use Mandrake 7.X and yes I too remember the apps crashing but lots water has flown into the see since then
and the picture is quite different 
Hmm.. I have used Mandriva from version 7.x (alright – it was called Mandrake in those days). I made de switch from SuSe 6.x (or something) to Mandrake in those days.
I kept my eye on other distributions and was very impressed to see the development Linux in general made through the years..
I tried many other distro’s like Fedora, SuSe, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, StartCom, Debian, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS and many others (even LFS).
Still – I keep Mandriva on my main computer (2007.1 at this moment). The other distros’s just don’t give me that combination of being complete but easy to configure yourself. There is always seem to be something missing in other distro’s thats “standard” in the default setup of Mandriva..
You talking about SuSe, but to be earnest – I think nowadays it’s a slow working distro. It’s not responsive and the software manager is really a pain to use (although I heard the upcoming version this has been taken care of). I have tested SuSe and really liked version 9.2, but after that it went downhill. Maybe the coming release will be better, but I don’t hold my breath..
Madriva 2007.1 is something completely different than the old Mandrake 8.2. I would suggest you give it a try..
I will be testing Mandriva 2008 RC1 after downloading. I was already impressed by the early beta versions, but I think it’s time to do a little bit of testing on a free partition of my main computer. Nothing wrong with a little bug-hunting (if any) now and then ;-).
I would suggest you try the same thing (on a spare computer if you are afraid to break things) or try the latest 2007.1 otherwise. Don’t justice Mandriva by looking back to a really old version like 8.2 like I said before..
Sorry about my English – it’s not my native language (and no – I’m not French :-)..
No need to apologies, your English is very good and easy to understand.
My main desktop was Mandrake, and later Mandriva, back in the day but I fell out of interest for me, for various reasons. I’ve been waiting for a good release for a while now to get back into using what for me has always been a fantastic distro. Maybe it’s time I gave a hand and helped out?
Thanks for the input. I’ll give it a go on my test partition.
More MAN-DRIBBLE!
I’m always weary of trying Betas, so I avoided the Mandriva betas. I will try the RC instead now