JLP’s Blog

A new version of one of the most user-friendly distributions of free and open source operating system Linux has just been released. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (or 2008.1 if you wish) packs quite a lot of goodies. It brings official full support for the highly popular ASUS Eee PC laptop, has easier synchronisation with various mobile devices, a new parental control utility, Elisa multimedia centre is there, so is Codeina for easy multimedia codecs installation. They have also switched to PulseAudio sound server, updated software to latest versions (yes even KDE 4.0.3 is available) and given the distribution a fresh new look. Go download it from here (or via BitTorrent) and while downloading be sure to check out a visual guide to what’s new in Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring.

As with previous releases I also did my fair share of beta testing and bug reporting this time. In addition this is also the first release where I have been the coordinator of Slovenian translation team. We did a great job and almost everything is translated. The only thing left are initscript messages (which are hidden most of the time).

Even during beta testing this release proved to be of very high quality. Looks like after some hiccups a year or two ago Mandriva have put their act together and the quality of releases is increasing every year now. They are also doing a great job with improving their relationship and interaction with community. If they continue in this direction they can soon be back at the top, although it will be hard since unfortunately there is not so much hype surrounding Mandriva as there is around some other very popular Linux distribution.

Tags: mandriva, linux, distributions, eee pc, eeepc, free software, open source, operating systems