Mandriva 2010 Spring Released

Today, Mandriva has announced the availability of Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. It's like a major updates to the original Mandriva Linux 2010 release by the end of last year. As usuall, Mandriva comes with lots of goodies that has been cooked in the cooker tree while being developed. Here are some highlights of Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring:

• a complete, quick-to-install system, comprising all the necessary drivers ;

• 'Smart Desktop', a unique technology, which offers dynamic access to all files by labelling them and grading photos, documents, emails and videos whilst safeguarding personal data through a customised approach. Ginkgo, the new graphical interface for managing data semantics, can create and explore the links between their personal data such as mails, documents, files, Web pages;

• Mandriva Directory Server (MDS), an easy-to-use LDAP directory management solution;

• tools to easily secure the system, parental control is easier than ever and can control the web sites and applications used by children ;
  compatibility with the latest (and oldest) hardware platforms, including netbooks ;
  a panel of applications embracing Office, varied educational software, multimedia …;

• numerous educational and scientific applications such as: Axiom (scientific computing), Jmol (a tool for visualizing molecules), Salome (a generic platform for pre- and post-processing for numerical simulation) ;

• the latest versions of leading Open Source applications: KDE 4.4.3, GNOME 2.30.1, Firefox 3.6.6, Xorg Server 1.7.7 ;
  a DVD drive ;
• a wide range of complementary applications in the Powerpack version: audio and video codecs, display with VMware, Adobe suite of drives ...

Very interesting huh?

Actually Mandriva is my first Linux distribution that has been installed on my computer back in 2002. I liked this distribution as it gives me very good experience of using Linux at that time. Everything goes very smooth which encourages me to study more about Linux and how it works back then. I even got a MVP access as i worked through Mandriva translations project to Indonesia until 2005. My first post on this blog was actually in 2004 and it was talking about Mandrake Linux 10.1 Beta 1.

Even though i switched to Slackware since 2005, i still admire how good Mandriva is for new Linux users. One of my student who took my operating system class installed previous Mandriva release and i asked his opinion about this distribution. He said it is a great one as every hardware he has are detected automatically by Mandriva even though it's not the latest version available since this version comes up today.

Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring is available in three editions:

- Powerpack (the commercial edition, including exclusive commercial software, support, and services),

- One (a live CD which can also be installed to the system permanently) and,

- Free (an edition which contains only free / open source software).

One interesting news is that Mandriva only offer Torrents on his official pages, even though the ISOs are now spreading to public through public mirrors. I'm in a process of downloading some of the ISOs (yes, i'm not going to mirror all of the ISOs) into UKDW's ISO Server for faster local access in my campus.

Update (9:46 AM): The Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring ISO in form of CD and DVD for i586 are ready to be downloaded from the ISO Server above. The x86_64 ISO is still on progress and it will be ready in less than 3 hours. Please note that i will only provide the main ISOs and not all of the region-related ISOs.

Update (11 AM): The last remaining ISO (x86_64) is now ready for public consumption. Enjoy

The lists of ISOs that we will provide are:
Spring Dual (700 MB) MD5SUM
Spring i586 (4,3 GB) MD5SUM
Spring x86_64 (4,4 GB) MD5SUM