Mandriva 2011 Alpha 1

Hi all,

I am pleased to announce to you that the iso of Mandriva 2011 Alpha 1 just went out, and should be available in devel/isos/2011 directory on your favorite mirror shortly!

As promised some weeks ago, the Mandriva 2011 Alpha1 is following the lead of Mandriva 2011 Technical Preview, sorting out some of the issues we noticed in it. Besides all the features present in the Technical Preview, this Alpha1 version also brings you:

• Latest kernel 2.6.37
• RPM 5.3.8 (20110125)
• NetworkManager 0.8.2, with mandriva integration plugin
• Systemd 17, enabled and activated by default
• KDE SC 4.6.0
• GNOME 2.32.1
• XFCE 4.8.0
• GCC 4.5.2, with plugins enabled by default
• Chromium browser, provided in a versioning scheme to match the one used Google Chrome project (e.g., chromium-browser-stable and chromium-browser-unstable)
• Firefox 4b11
• OpenSSL 1.0.0d
• Wine 1.3.13

…among many others, available either on the iso, or via repositories. The list of packages to be present on the final version is not completely settled yet, so make sure to give your voice on what you prefer to have in Mandriva 2011.

Besides those items, the following are also worth mentioning:

• Work has started on updating TeX Live to 2010 version. It is still in early stages at the moment, and welcomes comments/testing/feedback.
• Nepomuk and social desktop are activated by default in KDE desktop
• Same ISO media is now used for both Live images and installable ones, so you don’t have to install this version of Mandriva to see how it works and what does it looks like. Just boot the image and you are all set (make sure to use the livecd-iso-to-disk utility within the .iso file if you want to boot it from a flash drive).

Of course, it is needless to mention that it is an Alpha version, and there are still many things to be done before the final release.

And of course, if your favorite application was not updated to the latest version, of there is something that you think should be improved – please, feel tell us about it. Or, even better, be invited to contribute to Mandriva community, helping us to improve the distribution – either by reporting bugs, or triaging them, or even by becoming a package maintainer or developer yourself.

P.S.: A last-minute issue was discovered in x86_64 iso which prevented its boot in some occasions. The updated x86_64 iso should be available in the coming days.

Edit: some corrections in package names and versions.