The Official Mandriva Blog

Contributors, club members & employees gathered on tuesday 30th for a relaxed evening at the Jet Lag.
We talked about any and everything over a drink, diner, and for some over another drink, untill 1am in the morning.

The warm atmosphere, the nice surroudings and probably also all those cocktails, helped making us connect.

The employees and contributors appreciated this chance to meet each others in such an informal gathering.

More pictures on flick’R
Big thanks to Dark_Schneider for letting us use his pictures.

Thanks a lot too to all of you who came to have diner with us. It was a great night and we’ll probably do it again so stay on the look-out for the next date !

Contributeurs, membres du club et employés se sont retrouvés mardi 30 pour une soirée détendue au Jet Lag.
Nous avons parlé de tout et de rien autour d’un verre, d’un dîner, et pour certains, d’un autre verre, jusqu’à 1 heure du matin.

L’ambiance chaleureuse, le cadre sympathique, et sans doute aussi tous ces cocktails, ont contribué à resserrer les liens.

Les employés ont autant apprécié de rencontrer des contributeurs, que ces derniers de rencontrer des mandriviens dans un cadre informel.

Plus de photos sur flick’R
Merci à Dark_Schneider de nous les avoir passées.

Merci également à tous ceux qui ont fait le déplacement pour passer cette soirée en notre compagnie ! L’expérience sera sans aucun doute reconduite alors ouvrez l’oeil pour la prochaine date !

We’ll be shipping Mandriva Linux 2007 with an extra security feature we’re very proud of: Invictus Firewall.

Invictus is latin for unconquered and the title of a famous poem by William Ernest Henley. Invictus Firewall is a redundant firewall. Drakinvictus is the wizard that will help you to configure it, in your language when available. That’s as Mandrivian as it gets.

Samir Bellabes came to me and said “Alex, I just added some sweetness to the kernel”. Samir took the ct_sync capabilities of Netfilter, that allow syncing conntrack and expect tables between the two firewalls, and the virtual IP address sharing allowed by ucarp from OpenBSD. All in all, if the master fails, the slave knows when and how to replace it, instantly. Dead simple, simple genius.

Sam is a networking and security wizard. Rumours say he’s on the right spot to know what you need to protect your network. Colleagues say his help is valuable when designing protocols to communicate with certain employees from the communication agency across the street. Anyway, here’s a diagram of what your network could look like with Invictus Firewall (click on the image to enlarge it):

So there’s the kernel trick by Sam, and there’s also Blino’s user interface. A Mandriva wizard as you love them. Invictus Firewall is of course licensed under the General Public License. We’re making it available in Mandriva Linux Powerpack+ 2007: once you’re running the system simply launch drakinvictus to configure it.
Our Small and Medium Business clients can now safeguard their network’s first and last protection from the wild world of the Internet — the firewall — and benefit from our technical support.If you’ll be using any other flavour of Mandriva Linux 2007, you’ll be able to install drakinvictus with urpmi or the brand new rpmdrake2.For 2007, we wish you to remain unconquered.

The 3D-Desktop has been a hot topic since Novell showed-off their XGL/Compiz integration for NLD 10 at a Solutions Linux conference in January this year. Useless for some, simply cool for others. In any case, there’s a “Wow” factor that’s just good for Linux on the desktop: your neighbours during train or plane trips always ask “what’s with the cube”? “Oh, this is a Linux desktop”, you answer. And that’s when you’ll give her the speech.

So Blino baked a recipe, put it all in Cooker and made a video of Mandriva Linux 2007 running sexy Compiz effects (powered by XGL in this case). Check it out:

Mandriva Linux 2007 3D Desktop
Uploaded by mandriva

We’re enabling both AIGLX and XGL technologies in Mandriva Linux 2007. The selection will be automatic, so it’s a transparent process for you (unless you want to tweak and hack and break and make ;)). We handle Intel, Nvidia and ATI chipsets through both proprietary and Free drivers. It works on both KDE and GNOME desktop environments.

Apart from those addictive effects (try using a 3D-Desktop for a few days then go back to a plain old desktop to understand “addictive effects”) and the “Wow factor”, many say there’s not much to the 3D-Desktop on Linux yet. Major Linux distributions, and some smaller ones, have just integrated these technologies. This was the first step.

When you’re done showing-off your cool Mandriva Linux 2007 and evangelizing the great things we can achieve through Free and Open Source Software, go make some great 3D-ready applications!

Blino just put Ruby On Rails in Cooker, making RoR ready to ship in Mandriva Linux 2007.

 

To lever my hype skills (and to please our marketing team, for that matter), I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails, and to package it for Mandriva.

Blino

It’s not yet integrated with Apache, but MySQL connectivity and Webrick are up-and-running.

Ruby On Rails is a fast-growing web-development framework. It’s been the next big thing for the past two years or so, so we wouldn’t dare let our users miss the chance to try it, use it and abuse it. If you’re a web developer or the curious type, jump into the Web 2.0 thingy with Rails: MCV model, DRY principled (Don’t Repeat Yourself), inline AJAX (you produce AJAX in Ruby ) and lots more fun stuff to play and get serious with.

Other frameworks are going to make it into the distro, like Catalyst (which in fact has been there for a while, our Hardware Compatibility List and Fibric being Catalyst-powered) and Django, as well as more Web 2.0 goodness.

For now, grab a Cooker snapshot and feel the power of freedom-powered-web2.0-agile-sexy-coding for the Web with Ruby on Rails and Mandriva Linux