We are glad to introduce you our brand new website for our Brazilian subsidiary. Thanks to this website, Brazilians will be able to download our free solutions, to discover all our products and goodies and buy them from the Mandriva Store.
With its specific area dedicated to professionals and partnerships, the Mandriva Brazil website is opened to all its customers.
At the same time, we’ve opened our Brazilian team blog, which will permit Brazilians to follow Mandriva’s news online!
Mandriva is proud to introduce its brand new release: Mandriva Linux 2010, code name Adelie. Take a look on a new desktop: smart, innovative and open!
Your desktop is smart
Included in this new release, “Smart desktop” technology, coming from european research project. Your desktop is tasks oriented. Organize your personal data (mails, documents, images, videos). Notate it, add your comments and tags. Now your data are easy to find through your projects. This is an exclusivity for Mandriva.
Fast and attractive
Don’t wait to have your desktop ready to work! Boot time has been improved again. Mandriva Linux 2010 comes also with a 3 brand new designs: choose the one you prefer. You can also choose one of the 11 extra backgrounds contributed by community members.
Choose your own environment
We believe a linux distribution should reflect open source diversity. Mandriva Linux is the only distribution including both KDE (4.3.2), GNOME (2.28.1) all integrated. Your hardware is a bit old: use lignt environment LXDE. You are netbook user: check our integration, it’s all included in our distribution. Have a look also in Moblin, a new environment dedicated to mobile use.
Take advantage of Mandriva Control Center
Another exclusivity for Mandriva! Your system is easy to administrate. In a few clicks you can:
The best of up to date open source software
Find more information here:
Mandriva Linux 2010 is available through
All Mandriva iso images are hybrid isos. You can dump it on an USB key using Mandriva Seed (Linux | Windows)
Thanks again to all Mandriva Linux community efforts who made this new release possible.
Enjoy Adelie!
Here are the results of the contest Mandriva launched one month ago. This contest was a big success. We received 842 photos. Thanks everybody for your interest and for contributing!
We had to pick 10 photos, choice was really hard. Here are below the 10 winners. Note that we have a 11th photo we wanted to add as we found it really nice (and it is from one of the 10 winners). Again congrats for all contributers and especially for winners.
All these extra backgrounds will be provided by default in Mandriva Linux Free and Powerpack in mandriva-theme-extra package.
We take the occasion to open new Mandriva groups on Flickr for artwork contribution in Mandriva Linux. You can now upload whenever you want some more backgrounds, screensavers, themes… in Mandriva Linux artwork group. You can also spread your favourite distribution and upload screenshots of your environment.
Note: for all winners, check your FlickrMail, we have sent you message for your price (Mandriva Linux 2010 Powerpack , download edition).
Leaf - photo by kubina (CC By-SA)
Let’s start with a large overview of the Linux distribution publisher activity for Mandriva. We will deal with the best known, public and freely available versions (Free and One).
One of the first missions for a Linux distribution publisher is to make a selection from the many available Open Source projects.
freshmeat, a standard reference on the topic, puts the number at more than 40,000. Our aim is to supply applications answering ours users needs – at home, at work, on a workstation or on a server.
Then the “best” version of each software needs to be identified. The game is to answer a seemingly paradoxical demand: offer the most up-to-date, innovative software and still guarantee system stability.
This conflicting choice requested by a majority of users requires a close watch of the evolution of these projects. An additional challenge: if we pride ourselves in collaborating with developers, we have little influence in their planning or roadmaps, which adds a healthy dose of incertitude to the process.
Monitoring technology is consequently a crucial factor in guaranteeing long-term stability.
Each engineer daily scours through mailing-lists, technical articles and reviews to keep abreast of changes, development planning, future technological leaps.
Our principal concern: to draw up a timetable for integration into the distribution taking into account necessary testing for the final delivery of a stable version.
The selected software, once integrated, offer end-users a consistent, ergonomic, simple and powerful environment.
Integration is of various kinds:
These examples illustrate the range of tasks to be carried out in a tight timescale (6 months). Integration is successful when the environment is installed without any supplementary configurations.
One of Mandriva’s primary goals is ease of use.
We invest heavily in tools which make Linux accessible to everyone. The installer, Mandriva Control Center, the ease with which hardware is detected play an important part in making our operating system accessible for all.
These tools have followed the technology evolution and the way computers are used today: mobility, user data privacy and security and the amazing, ongoing diversification of peripherals.
The integration of software demands technical efforts. Software from different projects often implies a heterogenous appearance.
The Ia_Ora theme is our standard for KDE and GNOME graphic environments. It harmonizes a whole range of applications, even if they come from different projects.
We also supply three distinctive graphic themes identifying our different products (Free, One, Powerpack, …): wallpapers, screensavers, boot-up images…
To ensure the best results we collaborate with a professional graphic designer.
Our Engineering and Quality Assurance teams carry out an enormous amount of upstream development work.
Up to 8 months before new versions are shipped, they collaborate with hardware manufacturers. In this way all the necessary modifications can be made and integrated before the stable version is released to guarantee an optimal level of hardware support.
It’s the responsibility of the Security team. It ensures in the shortest delay the availability of security updates and bug fixes.
Its work is coordinated with the other teams and contributors. On a daily basis all potential or confirmed security flaws are gathered, fixes are produced or collated, non-regression is guaranteed by Quality Assurance team and corrective software packages are published.
Another key point in the continuity of the distribution is the possibility to upgrade from one version to another. This demands extensive non-regression testing to ensure a simple, secure and transparent migration for your data and all installed elements.
Each Mandriva Linux user can install new software, in complete confidence.
Packages integrity is guaranteed by a controlled and secured production process.
At the heart of this process, the build system is available to the Mandriva community 7 days a week and maintained by our IT team.
This platform is the result of the joint activity of our teams and contributors: development of tools to facilitate package production, improve their quality and reliability…
This allows maintainers to operate in the same secure, standard environment to build applications and software packages that ensure the integrity of the distribution – they do not need to own powerful machines of diverse architectures.
Twice a year we supply ready-for-use versions of Mandriva Linux available for all.
Apart from the commercial version of Powerpack, we offer the Free and One versions.
Free, a 100% Free Software construction, is supplied via DVDs for 32 and 64 bit architectures.
One is a “live” version which allows you to test Mandriva Linux without any risk for the existing environment. This version, like Free, is supplied in more than 70 languages and offers a choice of graphic environments.
In all, 9 ISO images are supplied for free – for everyone to choose among. These images are elaborated throughout the 6 months of development of a new version: 5 test versions are produced during this period to allow everyone to test them and to report on any failure.
We adapt these to new installation needs; for instance, the massive arrival of netbooks has seen the emergence of Mandriva Seed, a tool which allows the easy transfer of these images using a USB support, overcoming the absence of a DVD driver.
The corner stone of the distribution production process is the Mandriva community. It is at the heart of our concerns and calls on us daily to take into account:
What about the Mandriva style, you might ask?
We are convinced that Free Software is of a huge benefit in the software industry as in everyday life. Its consequences for stability, trust, quality, performance vastly outscore what happens in a closed, proprietary software world – notwithstanding collaboration and communities.
From where we are, we do give back our code, our time, our exposure and successes to every projects we rely on. Our commitment meets and depends on our community’s own massive support.
So we will cover next week how the Mandriva Linux community is a critical piece of this job.
country road by joiseyshowaa (CC By-SA)
Mandriva Linux 2010 is coming soon, as does the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and we believe it’s time, yes, for a seasonal pitch about Mandriva’s persona as a Linux distribution publisher, and the Mandriva Linux Community role in this regard (we will cover other Mandriva activities later, for sure).
Although we might be a little didactic in this serie, this will help you to better see how Mandriva is considering the coming years (your feedback is so very welcome, here, in the forum or on your own blog).
As there’s quite a lot of things to say, we’ll make three separate notes:
Let’s go.
We are happy to launch a new service, we hope it to be a long time companion for Mandriva Linux:
Click’n Backup
We face two apparently contradictory needs these days. One is that our files are valuable – we work with them, put a lot of our lives in them (photos, emails, movies, songs, memories) – we want, we need them to be safe.
The other need is that, more and more, we want to access, modify our files, wherever we are – not only when we are on our computer or at home – we move and we want our data to move with us. And we want this to be simple.
Click’n Backup is an answer to this. We have:
And you decide how to use it:
We also have an exciting list of enhancements (translate and improve the service effectiveness) and extensions to pursue. We expect as well a lot from your feedback and ideas, to move on and talk back here or in the forum.
To secure and share your data online is only a first step. It has been years we thought about it and finally we are taking our share of it. Online storage and backup is a hop topic these days, so many ideas and solutions out there, and that’s a good thing.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the beta-test of Mandriva Enterprise Server 5 (aka MES 5).
MES 5 is going to succeed to Corporate Server 4 (which support cycle will end on September 2011).
Among this new beast new features:
All your tests and feedback are interest to us! Especially about hardware support, install process, virtualization and various software stacks.
For your feedback:
Mandriva has decided to help porting K3b, the leading and award-winning KDE burning software, to Qt4.
2 engineers of our KDE team are working together with Sebastian Trueg, the lead developer of this project, so that new version can be released sooner and hopefully for 2009 Spring release. Linux users will finally be able to make K3b use the full power of the KDE4 platform through Solid, Phonon and all the Plasma environment. Boiko is one of our 2 engineers working at the moment on this port.
What does your work consist in?
Boiko: KDE4 and Qt4 brought many new possibilities for developers. But in order to benefit from those possiblities, it is necessary to port all the KDE3/Qt3 code to these new infrastructure. K3b port has been started some time ago, but there are still a lot of work to be done. Our work is to finish this port work and at the same time to simplify the code by making use of the new KDE4 and Qt4 frameworks available for many of the tasks that used to be done “by hand” inside the application.
What are the targets in general and in KDE4?
Boiko: The main target is to get K3b working for at least the most common tasks (like burning data CDs and DVDs, Audio CDs, VCD, etc). Apart from that, the target is also to keep K3b integrated into KDE4 by adapting it to the new frameworks and guidelines.
Sebastian added: “Gustavo and Arthur are working on porting all project views to the Qt4 view/model architecture. They are processing very well and almost all projects have been ported. I ported the d’n'd support, fixed plugin management, and a few other things that broke with the change from KDE3 to KDE4. K3b trunk contains a lot of improvements which partially are not finished yet. I am trying to get most of it done for April.”
We wish them good work and see you at the end of 2009 Spring release!
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