The Official Mandriva Blog

C’est au premier étage de la Tour Eiffel, lieu symbolique de la France, qu’une grande partie de la communauté de l’open source s’est donné rendez vous pour fêter les 10 ans de Mandriva. 230 personnes s’étaient réunies afin de célébrer l’événement. La soirée a commencé vers 19h avec un discours de François Bancilhon CEO, sur l’historique de la société. Puis, à tour de rôle, plusieurs intervenants, partenaires de la société se sont succédés:

• George Lebre (Dexxon)
• Tristant Nitot (Mozilla Europe)
• Pascal Chauvat (Bacula System)
• Olivier Comes - Emmanuel Mace (SUPINFO)
• Roberto Di Cosmo (Reseach Department)
• Dele Ajimoso (Mandriva West Africa)
• Pavel Frolov (Mandriva Russie)
• Marcin Zalicki (Mandriva Pologne)
• Juan Carlos Bonilla (Mandriva Middle East)

Ces différentes interventions ont pu donner aux invités le ton sur l’avenir de Mandriva. Cet anniversaire fut également très enrichissant en matière de rencontres et d’échanges. Un bilan qui s’avère être plus que positif pour la décennie qui vient de s’écouler, et qui annonce un futur très prometteur pour Mandriva.

[English]
Mandriva celebrates its 10 years anniversary at the Eiffel Tower

Mandriva 10 years anniversary took place at the Eiffel Tower, symbolic place of Paris, where a large part of the Open Source community got together to celebrate Mandriva’s anniversary. 230 guests were presents. The evening started at 7 pm with François Bancilhon’s speech, the CEO of Mandriva. Then, several partners made a speech:

• George Lebre (Dexxon)
• Tristant Nitot (Mozilla Europe)
• Pascal Chauvat (Bacula System)
• Olivier Comes - Emmanuel Mace (SUPINFO)
• Roberto Di Cosmo (Reseach Department)
• Dele Ajimoso (Mandriva West Africa)
• Pavel Frolov (Mandriva Russie)
• Marcin Zalicki (Mandriva Pologne)
• Juan Carlos Bonilla (Mandriva Middle East)

This anniversary was very fulfilling and rewarding for all guests. Everyone was very happy to be part of Mandriva’s party.

We’re proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site, and on the network of public mirror servers.

The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you’ve come to expect from the latest Mandriva Linux release. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards and wireless chips). Also, the addition of new features and ongoing improvements to the renowned Mandriva tools continues, including a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, the new network configuration center, and improvements to the Mandriva software management tools.

You can read about the most exciting new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The Release Notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The Errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

Mandriva Linux 2008 was developed by the Mandriva development community, based around the Cooker development distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available, for which we thank our contributors greatly. We’re proud of the standardization efforts included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including support for the Freedesktop.org XDG menu, user directories and icon theme specifications.

Mandriva Linux 2008 is available for download free of charge at the Mandriva website. The One installation CD is the recommended download with everything you need to start using Mandriva Linux 2008: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included.

Enjoy your brand new Mandriva Linux 2008 system!

Last Saturday I participated in Mozilla24 a cyber and physical event organized by the Mozilla foundation. The overall event took place in France, Japan, Thailand and the US. The panel discussion I was in was only (I assume for time zone reasons) in France, Japan and Thailand.

In France, it was held at ENST (a Telecommunication Engineering School in Paris), in a rather ugly auditorium (like most auditoriums of French engineering schools). It seemed from the pictures on the screen that they had found similarly ugly places in Japan and Thailand. Which means the glitter was in the technology rather than in the setting.

The technology was indeed impressive: good and clear communication around the globe, possible interaction between the sites and good quality sound and video. On the other hand, there were lots of people busy pulling wires and frantically typing on keyboards, so I assume there was a lot of work behind the seemingly effortless exercise.

Participants in France were OpenOffice.org (Charles Schulz), Wikimedia (Pierre Beaudoin), Mozilla Europe (Tristan Nitot) and Mandriva (yours truly).

Tristan was his usual mix of fun, kindness and smart and told us some cute stories on the beginning of Mozilla in France, when life was tough (it is much better now). He had given each presenter a list of questions to answer and to my surprise everyone followed the scenario he had provided.

In my presentation, I explained the three key words which drive our strategy: simple, innovative and open. Simple as in “take technology to the masses by making it simple�, innovative as “include innovations in the distro to take them mainstream� and open as in “open source, free software and open standards�. Then I went to our focus on bringing Linux to emerging markets via OEM relationships, as we are doing today for instance in Brazil and Argentina.

I had a question on fighting Microsoft in emerging markets. This is a good question: we indeed met them recently when they offered $3 licenses to a prospect we were talking to in an emerging market country (more on this soon)! I had another question on the multiplicity of distros: 5 years from now, will there still be many distros? Our vision is we should see convergence on the lower layers of the distro, i.e., the core components and the added value of a specific distro should move up in the software stack.

English version available, please scroll down

Version française

Nous avons mis à jour deux suites, et publié deux nouvelles suites sur Mandriva Kiosk.

• KDE 3.5.4 : Nous avons sauté la version 3.5.3 et voici la 3.5.4 toute fraîche!
• Mozilla Pack 1.5.0.6 : Les dernières versions des “killer-apps” de Mozilla, Firefox 1.5.0.6 et Thunderbird 1.5.0.5
• Pingus 0.6 : Des tas de pingouins et d’heures de diversion avec ce jeu grâce à son éditeur de niveaux.
• Lecteurs video : Tous les lecteurs, pour ne plus rater une seule vidéo.

C’est l’heure du click !

English version

We have updated two bundles and added two new bundles to the Kiosk catalog.

• KDE 3.5.4: We skipped the 3.5.3 version and you can now install a fresh 3.5.4 version!
• Mozilla Pack 1.5.0.6: The latest versions of the Mozilla killer apps, Firefox 1.5.0.6 and Thunderbird 1.5.0.5
• Pingus 0.6: Penguins and hours of fun galore with this Lemmings clone game that includes a level editor.
• Video players : All the best players, so you won’t ever miss another video.

Do the one-click thing!

You can now get the latest version of Firefox for your Mandriva Linux 2006 system directly from the Security Updates.

Frédéric Crozat, who maintains Mozilla packages and is the GNOME developer (among other things) for Mandriva, explains:

“Mozilla is not supporting 1.0.x versions of Firefox and Thunderbird anymore. We had shipped 1.0.6 versions of both applications with Mandriva Linux 2006.0 and were able to provide security fixes in sync with version 1.0.8, but now we suddenly found ourselves unsafe. We decided to break our no-backports rule for Firefox and Thunderbird for that reason.”

So there you go, next time you type MandrivaUpdate in your console as root, Firefox will suddenly be safer and more featureful. Kiosk users will benefit from the Firefox update plus the Thunderbird update very soon. UPDATE : Mozilla(TM) Pack 1.5.0.6 is available on Kiosk

Frédéric says it’s likely that a special policy will be implemented for Mozilla software also in Mandriva Linux 2007, resulting in very reactive updates. Although very beneficial for you, dear user, Mozilla’s strategy results in very complicated maintenance of applications that depend on Firefox as a platform, such as Galeon or Epiphany. Another reason to use Konqueror and KHTML some of you will say ;).

In the meantime, run that MandrivaUpdate command already and get Firefox 1.5.0.6!

Version française ci-dessous

English:

We’ve updated two bundles and published two new bundles today on Kiosk:

• New : Liferea
• New : Gthumb
• Updated : Mozilla(tm) 1.5.0.4 Pack
• Updated : GNOME 2.12.3

Next on the list should be KDE 3.5.3, a newer version of XGL/Compiz, a special compilation of wallpapers by Ayo, and games (won’t tell you everything, that wouldn’t be fun :p ).

We’re looking for good tutorials on how to use these applications. If you know them well and fell like giving it a go, write a tutorial and we’ll link to it from the application’s description in Kiosk. If you know of a good tutorial, do send the link

Enjoy your Kiosk experience !

The team.

Version française :

Nous avons actualisé deux suites et publié deux nouvelles suites sur Kiosk.

• Nouveau : Liferea
• Nouveau : Gthumb
• Actualisé : Mozilla(tm) 1.5.0.4 Pack
• Actualisé : GNOME 2.12.3

Prochains sur la liste : une nouvelle version de KDE (3.5.3) et de GXL/Compiz, une compilation de fonds d’écran dessinés par Ayo, et des jeux (et d’autres choses, mais gardons un peu de suspense).

Nous recherchons des tutoriels pour ces applications, donc si vous en connaissez bien une ou plusieurs, lancez-vous dans l’écriture ou suggérez-nous un lien ! Nous lierons le tutoriel depuis le descriptif de l’application dans Kiosk.

Rendez-vous sur Kiosk!

L’équipe Kiosk.