The Official Mandriva Blog

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.

New “Ia Ora” theme (that’s “Hello” in French Polynesian!), 3d desktop with both AIGLX and XGL, GNOME 2.16, KDE 3.5.4, Kernel 2.6.17… No, no, don’t read this post, go get your own brand new Mandriva Linux 2007!

Mandriva Linux Free 2007

• It’s Free as in Free and Open Source Software, and Free as in you don’t have to pay.
• It’s 3 CDs.
• Catch the Mandriva Linux Free 2007 torrent using your favourite BitTorrent client!

Mandriva Linux One 2007

• 1 CD with the greatest software. Use it in Live mode, install it in minutes from the desktop.
• There’s the Free Software version, with no proprietary drivers.
• There are the free, as in gratis, KDE and GNOME versions, available in 4 flavours according to your language. These include the proprietary drivers for WiFi, video, etc.
• Grab the Mandriva Linux One 2007 torrent using your favourite BitTorrent client! And share it people, spread the love!

Mandriva Linux Discovery 2007

• The DVD designed for Linux beginners, with simplified menus and ergonomy (also available on CD).
• Includes a free 1 month subscription to Mandriva Club (Silver level), to Mandriva Online (the powerful update notification service) and 1 month of free commercial support by Mandriva on our Mandriva Expert platform.
• Includes full versions of LinDVD for DVD playback; Flatout, a hit game powered by Linux; more full versions of commercial software.
• You’re one small step away from adopting Linux with Mandriva Linux Discovery 2007.

Mandriva Linux Powerpack 2007

• 2 DVD’s of pure Mandriva Linux experience for those of you who want to get some.
• Includes a 6 months subscription to Mandriva eTraining including the Linux System Administration course (certified by the Linux Professional Institute), a 1 month subscription to Mandriva Club (Silver level), to Mandriva Online (the powerful update notification service) and 2 months of free commercial support by Mandriva on the Mandriva Expert platform.
• Also includes full versions of LinDVD for DVD playback; Flatout, a hit game powered by Linux; also more full versions of commercial software.
• Fellow Linux lovers, meet Mandriva Linux Powerpack 2007.

Mandriva Linux Powerpack+ 2007

• A 2 DVD solution for your Small Office / Home Office.
• Increased security with Invictus Firewall, the Mandriva-made and exclusive redundant firewall solution, VNC software for remote administration, new VPN configuration tools, ERP, CRM and CMS solutions.
• Best in class commercial software: Arkeia Smart Backup, BitDefender, VMWare.
• Includes a 6 months subscription to Mandriva eTraining including the Linux System Administration course (certified by the Linux Professional Institute), a 1 month subscription to Mandriva Club (Gold level), 3 free months of Mandriva Online (the powerful update notification service) and 3 months of free commercial support by Mandriva on the Mandriva Expert platform.
• Yes, this is Mandriva Linux Powerpack 2007.

We’re very proud of Mandriva Linux 2007. Congratulations to the team, special cheers to our contributors, translators, documentalists and testers!

You too, join the community that is making Linux better on the desktop since 1998!

Do read the release notes and errata.

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!