Mandriva and Derivative Release Latest
After a long and anxious month of delays, Mandriva finally released their 2010.1 Spring update with lots of goodies for all. In related news, PCLinuxos, a derivative of Mandriva, released what they've dubbed their Quarterly ISO updates in several flavors.
Mandriva 2010.1 Spring
With talk of closed doors and hints of acquisition then release delays of over a month, many Mandriva users were rightly nervous if the Spring update would ever arrive. It did. After a press release stating that Mandriva would be saved by partnerships and restructuring, Mandriva 2010.1 Spring codenamed ‘Farman’ was announced.
This release brings one-click encryption, expanded parental controls, and improvements to the Smart Desktop system. Main applications that have been updated include GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.3, Firefox 3.6.6, and OpenOffice.Org 3.2.1. But there are issues.
Users with ATI Radeon HD 3470 may experience poor graphical performance unless they use the proprietary graphic drivers available when clicking through the graphical server setup. Other users may have trouble starting X when using NVIDIA proprietary drivers and the suggested fix is to use the Nouveau drviers instead. Laptops with more than one chipset may not have any 3D acceleration at all which keeps KWin desktop effects from working properly. Some users using the new GDM may experience system locks when trying to reboot. Non-root mounting of CIFS/SMB has been disabled due to security risks, but users can re-enable it manually. Firefox has multiple issues.
PCLinuxOS 2010.7
About the same time as Mandriva's announcement was beginning to make the rounds, PCLinuxOS announced their latest ISO updates as well. PCLinuxOS began making periodic ISO updates in order to save new users from having to download so many updates after initial install, a criticism previously heard.
This release comes in versions for KDE, Gnome and LXDE desktops. KDE has been updated to 4.4.5 and GNOME to 2.30.2 for 2010.7. Other common ingredients include Linux 2.6.33.5-bfs, Firefox 3.6.6, Flash 10.1, GIMP 2.6.9, and Compiz 0.8.4. OpenOffice.org can be installed with the included GetOpenOffice utility. No major issues have been reported as of yet.
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