Mandriva has released announced 2007. “Mandriva today is proud to introduce its brand new product: Mandriva Linux 2007. This new version of the operating system was designed to be an even better fit for the needs and expectations all users, from the beginner to the SOHO user. The key innovation of Mandriva Linux 2007 is the spectacular AIGLX and Xgl 3D-accelerated desktop.” Mandriva told us here at OSNews that while 2007 is released, you won’t be able to download it for a few days: “Our PR department has apparently decided to send out the 2007 ‘release’ announcement even though it’s not actually quite released yet. D’oh.”
Marketer #1: We have to write a press release about ’07 coming out.
Marketer #2: Should we issue that when the software is up or before?
Marketer #1: Before, this way the hits to our sites will go up once when the press release is out and another time when the software is released
Marketer #2: Brilliant!
In all seriousness, I am happy for Mandreva and wish them lots of success with the new release.
Edited 2006-09-26 23:19
.. does a Linux distribution need ‘antivirus’ software bundled with it?
The reason we started including anti-virus software is that we did research indicating that one thing Windows users felt unsure about when moving to Linux was the lack of anti-virus software. You can say all day that there’s virtually no Linux viruses in the wild but still some people won’t feel safe without AV software.
Plus viruses on Linux are, theoretically, a potential threat. It’s not impossible to envisage a Linux virus getting out there. And no, restricted user accounts are not really a good defence against viruses, because a virus run as a normal user can still wipe all the stuff Average Joe actually *cares* about, because it’s all owned by his regular user, not by root. The Linux software packaging / distribution system is a far better defence, but it’s not foolproof (I don’t think any distributor actually checks every line of code in every package they release for viruses) and it can be bypassed (people _will_ install random RPMs from random websites, no matter how often you tell them not to).
(people _will_ install random RPMs from random websites, no matter how often you tell them not to).
That, I think, is the inherent flaw in package management strategies whether on *nix or similar platforms. Installing packages generally requires admin privs, so entering your password becomes second nature. I suspect that if malware does appear on *nix, it will be delivered much the same way as it started with Windows, in seemingly innocuous “hey, install this cool game!” packages. Yes, yes, you can lecture users until the cows home about being responsible for safe computing, but human nature is what it is.
It would be nice to see degrees of trust rather than absolutes. Apps need privileges to install in system directories. I’d prefer to see an approach where apps and related files are isolated in a seperate directory that is protected, but doesn’t necessarily require admin privileges (maybe the equivalent of a power user account in MS venacular). Users can still be required to give explicit consent for application installation, without the installer having full access permissions. Or something along those lines.
The permissions system in *nix is a powerful defense, but just as Windows designers never envisioned the impact of a net-connected world on their security model, I’m not entirely convinced that the mainstream *nix distros are truly envisioning the impact of widespread adoption by a less technically-adept crowd. The number of posts I see in forums like Ubuntu or Suse where people post “Hi, I’m a linux newb and just installed linux, how do I login as root so I don’t have to enter my password all the time?” makes me sad.
Educating users to be responsible is important, but so is designing a security infrastructure that takes human nature into account. Rather than saying users are safe as long as they do this, let’s assume that they won’t and figure out how we can at least minimze the impact. Systems should conform to users, not the other way around.
Anyways, just my two pennies…
Antivirus installed on the computer are USELESS against real threats if the user updates his software like he updates the antivirus. By the time the antivirus gets its database updated, the software installed on your computer should already be patched against nasty holes/exploits.
And if the user is the kind that executes every executable dowloaded from the net, well, he deserves to get ass-raped.
Indeed, that and the bundling of cedega (just $5 a month) does give it a bit of a skeezy shareware feeling. However, I did try the last test release and I will say that it wasn’t half bad. My only true complaint was that I installed with the “One” CD, which is supposed to be a fairly complete one cd install. The part that bit me, and isn’t posted anywhere on Mandriva’s site or near that ISO is that to get a one cd install, instead of removing some of the unneeded cruft that came with it, they ripped out the man pages. Now that is just sloppy.
There’s a VERY good answer for that. If you use Linux as a file server, and you store infected Windows files on it, you don’t want to store the virus too. An anti-virus scrubs the virus on a platform on which it can do no harm, and the next access of the file accesses a clean version of the file.
I really miss the flamewars a new Mandrake release would setoff. What happened to the good ‘ole days?
I have been testing Mandriva 2007 since beta3 and though I’ve never been a Mandriva fan or even user I must say it looks like a really good release. Especially the “One” editions (live-cd’s) are great. You can download the one you prefer for your language, prefered desktop (KDE or Gnome) and graphic card (free or propietary drivers) and you end up with a clean and fast system, very easy to install and configure (especially for new users it’s much more convenient than Ubuntu or Fedora, IMHO).
It’s good to have the best Mandriva back. I wonder if they could now find a good business model similar to that of Red Hat and Novell, where they have an enterprise edition and a free edition. I always found the “Club” concept a bit annoying. And now even Linspire/Freespire has separate products, so maybe that’s the way to go.
Mandriva already has a completely free version called Mandriva Free. The only problem is that many people seem to think that Mandriva is only commercial because of the emphasis on the club and the poor community relations over the last few years.
Mandriva already has a completely free version called Mandriva Free. The only problem is that many people seem to think that Mandriva is only commercial because of the emphasis on the club and the poor community relations over the last few years.
Ahh, yes, good old Mandrake club. That’s when they lost me to Slackware. And I never looked back.
That separation of users into classes, club members and non-members, was a really bad idea.
I wonder how many users former Mandrake lost because of that club.
I’m afraid that Mandriva is pretty much irrelevant now, with Ubuntu taking big chunk of the market share, and Fedora and Suse pushing at it on the rpm distro side.
Which of the features are
*fully* included?I mean aren´t time limited trials.
Is cedega fully installed but you only have to pay for updates?
i especially like the integrated Cerdega and LinDVD.
but i do worry about the 2.6.17 kernel.
it wasn’t until 2.6.18 that a lot of niggles with AM2 and C2D chipsets were ironed out, so anyone thinking of putting 2007 on a brand new rig should be wary.
Give it a shot anyway, distro kernels are generally patched up a bit, so you might find that they have backported some updates from 2.6.18.
No doubt they’ll have updates afterwards, so if you can install, you shouldnt have a problem.
Or install the latest kernel yourself:-)
I’ll have to wait to download the free edition ISO image?
And yes, i know i can do a net install, but sometimes you don’t have access to a fast internet connection to do it, and I’d rather have a DVD-ROM to install rapidly, whithout having to pay an euro for it.
Last year was almost two months, we’ll see this year.
good point, cheers.
I just got a new somewhat low end Dell business PC. Anyway my old distro Ubuntu wouldn’t install, or even run the Live CD or regular install discs. Ditto Kubuntu or my favorite Xubuntu. So I searched around and tried Fedora Core 5 and OpenSuSE 10.1. Both gave me nothing but issues so I tried the last RC of Mandriva 2007 and it just worked. Easiest install and setup of ndiswrapper I have ever seen. It just worked. And AIGLX and 3D Desktop worked perfectly with my i810 driver.
I definitely am going to go with the final release as my distro of choice. It just works and it seems very solid on my system. The last time I used Mandriva was back in the Mandrake days of 7.1.
It’s solid, performs well on my PC, and using Smart Package Manager (which is my package manager of choice) is very simple.
I really think more users should at least give this version of Mandriva a try. I have yet to really encounter any major problems I couldn’t easily fix myself. Such as the slightly tricky process of getting the RC of XFCE 4.4 working.
… WORLD PEACE!
Okay, it´s not ready yet but hey… ya´ know… just want to announce it. Maybe in 2012, we´re there
Serious, i was testing the last two Mandriva 2007 RCs and it all looks quite good. I had to integrate the wifi driver via ndiswrapper by hand but that worked fluently (and did NOT with OpenSuSE 10.1 by the way).
So i´m looking forward to have the stable release of Mandriva 2007 soon.
A distro well done.
I was using 2006 until I saw how well done 2007 RC2 was put together.
no
i’d just screw stuff up.
if new chipset stuff has been backported from 2.6.18 then fine, if not then i will look for a distro with a vanilla 2.6.18 kernel for my new C2D system.
not eveyone is, or wants to be, a command line guru / l33t uber hacker.
😉
Edited 2006-09-27 12:57
Fair enough. I do have to say, though, that historically Mandrake/Mandriva has absolutely *loved* backporting changes and features. They used to do this even with features and bugfixes from new versions of KDE, and kernel backports were pretty common. Dunno if they have actually done backports of the chipset issues you mentioned, but there is a pretty decent chance of it.
There’s actually a vanilla 2.6.18 kernel in 2007. As well as our ‘own’, patched kernel package (which is just called kernel), we have two ‘alternative’ kernels packaged by contributors which generally include more adventurous packages – kernel-multimedia and kernel-tmb – and then we have a package named kernel-linus, which is an automatically built completely stock upstream kernel (we have a buildbot which notices any new kernel released by Linus, pulls it, builds it, and uploads the package to Cooker). There may be some things that don’t work right because it’s a vanilla upstream kernel and not our patched kernel – for e.g. there may be modules missing that the configuration tools expect to be there – but you could certainly give it a shot. 2007 includes either the final RC of 2.6.18 or 2.6.18 final, I’m not sure whether the RPM for 2.6.18 final made it in before the cut-off for 2007 or not.
BTW, if you do try out 2007 and do find problems with the Mandriva kernel and your chipset, please report them to qa.mandriva.com, including a link to the upstream bug report if there is one. The kernel updates team would be very interested. Thanks!
that’s a very useful attitude Mandiva seems to have.
i am very impressed with what i’ve seen of this release, which i say as a long time SUSE devotee.
is it easy to select this 2.6.18 kernel?
kind regards
R3MF
Fairly easy, yeah. It’s in the contrib package source, so you have to set that up first – Easy URPMI ( http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ ) makes it pretty easy to set up package sources (right now they don’t have 2007 in their distribution list, but they will do as soon as the 2007 tree gets onto mirrors. Don’t use ‘2007 community’ as that’s the tree for 2007 betas / release candidates that will disappear when 2007 final is released), use it to set up a contrib source, then you can just use rpmdrake (the graphical RPM installer) or urpmi (the command line one) to install the kernel-linus package. It will install alongside the ‘main’ kernel and will be automatically added to the bootloader menu, so you can select it when you reboot.
easyurpmi has 2007 config since 22/06/06 for betas/
yes, but it configures the /devel/2007.0 tree, which is ONLY for the betas. it will cease to exist when 2007 is officially released, and obviously you’ll have to reconfigure.
Ahh, yes, good old Mandrake club …
That separation of users into classes, club members and non-members, was a really bad idea.
Why? Linspire does it as well and nobody complains about them (except when they’re bashing Linspire et al). Personally I think they only problem with the Club is that it is way too expensive – $132/yr for Silver membership compared to $49.95/yr for a CNR Gold subscription.
I wonder how many users former Mandrake lost because of that club.
They have lost users, but I don’t think the Club concept itself was to blame.
I’m afraid that Mandriva is pretty much irrelevant now, with Ubuntu taking big chunk of the market share, and Fedora and Suse pushing at it on the rpm distro side.
Mandriva is still easily the Number 3 distribution in the world behind Red Hat and Novell/SUSE, thanks to its enterprise/government contracts. The SOHO market is more complicated, I agree, but from the specs of this latest release Mandriva is fighting back.
In particular, Mandriva One 2007 will include proprietary software and drivers for free, something new for Mandriva. This makes One potentially more approachable for newbies than, for example, Ubuntu.
on the disc?
See http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15885&comment_id=163811