Mandriva releases a new version in every six months and this time is no exception. The team released 2009 RC1 which is scheduled for a final release on 9th October. The notable improvements from the previous 2008 Spring release are,

• Automatic repository configuration and mirror selection
• Installer Improvements
• Better webcam support
• Option to uninstall unused localization packages and hardware drivers
• 2.6.27 rc5
• KDE 4.1.1 as the default KDE
• OpenOffice 3 (svn)
  

Installation and Hardware Detection:

The live CD booted into KDE 4.1.1 desktop which has customized menu and theme/wallpaper. All the hardware components were detected and configured properly. There was no 'Live Install' icon on the desktop but you can find it under "tools" menu. Mandriva has one of the simplest installer with a user friendly partitioning tool but when I tried to read the help I got an error saying there is no help package available. This needs to be fixed as this the important step in the installation.

The installer was quick and worked as expected. The installer detected all the existing Linux installations but displayed some non-ASCII characters while listing them. I reported a bug(43714) two days before and the bug is now resolved.

One noticeable feature of the installer is that it will opt the user to remove the unused localization (language) packages and hardware drivers. I've always wanted this kind of utility in many distributions (especially the Live DVD distributions like Sabayon). This post-installation feature will save some disk space but if you add a device which needs a driver from the removed drivers then you need to install it again. It is good to keep the drivers and remove the localization packages (which consumes considerable hard disk space).

The unwanted hardware removal step removed the 'Synaptic' driver which resulted in the loss of scrolling functionality in the laptop (Bug 43694) I've tested. I've to install the X11 Synaptics input driver after installation to get the mouse scrolling working.

KDE 4.1.1 - Wrong Choice?:

I always use KDE as my DE(Desktop Environment) and this time instead of KDE3 series, Mandriva switched to KDE4.1.1. I have been using KDE4 series (though not full time) from the KDE 4.0 beta. I'm sure that KDE4.1.1 has improved a lot from the initial release but it is still under heavy development. Being one of the most beginner friendly distribution, Mandriva should have chosen the stable KDE 3.5.10 instead of KDE4 as the default DE in the One Livecd (may be Mandriva wanted to follow OpenSUSE/Fedora?). For those who want to experiment, they can install KDE4 from the repositories.

Mandriva played the video files without any issues but Amarok complained about Phonon backend and did not play mp3s. I updated Amarok but now Amarok crashes every time I open it (Bug 43695).

One, more serious issue was that whenever I close the laptop lid, it did not power off the LCD. Other issues I noticed were, the "printscreen" did not launch KSnapshot and the 3D effects were not working. I was not able to enable the effects neither from KDE settings nor from MCC. The multimedia front panel in the DELL laptop did not work when I tried to change the Volume even after changing the keyboard layout to DELL Inspiron 6400.

Working with Mandriva:

This release contains all the bleeding edge software including the 2.6.27 RC kernel, OpenOffice 3.0svn and Firefox3. All the applications I've used so far worked as expected but there was no Ktorrent on the Livecd. The long admired Mandriva Control Center takes care of all the administrative task from a single place. Installing software, configuring repositories in Mandriva are as good as any apt based distribution. The automatic repository configuration and mirror selection feature configured the repositories and mirrors works as desired.

After playing around for a while with KDE4, I rebooted my laptop a day after and I was not a able to login into Mandriva as the login manager would not load the KDE4 desktop. I thought that there was some issue with the login manager and tried to install Gnome Display Manager using the 'urpmi' from console and that was when I found out that my disk was full!. After a couple of 'du -sh', I found that the directory /home/.snapshot was using 3.1GB of disk space. So I removed the directory and logged in and went straight to MCC. The control center listed the 'Snapshots' option from where I came to know that this tool takes periodical backup of the system which I accidentally enabled (of by default?). I disabled the backup service and the disk usage is in limit now.

Conclusion:

This release candidate from Mandriva contains less bugs compared to the 2008 spring RC which I reviewed earlier. This release also has some nice installer features and from the release notes, I see webcams are best supported in this release. Though I do not like KDE4 being the default desktop in Mandriva, you can always try Gnome or install KDE3 from the Internet. With its complete hardware detection, out of the box support and all in one stop control center and no major bugs, this release is going to be another success story for Mandriva.