Final Mandriva Linux 2010 release candidate arrives

The Mandriva developers have announced the availability of the second release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2010; Mandriva Linux 2010 is aimed at improving the user experience for daily tasks. The fifth and final development release includes several bug fixes and updates to the included components.

Mandriva Linux 2010 RC2 is based on the 2.6.31 Linux kernel and features updates to the major desktop components, including the latest stable release of KDE 4.3.2 and GNOME 2.28. The release also includes the Moblin 2.0 environment designed for mobile desktop platforms, making Mandriva Linux the first distribution to integrate it in a free distribution. The Guest account is now enabled by default and Plymouth has been fully integrated, replacing Splashy for managing the boot splash, the graphical boot animation which appears while the boot processes happen in the background. Poulsbo chipset drivers are now included in the Mandriva One ISOs and Nepomuk related services and user interfaces have been improved. VirtualBox 3.0.8 and Amarok 2.2 are included in the release, however, the KMyMoney2 personal finance manager has been removed as it is "much too unstable for now".

The developers caution users not to use the RC2 release to upgrade existing Mandriva Linux installations due to several "unresolved issues" with KDE, GNOME and other window managers which may result in "being unable to start a desktop, rendering it useless for most people". As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Testing is encouraged and users are asked to report any major bugs that they find so that they can be addressed before the final release.

More details about the release can be found in the release notes and a list of known issues is available on the project's 2010.0 Errata web page. Mandriva Linux 2010.0 RC2 is available to download as a 32 or 64-bit DVD image file. The final version of Mandriva Linux 2010 is expected to be available on the 3rd of November. Mandriva Linux is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

See also:

• Mandriva get into the cloud backup business, a report from The H.
• Mandriva 2009.1 Spring released, a report from The H.

(crve)