This Beta version comes in 5 differents live installable CDs, which includes each one different languages support. For space constraints, the language are only present on one of the 5 CDs. Likely the language repartition will change for the future betas. You will find which languages is included in each version in the following description. However, once the live CD is installed, you have the possibility to add new languages if you configure an external Mandriva Linux 2007 urpmi source.

I have said it a long time ago. The one year cicle is not worth it if not well used. Again there is a lot of things being done at the last moment: rpmdrake revamp, xdg full migration, drakxtools full work, etc.

At this moment i don't see the advantages of one year cicle in the development of Mandriva Linux. Perphaps the advantages are that mandriva developers can work in several projects at a time.

Strange feeling i have now :(

Also, it seems as though the KDE components can't be found at all, as I can't launch KDE apps (like Konqueror) or even MCC. And, from what I can tell, Thor does not find (or at least activate) eth0.

A few bugs. Big ones, too.

First of all note that I have only booted the live CD once, and that was in order to install the system on a spare hard drive on my T22 Thinkpad; 866MHz PIII, 384MBytes RAM, 20GByte Hard drive.

I immediately used Easy Urpmi to configure main and update resources and did a `urpmi --auto-select' to establish a worthwhile starting point. I had had lots of frustrations with the 2007 alpha release and I hoped to avoid as many avoidable issues as possible.

It is worthwhile noting that I am using the term "immediately" in the previous paragraph somewhat loosely. The first trick was to get the network working, but the beta is no better than the alpha at setting up my PCMCIA Dell TrueMobile wireless network card. Wired ethernet was handled with the expected ease so the delay was only 15 or 20 minutes.

Setting up the X server was approached with trepidation. I remembered from many months ago (18-20?) how much difficulty I had when I first installed Mandriva 2005LE on this machine as I appear to be one of the 4% of the population with a dodgy Savage/IX-MV chip which needs a "ShadowStatus" option to be set (xorg.conf - device section) to prevent the whole machine from seizing up when I am scrolling a screen. It took about an hour to re-learn this lesson using google and as little scrolling as possible.

Opera went in next; I can't do without it. Luckily the Mandriva RPM they host works perfectly well in 2007 alpha/beta.

The next thing I did (silly me) was to fetch and install the alternate laptop-mm kernel and its sources. My reasoning was simple; some might say facile. I reckoned that a laptop-oriented kernel was more likely to handle the PCMCIA cards better than the default kernel. Wrong. Not just wrong, but seriously misguided. Not only is there little discernible difference in the handling of my wireless network card, but the third party Thinkpad modules are missing! The source folder is there alright but it is completely lacking in the source code department. If anyone doubts me then a quick look in /lib/modules/2.6.17.7-mm-laptop-1mdv/kernel/3rdparty will prove the point.

A bit of investigating on the ftp site for contrib showed that there appears to be more than one way to get the mm laptop kernel and sources. There is a "convenient" latest version rpm which purports to ensure that you get the latest version of the kernel and another one for the kernel source. This latter option gets you the "stripped" version, but there is another one which also provides 2.6.17.7-mm and guess what third party module you will find completely intact there? Yep, Thinkpads are Go - if you recompile the kernel. I haven't tried that yet, it will need something stronger than coffee, I think, to see me through.

Time to move on to something a little less stressful. I need a dkms module for my webcam and there is already a 2007-ready download available, so in it goes. The spca5xx module compiles and installs faultlessly for the standard 2007 kernel but fails miserably when I boot into the mm-laptop kernel. This does not bode well for my planned attempt to get a USB DVB-T MSI Megasky module compiled and running on this machine. What on earth could be wrong with the mm-laptop sources? Whatever it is it is wrong with both available rpms; stripped and not.

OK, time is marching on and I need to spend a day or two getting the wireless card to work so we'll forget about the kernel problems for now. I like to think I am hitting the ground running in the race to get the Dell TrueMobile 802.11b card to work as I have spent quite a bit of time already with 2007 alpha. I already know that various PCMCIA cards work - things like USB2 interface cards and an ethernet card all just plug in and go. Even my Belkin Wireless G Notebook Network Card is not held back by its exceptionally long name. When I plug it in the system sees it, loads its module and tries to initialise it. This is MUCH further than I get with the Dell card. According to my system log the plug in or unplug events are identified, but no further action is taken.

I could try to remember and relate the incredibly convoluted course I took to the "solution" but there were very few high points and far too many disappointments, so I will spare you that. At the end I had resorted to playing around with Bash completion to see if there were any commands I could use to report or analyse or make smoke pour out of the damned card and that is when I discovered pcmcia-socket-startup. A quick check of the man page showed that there is no man page (why did that not surprise me? There are very few man pages (any?) available when you install from the 2007 live CD) so I did my usual thing of just trying it and looking for complaints. Imagine my surprise when the blasted thing started to spew messages into the system log and ended up connecting me to my wireless lan on eth2! Wow. There are still lots of unanswered questions like why is it eth2? What was wrong with making it eth1? Indeed, why does the log talk about eth1 and orinoco_cs and then start it up as eth2? Why does the system sometimes say it can't find the orinoco_cs module when that is what is loaded and in use?

Let's move on. We have almost forgotten why we wanted to try this new system in the first place. I have to admit that I was desperately keen to see something as impressive as the Kororaa XGL demo from Mandriva. It runs a treat on my 866MHz Celeron powered HP Brio with an nvidia card so I was hoping for something from my 3D accellerated Savage IX/MV, especially as I had seemingly succeeded in getting all the DRI stuff working. Hint to fellow T22 sufferers - don't try to claim 8MBytes video RAM. Just delete the line that says video RAM is 4MBytes and the memory will be correctly detected. It worked for me. If I set the video RAM option to 8192k in the xorg.conf device section the server would not initialise at all and just left me with a hung machine and a black screen. Alas, this was not enough. I also had to select 16 bit colour to get the dri system to initialise but I still cannot run ANY 3D apps; not even the ubiquitous glxgears. No matter what application I try I get an error about visual 0x42 not being available and that is that.

Googling for the text of the error message brought several matches, one was even a fellow T22 user on the Gentoo list. She has exactly the same problem with exactly the same hardware on a different distribution. The kernel is 2.6.16, but Xorg is the same version as Mandriva 2007.

What about the USB DVB-T stick? Well, I was hoping to get that working in time for a holiday next week on a boat on Lough Erne, but it doesn't seem likely now. I was really looking forward to mapping the extent of DVB-T signals from the lake as it runs from one end of the county to the other - roughly south-east to north-west and the Brougher Mountain transmitter is almost in the middle

Anybody got a spare laptop with Windows XP they could lend me for a week?

I will try to look into the issues. But I don't understand: -what exactly is the problem with your wireless card (please post a bug)

-kernel-stripped is meant for compiling external modules. Not for recompiling your own kernel. This is explained in the rpm description. But you are right, I forgot to enable CONFIG_THINKPAD (considering i actually own a T60 its quite ironic). Will fix in next update.

• spca5xx: known issue. The driver is outdated and does not handle some 2.6.18 v4l api changes. I will try to fix and include the spca5xx driver by default in multimedia.

d.