Mandriva Linux 2009 Alpha 2 released

Published by awilliamson on Thursday, July 10 2008 @ 11:49:18 CEST

Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Alpha 2, marking the first public pre-release of the upcoming Mandriva Linux 2009. This alpha introduces several significant changes, most obviously the inclusion of KDE 4 - 4.1 beta 2, specifically - as the default version of KDE, and the latest development version of GNOME, 2.23.4. The kernel has also been updated to release 2.6.26rc8. We emphasize that the KDE change is a major one that is not yet entirely completed and likely to cause many bugs. As always - but more importantly than ever - we remind you not to use pre-releases in any critical situation; install them only on a test system or partition, or in a virtual machine. Additionally, we strongly discourage using this pre-release to upgrade from any earlier release of Mandriva Linux, as the transition process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not yet fully implemented and you are likely to end up with an unusable system.

Another feature of interest to many users will be the addition of orphan package tracking (and optional automatic removal) to the urpmi package manager. Of course, many applications have been updated (although the default version of Mozilla Firefox is still currently 2.0.x), and most of the distribution has been rebuilt with a new GCC version, 4.3. Please make sure to read the Errata and Release Notes, and file any bugs not covered in those pages on Bugzilla.