New releases: Corporate Desktop 4.0 and Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Powerpack CDs
Kicking off as always with new releases since the last issue, this month has seen two releases. The Mandriva enterprise desktop, Mandriva Corporate Desktop, hit 4.0. This release updates the base system and includes many new features, including integration between LDAP and KDE user rights, improved configuration tools for VPN and mobile data, improved support for encryption and high-security authentication, integration of the 3D desktop management tools from Mandriva Linux, and much more. All the details are in the press release.

The CD version of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Powerpack is also now available. It's functionally no different from the DVD edition released a few months ago, it's just for those users who need CD images for one reason or another. It's available exclusively to Mandriva Club members from the Club download section, via Bittorrent or HTTP.

Mandriva at the conferences: aKademy, GUADEC, LinuxWorld
A bumper crop of Mandriva news this week. First up, some news on Mandriva's presence at major conferences this year. We were very proud to have the opportunity to sponsor both the KDE and GNOME developers' conferences, aKademy and GUADEC.

aKademy was held in Glasgow from June 30th to July 7th. We sponsored the event at the Silver level, and provided free Mandriva Flash keys to participating developers. These keys were pre-loaded with a special edition of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, with the latest KDE - 3.5.7 - included. We also provided an optional downloadable module to add the current development version of KDE 4. We sent Helio Castro, our lead KDE developer, to the event, and kept him busy too! He ran a well-received presentation on OEM deployments of KDE, of which a video is available. He was also able to demonstrate the Intel classmate PC running Mandriva Linux to several interested journalists and KDE developers: you can read Ars Technica's impressions of the device.

GUADEC was held in Birmingham (England, not Alabama!) from July 15th to July 21st. Again, we sponsored the event at the Silver level, and provided free Mandriva Flash keys to participating developers. The GUADEC keys were again a special edition of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, this time pre-loaded with the latest GNOME release, 2.18. They were also used to distribute the promotional materials from all the other sponsors, saving the paper that would otherwise have been used for these. We sent our CTO and Community VP, David Barth, our lead GNOME developer, Frederic Crozat, and another of our developers, Olivier Blin, to represent Mandriva at the conference.

Finally, Mandriva will also be present at the LinuxWorld conference to be held at San Francisco's Moscone Center from August 6th to August 9th. Adam Williamson and Walt Pennington will be at the Intel booth from August 7th to August 9th as part of Intel's Mobility Showcase, demonstrating the classmate PC running Mandriva Linux, and Mandriva Flash. We'd also love to meet any Mandriva users attending the conference, so find us and say hi!

Mandriva on dealing with Microsoft
The interoperability and patent deals between Microsoft and various Linux distributors and other companies became a hot topic in the Linux world recently. After several articles were printed speculating that Mandriva might be the next to sign such a deal, we decided to make a definitive statement to remove any doubt about the issue: we will not sign any patent agreement with Microsoft. We believe properly defined, open industry standards are the best route to interoperability, and that Microsoft has yet to demonstrate any plausible claims of patent infringement in Linux. The full statement by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon is available here.

Mandriva's Sebastian Trüg takes home aKademy Award
We're proud to announce Mandriva's second aKademy Award in two years. Coming hot on the heels of Laurent Montel's Jury Prize win last year while working at Mandriva, our own Sebastian Trüg scooped this year's Best Application prize for his famous k3b. The aKademy Awards are presented in various categories at each year's aKademy KDE conference to recognize the best work by members of the KDE community. Read more about this year's awards here.

Mandriva UK opens for business
The U.K. has always been a great supporter of Mandriva Linux, and we're happy to announce that it now has a local Mandriva distributor, just like various other countries. Mandriva UK sells the complete range of Mandriva corporate and personal products and services, including Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, Mandriva Flash, Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0, and Mandriva Club memberships. Now U.K. residents can get all their Mandriva needs from a local reseller.

What's coming in Mandriva Linux 2008
Curious about the development of the next Mandriva Linux release, Mandriva Linux 2008? Well, wonder no more! You can read about the currently planned major improvements for Mandriva Linux 2008 on the Mandriva Wiki. Planned features include all the latest applications, kernel 2.6.22, Compiz Fusion, a new consolidated network management tool, WPA-EAP support, and more. The release of Mandriva Linux 2008 is planned for late September 2007: mark your calendars!

Mandriva kernel team reorganization
A reorganization of the kernel development team was recently announced on the Cooker mailing list. Luiz Capitulino, who was previously responsible for maintaining the kernel for stable releases, will now lead the Cooker kernel team. Herton Krzesinski will assist him, and Claudio Matsuoka and Arnaud Patard (the previous Cooker kernel team leader) will help out when possible. The two leading community kernel maintainers, Thomas Backlund and Danny Tholen - who are responsible for the widely-used kernel-tmb and kernel-multimedia alternate kernels - will work together with the kernel team and will be able to contribute their changes directly. Full details of the changes can be found in this article on the Mandriva Club.

Mandriva bug tracking system upgraded
After a few weeks of testing, we have upgraded Mandriva's Bugzilla. We are now running Bugzilla 3.0 with almost no patches (as compared to the previously installation, which was a heavily patched Bugzilla 2.x). The main good news about this change is that the new Bugzilla is a lot faster than the old one! You might notice a few other changes too.

New major mirror site in Brazil
With huge thanks to Carlos Carvalho at the Universidade Federal do Parana, we'd like to announce a new mirror in Brazil. It is available via FTP, HTTP, and rsync. It is syncing regularly direct from our master server and has lots of bandwidth available. We hope that our users in Brazil and the rest of South America will find this useful, and thanks again to Carlos!

French Ministry of Agricultural and Fisheries chooses Mandriva
In some great news for the Mandriva Corporate product line, the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries has chosen Mandriva Corporate Server to replace Windows NT Server on all its server machines (around 400). The migration will take place within two years. The full write-up is in the press release.

Reviews of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring
After the previous issue of this newsletter went out, some more reviews of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring came through. Sam Bailey posted his review based on a month's experience of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring on a laptop: "To avoid people having to skip to the conclusion, I'm sticking with Mandriva Linux Spring on my laptop permanently!" The Polish Linux community site, PolishLinux, printed its own review, concluding "I have to say I highly recommend this version of Mandriva to both old Mandriva users and those who haven't yet used the Linux system from France." Remember, you can pick up your own copy of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring from the Mandriva Store.

Interview with Mandriva's NEPOMUK team
Mandriva is one of the leaders of the NEPOMUK semantic desktop project, an EU-funded project which is bringing together various companies, researchers and agencies to develop a revolutionary framework for the future of the desktop and the Web. InternetNews.com ran an interview with Mandriva's NEPOMUK team, Sebastian Trüg and Stéphane Laurière. They explain more about the design and goals of the NEPOMUK project and particularly NEPOMUK-KDE, the implementation of the NEPOMUK framework for the KDE desktop environment which will be a component of the upcoming KDE 4 release. You can also find more information in this press release, which was sent out to highlight NEPOMUK at the aKademy conference.

Linux.com hands-on with the Intel classmate PC running Mandriva Linux
Linux.com got to play with the Intel classmate PC running Mandriva Linux 2007 for five days. Their reviewer tested it out herself and also let her three kids play with it. After the review period was up, she declared that "if the students in Mexico, India, and Nigeria stick to the basics, they'll fall in love with the Classmate loaded with Mandriva, like Mackenzie did." You can take a look at the whole article here.

Distrowatch interviews Adam Williamson
The Linux distribution information site, Distrowatch, runs a popular weekly newsletter called Distrowatch Weekly. The editor, Ladislav Bodnar, interviewed Adam Williamson, Mandriva community representative, Bugmaster, packager and editor of this humble newsletter for a recent issue. His questions covered the past and future of Mandriva Linux, the organization of the company and more. Take a look at the full interview.

Making music with Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux KDE team leader, Helio Castro, has another talent up his sleeve: music. He passed on his tips for creating music on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring in this handy and informative article on the Mandriva Club. You'll be amazed how easy it is to create your own music using nothing but the tools available in Mandriva Linux - try it today!

Running an FTP server with virtual users on Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring
HowtoForge, the site that publishes guides for all sorts of useful tasks on Linux, has printed a guide to running an FTP server using virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This increases performance and security greatly.