Kat and X.org: important updates

#includeResource("Skel.ArticleHeader") Mandriva users and club members have been experiencing issues with some important packages in the last weeks. In particular, we have received many problem reports about Kat and about the X.org packages.

Kat is a new technology for searching documents and messages that we choose to integrate in the 2006 release. Mandriva engineers, like Laurent, have worked extensively within the Kat project to stabilize this new technology and offer it on the Mandriva desktop. Unfortunatly, we haven't been able to gather enough user feedback during the cooker testing process. The result is that Kat has not been stable enough in all configurations, mostly for users migrating from previous Mandriva release or those who have a lot of emails in particular. We have acknownledged these issues shortly after 2006 has been released and Laurent has worked since then to tune the behaviour of Kat and continue to develop fixes and patches. This has resulted in a Kat update that cures most of these issues. However, we have decided to disable the mail indexing feature, because the underlying tools have not been designed to go through large mailboxes of more than 1 Gigabytes. We regret turning off this feature, but it has been decided to be a safer choice, the least surprising for most of our users. Of course, we are still investigating ways to re-enable mail indexing, searching for better tools able to cope with large files. This should be available in the next months, first on cooker, then on upcoming club versions.

X.org packages bundled in the 2006 release have also been a source of difficulties for some graphic card owners. The problem has different roots. Mainly, we have been participating in X.org development and certifying graphic adapters during the last months before 2006 release. At that time, the development version of X.org was the only solution to support the latest chipset we targeted. Shipping 2006 without this support would have limited the reach of our product, in particular for the OEM market. The OEM market is strategic for Mandriva to widen Linux adoption, thanks to key partnerships we have signed or renewed with Intel Corp. or Hewlett-Packard. We have thus choosen to ship 2006 with a pre-release version of X.org, after cautious testing of many graphical platforms. Unfortunalty, this choice had some bad side-effects with some model of graphic cards that were broken with this intermediate release of X. As stated, at least on the development lists, the Engineering team was waiting for the official release of X.org to release updated packages as soon as possible, to get back to only stable and official packages. Again, we have released updated X.org packages a few weeks ago, containing a build with the latest final and official version of X.org. We apologize to customers that experienced problems with their graphic cards and hope you will understand the decision we had to make last year.

In summary, Mandriva 2006 illustrates our commitment to innovation. We choose to take some risks to offer better features, and these choices have been validated by the success of the 2006 release and by the large distribution agreements. Yet, 2006 is a living product. We work hard to fix all pending issues, and provide the necessary updates for our customers. Please continue to give us your feedback and tell us how we can improve our products and the Linux technology.

David Barth - VP Engineering