Mandriva Cooker (2010.0) opened

Since Friday the cooker repositories, which will lead to Mandriva 2010.0 in 6 months, are open again. In only 3 days about 400 new package releases were made, mostly new upstream versions which came out during the last month while the cooker repository was frozen.

Some of the more important or interesting changes in Cooker include:

• KDE is being updated to a 4.3 development snapshot. Expect lots of new features but also many new bugs. Information about KDE 4.3 can be found in the feature plan. The KDE audio player Amarok was updated to version 2.1 beta 1.
• Firefox was updated from 3.0.8 to 3.0.10
• XFCE was updated from version 4.6.0 to 4.6.1
• WebkitGtk was updated to version 1.1.6 (read Gustavo Noronha’s blog for info on what they are working on) and the Midori web browser was updated to latest version 0.1.6, including download support. Midori is becoming a more and more complete browser for less powerful systems.
• nspluginwrapper 1.3.0: this should improve performance a bit with the Flash plug-in. Hopefully it might also fix some stability problems, but I’m afraid that’s rather unlikely.
• Nexuiz 2.5: many improvements in this first person shooter, including new weapons, a new game mode, more eyecandy,..
• Updates to the Telepathy stack: thanks to the new telepathy-gabble, Empathy now supports file transfer over XMPP/Jabber.
• GMime updated from 2.2 to 2.4, which has a modified API. Lots of applications will need to be modified.
• Mono 2.4: this includes many performance improvements
• Bash 4.0 includes many improvements for shell programmers, such as support of associative arrays

For all changes, you can read the Changelog mailing list archives.