Noteworthy Mandriva Cooker changes (27 July – 9 August 2009)

There were a lots of package updates in Mandriva Cooker during the last two weeks, amongst others because of rebuilds of all Perl packages. Currently a complete rebuild of all packages in the Main repository is going on. Here’s a list of some more interesting changes:

• Pam was updated to stable release 1.1.0 and Hal version 0.5.1 is now in Cooker. Pam_console and Hal won’t take care anymore of setting the right permissions on hardware devices for console users. Instead, udev and consolekit will deal with this.
• GNOME 2.27.5 is now available. Totem’s YouTube plug-in is working again, and it’s now possible to not to be warned again when a file system is full.
• Python 3 is now available in contrib. For compatibility reasons, Python 2.6 will remain the default Python version now.
• F-Spot has been updated to version 0.6.0. One of the nice things is a folder bar which you can use to organize folders to your liking.
• VirtualBox 3 (more precisely version 3.0.4) entered Cooker. VirtualBox now supports SMP virtual machines and has improved 3D support and better performance.
• Emacs 23.1 includes many major improvements: UTF-8 support, font anti-aliasing, running text terminals and X displays in one Emacs session, Ruby support and more.
• urpmi and it’s back-end perl-URPM have seen many improvements which should help resolving complex dependencies, for example when upgrading from an old version of the distribution to a newer one.
• KDE 4.3.0 final is now available in Cooker. For a nice overview of all the new features since KDE 4.2 from Mandriva 2009.1, read the official KDE 4.3 announcement.
• The Firebird database pacakges have seen many improvements and should start working well soon.