Lots of important changes happened in Mandriva Cooker during the last few weeks. Here is a quick summary:
- GNOME has been updated to the development version 2.29.3. There is a new game, called LightsOff, Empathy has improved IRC support, Evince supports PDF file attachment annotations and opens each document in a separate process, more and more applications support Seed and more applications have been ported to new APIs such as GtkBuilder.
- KDE is now at version 4.4 beta 1.
- Amarok 2.2.2 beta 1 brings improved podcast support, custom track labels and other improvements.
- Linux kernel 2.6.32 is now used in Cooker. Per-backing-device based writeback gives better writing performance under many workloads, kernel samepage merging gives huge improvements in memory usage when running many virtual machines with qemu-kvm, CFQ low latency mode will provide better interactivity for desktop workloads when there’s background I/O activity. There are more improvements to KVM virtualization, power consumption reduction and of course hardware support improvements.
- Glibc 2.11 brings many performance improvements, especially in combination with STT_GNU_IFUNC support in the new binutils package in Cooker.
- Firefox 3.6 beta 5 is now available in main/release. This means all users will be updated to this version now.
- Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2 bring performance improvements, a better user interface and a new debugger.