In spite of the holiday season, lots of new packages continue to trickle in Mandriva Cooker. Amongst the many updates, here is an overview of some important changes:
- GNOME is now updated toversion 2.29.4: The most important changes are in Nautilus. In preparation of GNOME 3.0, where Nautilus will purely be a file browser and won’t provide the desktop anymore, the file management part has been improved a lot. Upstream is now using browser mode by default (this was already the case in Mandriva) and made several UI improvements for it. The developers have added now an optional split view like Midnight Commander. Another useful change is that it’s now possible in GNOME to configure a background per monitor on a multi-monitor setup in GNOME. Also worth mentioning is the fast progress the Tracker document search engine is making since some time. I would recommend removing Beagle from your Cooker system, and switching to Tracker instead. Then by clicking on the Search button in Nautilus’ toolbar, you can easily search your files.
- KDE has been updated to the latest beta, which is version 4.4 beta 2.
- For NVida graphics cards, the Free edition of Mandriva will now use the Nouveau driver by default instead of nv. Nouveau will bring KernelModeSetting support (which provides high resolution consoles and flicker free console switching), 2D acceleration, and RandR 1.2 support (for easy multi-monitor setup.)
- Mesa 7.7 is now in Cooker. 3D support has been enabled for the ATI R600 and R700 chipets (ATI Radeon HD 2000 and later), so these users can now enjoy 3D acceleration with the free ATI drivers.
- The Intel X11 driver version 2.10.0 RC2 is now included in Cooker. In combination with kernel 2.6.33 this brings video overlay support for more CPU efficient video playback.
- Digikam and kipi-plugins finally reached stable version 1.0. Version 1.1 is already expected in one month, strengthening Digikam’s position as one of the most advanced open source photo management applications.
- The GDB debugger was updated to version 7.0. Developers are excited about the process record and replay and reverse debugging features.
Enjoy the many changes in Mandriva. I wish all readers a fantastic 2010!