The kernel is now updated to 2.6.33 final. As usual, KernelNewbies has a complete overview of the changes in this new kernel. Some noteworthy changes include: the new Nouveau driver for NVidia graphics cards is now included in the kernel and is now used by default on Mandriva instead of the NV driver. DRBD, the Distributed Replicated Block Device driver, which is useful on High Availabality clusters is now included in the kernel. There is a new experimental Compcache driver, which compresses part of the memory, effectively increasing the amount of memory you can use. Note that Mandriva does not yet include the user space tools to effectively use this. The Anticipatory I/O scheduler was removed and there were the usual improvements to the default CFQ I/O scheduler. Of course there are also many improvements to hardware support, such as a new driver for WIFI devices with the Ralink RT2800 and Realtek RTL8192U chipsets.
The TMB kernel in Contrib uses the BFS process scheduler now, bringing improved responsiveness.
GNOME reached version 2.29.91. Empathy now lets you easily configure a Facebook account using the standard XMPP protocol and File Roller will now use PackageKit to install any missing (de)compression utilities.
On the KDE front, the KDE 4 port of KmyMoney now reached beta status. Amarok 2.3 beta 1 brings improved podcast support, a newly designed toolbar and the possiblity of automatically using a USB mass storage device for the collection when it’s connected.
Postfix 2.7.0 is now available, bringing improved performance in content filttering and address verification.
The MySQL packages were reorganized a bit. The mysql-max package was dropped and its features were merged in the standard mysql packages. The clustered storage engine NDB was removed from the mysql package and is now available in the mysql-cluster package.
There were some updates to various video editors: Lives 1.2.1 brings PulseAudio support, many improvements to multitrack mode, a startup wizard for new users, some new real-time transitions and improved performance. Kdenlive 0.7.7.1 now includes colour themes, an improved titler and a few other new features. The OpenShot video editor was imported in Mandriva last month. The package is now at version 1.1 alpha 2.
There was a a major new version 2.0.0 of the Bluefish web editor. It adds autocompletion for HTML, CSS and PHP, inline help, inline spell checking, a character map, upload/download synchronization with remote web sites, automatic document recovery and more.