Archive for January, 2010

Noteworthy Mandriva Cooker changes 18 January – 31 January 2010

Posted in Mandriva on January 31st, 2010 by Frederik – 1 Comment
  • Linux kernel 2.6.33 rc6 is now the default kernel in Mandriva Cooker. In this kernel, the anticipatory I/O scheduler has been removed, and there were again various performance improvements to the CFQ I/O scheduler, which is the default already for a long time. There were also different performance improvements to KVM virtualization (such as improved kernel context switching speed and IRQ scaling). There are power saving improvements in the Intel i915 driver (render standby and LVDS downclock, the latter being disabled by default for now), a new driver supporting VMware’s paravirtualized SCSI device, better support for ALPS DualPoint touchpad/trackpoint on some Dell laptops, and many other improvements to hardware support.
  • GNOME has been updated to development version 2.29.6. Epiphany enables Webkit’s page cache by default, which makes using the Back and Forward buttons much faster now There is also a new Epiphany extension available to view Youtube movies without having Flash installed. There were further performance improvements in the GLib library. Gnome Activity Journal, a tool which uses Zeitgeist to let you browse through the documents you recently worked on, is now available in Mandriva. Evolution opens attachments read-only to prevent accidentally loosing modification you might make. Vinagre now supports tunneling VNC connections over SSH. Gnome Color Manager, a utility to set up colour profiles for your monitor, is now packaged in Mandriva Cooker.
  • KDE is now at version 4.4.0 RC 2.
  • Firefox has been updated to the final 3.6 version. Ars Technica has an article giving an overview of some of the changes, which include Personas, better performance, and better support for HTML5 and other web standards.
  • Transmission 1.83 is now available in Mandriva Cooker. It adds support for magnet links and trackerless torrents and has many other improvements.
  • The popular media centre software xbmc is now available in Mandriva Cooker. Ideally for setting up a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) with Mandriva!
  • Spamassassin has been updated to version 3.3.0. There are new plug-ins and adaptations of the default scores for better spam detection. The rules now are in a separate spamassassin-rules package and by default sa-update is run on a daily basis to update them.
  • Songbird, an advanced music player, has been updated to version 1.4.3, which includes a new default look.

Noteworthy changes 1 January – 17 January 2010

Posted in Mandriva on January 17th, 2010 by Frederik – Be the first to comment

The first two weeks of 2010 have passed, and the first alpha version of Mandriva 2010.1 has been released last week. Here are some of the interesting changes currently available in Cooker:

  • GNOME has been upgraded to the new development release 2.29.5. The Cheese webcam application has been split into different libraries, making it easier for other applications to integrate webcam functionality (like avatar choosers in instant messaging applications). Epiphany now uses an infobar to ask the user for saving website username and password and stores them in the GNOME keyring. Thanks to the new Content-Encoding support in Libsoup and Webkitgtk, Epiphany is now capable of correctly rendering web pages which send GZIP compressed pages.
  • KDE 4.4 RC 1 is now available in Cooker. Mandriva has patched the kmix volume mixer to support Pulseaudio. Amarok 2.2.2
  • Gnash 0.9.7 snapshot
  • There is a package available in Cooker now for the QBittorrent BitTorrent client.
  • xine-lib 1.2 with support for VDPAU for hardware accelerated rendering of high definition video is now available.
  • dracut, a replacement for mkinitrd, is already available for some time in Mandriva. The last few weeks many changes were made to make it work nicely in Mandriva out of the box. You can create a new initrd with dracut by hand if you want, or start using it by default the next time you install a new kernel by running

    # update-alternatives --config mkinitrd

  • Ruby 1.9.1 is now available in Contrib. This new version is much more faster than the previous Ruby 1.8 series
  • USB/IP, a tool for using USB devices over the network, is now packaged in Cooker.
  • Firefox has been updated to version 3.6 RC 1.
  • The final release of Deluge 1.2.0 is now available in Cooker. It has a rewritten web UI and improves performance of the application.