On April 10, Mandriva has released it’s popular Mandriva Linux distribution to the public. You can read my previous post to know about some improvements and new features added to this distribution.
Jochem wrote a review in his blog about this new released.
A while ago I took a look at Mandriva 2008 Spring RC1 inside VirtualBox. Today, the 2008 Spring final release was announced. I decided to install it on my main laptop (Acer 5920). Here’s a few quick notes. Perhaps a full review will follow later. This time I downloaded the One GNOME i586 version.
The announcement seems to have been made a bit too soon unfortunately. Not all mirrors listed by Mandriva had the all iso’s up already. I needed to use BitTorrent to download the GNOME One version of the ISO. I was unable to find an x86_64 version. Pretty strange. 64 Bit hardware has been in common use for about three years now here, but software support still seems abysmal 
About the install: After starting the Live Install, it complained about not being able to mount an USB stick. I clicked the notice away, an install continued without problems. I noticed the Netherlands is now listed in the “Other countries” list. Thanks Adam and Mandriva team! (see comments on previous review).
You can read a full review in his blog
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Yesterday, Mandriva has released its latest distribution, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring.
Mandriva, the leading European Linux distributor, today announces the launch of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, the major new release of Mandriva Linux, featuring hundreds of improvements which make for a quicker and more powerful distribution that is easier to use than ever.
Here a list of improvements made:
- A new parental control utility
- The Elisa multimedia center,manage your photos, music and videos
- Easy synchronization with mobile devices
- Software updates include KDE 3.5.9, GNOME 2.22, OpenOffice.org 2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.24.4, X.org 7.3, Compiz 0.7
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Banshee is a music management and playback for Gnome. Banshee is just like Windows Media Player where you can import, organize and play your music files. With Banshee, you also can rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. The first alpha version of Banshee 1.0 hits the street on March 13,2008 with new redesign user interface and new features. The second alpha released saw a support for video management and playback has been added.
New Features
Here is a list of the features added for Banshee 1.0
- Artist/Album Browser - the ability to filter a source by Artist and Album selections. The album view features glorious cover art previews.
- The Play Queue
- Last.fm Integration - Last.fm has been integrated to Banshee
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Sopcast is a software which you can use to watch the video and listen to radio on the Internet. You also can broadcast your on tv channel if you want for free. On Vista, I used Sopcast to watch Formula1 race. When I am using Ubuntu, I have no idea how to watch the show. I look around and finally I found one post on Ubuntu forum discussing about how to install Sopcast.
On Windows, Sopcast comes with really good user interface but not on Linux. So you need to install special modified code to get the GUI
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On March 21, Canonical has released the first public beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. Its about a month left until the release of stable version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron. Here are some of the improvements made by the developers that distinguish Hardy Heron from Gutsy Gibbon.
- Latest version of Xorg (7.3)
- Linux 2.6.24-12.13 kernel based on 2.6.24.3 which bring support for amd64 power saving ( this is a good news for me)
- Gnome 2.22 is the default desktop environment. Kubuntu 8.04 comes with KDE 3.5 or KDE 4
- Firefox 3 beta 4 is the default web browser
- GTK’s version of the Transmission bittorent client
- PulseAudio is enabled by default
- New PolicyKit manager for advanced permission controls
- Vinagre
- Brasero CD/DVD burning application, replaces the Serpentine CD burning utility
- World Clock Applet
- Native PDF support
- Wubi installer which allows Windows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application (a good features to attract Windows user to the world of Linux)
Since this is still a beta version, therefore you are not recommended to install it on production machines. The full version of Ubuntu 8.04 is due out on April 24th.
Skype 2.0 for Linux has been released on March 13, 2008. So, this is not a something new anymore.
Today we’re proud to announce the general release of video calls in Skype 2.0 for Linux. As you may already know, the best things in life are often free and now you can make (and receive) free, great quality video calls on Linux.
Last week, I didn’t have time to install Skype 2.0 since I was busy doing my assignments and project. So today, when I power up my laptop and boot to Ubuntu, the update manager is notifying me that there are software updates available. I clicked on the notify icon and the update manager windows showed up. I looked on the list of updates available and Skype was in there. So I just clicked on install updates. The system started installing the updates and after a while, I got this error.
E:/var/cache/apt/archives/skype-common_2.0.0.63-0medibuntu0.7.10.1_all.deb:trying to overwrite `/etc/dbus-1/system.d/skype.conf’, which is also in package skype
So, I search on the internet and this is the way to solve this problem.
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