Spring is here for Mandriva

THE FRENCH LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Mandriva has released its Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring edition, code-named "Farman".

The outfit says its 2010.1 release is "designed to meet users' real needs". It also boots up a bit faster than the earlier versions and there are a number of updated components and new features over the previous 2010.0 release that came out in November of last year.

Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring uses the 2.6.33 Linux kernel and the GNOME 2.30.1 and KDE 4.4.3 desktops. The package updates include Firefox 3.6.6, X.org Server 1.7.7, VirtualBox 3.1.8, and the Go-OO branch of the Openoffice.org office suite.

The distribution also features several educational and scientific applications, including Axiom for scientific computing, the Jmol tool for visualising molecules and Salome, a generic platform for pre and post-processing for numerical simulations.

Other changes and improvements include better hardware support for 3G USB modems and updates to the company's Smart Desktop technology, which is supposed to help users to organise data.

There are three versions which can be downloaded here. These are the commercial Powerpack edition, the One live-CD system and the complete Free open source edition as a DVD image file for either 32-bit or 64-bit systems.

(We're downloading the Free version over Bittorrent at the moment. - Ed) µ