A Quick Look at Mandrake 10.0 Pre-Beta

What can we expect? Those of you on distributions' development mailing lists have already had a chance to experience the taste of things to come. As an example, looking through the Fedora development branch, we can see that, at the time of writing, the RPM package of the 2.6.0 kernel has undergone 24 revisions. And although XFree86 is still at version 4.3.0, KDE has been upgraded to 3.2-beta and glibc to (as yet unreleased) 2.3.3. Some other distributions have similarly bleeding edge development trees. A few of them have even released experimental ISO images: Conectiva has put together a single-CD Conectiva 10 Technology Preview, while Mandrake has released a 2-CD Cooker Snapshot 20031231. I have taken the latter for a test drive to see what has been done so far, although the features mentioned below are general enough to apply to other upcoming distribution releases.

Linux kernel 2.6. The changes in the kernel are probably the most far-reaching of them all, especially in terms of system responsiveness and interactivity. One of the interesting new features is the kernel's support for hyperthreading - an ability that allows a single physical processor to masquerade as two or more processors. Some other features that will result in noticeable speed improvements is preemption (the ability to interrupt a kernel process so that other processor intensive tasks can continue to execute), "futexes" (a way for multiple processes and threads to serialize and prioritize events), improvements to input/output subsystems and a number of other changes. On a hardware side of things, the new kernel comes with support for USB 2.0, much improved support for wireless devices and a new structure of the dedicated storage buses; as an example, it is no longer necessary to enable SCSI emulation for IDE CD/RW drives. Improvements in the new kernel are too numerous to mention them all, but the above few examples should give plenty of reasons for the majority of users to want to move to kernel 2.6 as soon as possible.

XFree86 4.4. As always, the new version of the X Window system will have many new and updated video drivers, including new ones for the more recent NVIDIA and SiS video cards, as well as the usual bug fixes. Version 4.4 also supports the IPv6 protocol. On the Xterm side of things, much improvement has gone into international font handling and locale support. The complete changelog and feature list can be found in the latest XFree86 release notes.

KDE 3.2. There is a host of new features and applications in the upcoming KDE 3.2 scheduled for final release on February 7. Some of the more interesting ones include CD burning from within Konqueror, "service menus", or custom context menus in Konqueror, updated khtml engine, a graphical dialog for connecting to Windows machines on a network and a new theme called "Plastic". Among the many new applications in KDE 3.2 one will find KPDF (a PDF viewer based on XPDF), Kontact (KDE's PIM and groupware suite), KSVG (a Scalable Vector Graphics plugins for Konqueror), KGamma (a KControl module for monitor gamma correction), JuK (a jukebox and music manager), Kopete (a multi-protocol instant messaging tool), KWiFiManager (an application for monitoring and configuring wireless LAN connections), Umbrello (a UML Modeller), Kgpg (a frontend for gpg), KMouth (a tool to create sentences for speech synthesizer) and many others. One of the more interesting summaries of the new features, as well as annoyances in KDE 3.2 was recently published by OSNews.

How do all these new goodies feel when integrated together in the Mandrake's latest Cooker snapshot? To put it simply, I have never used a faster and more responsive KDE desktop. Whether it comes to application load times or the time it takes for menus to appear on the screen, everything feels considerably faster than in any distribution using kernel 2.4 and KDE 3.1 on the same hardware. I haven't done any benchmarking to provide some hard figures, but clicking on the taskbar's "K" to bring up the KDE menu takes good 1 - 2 seconds on my Debian Sid installation, while on this Mandrake Cooker snapshot, it appears almost instantly. Konqueror now starts in a flash. It is of course too easy to get used to these new levels of speed: after playing with the Cooker snapshot for a few hours, rebooting into Debian felt as if somebody had replaced my Pentium 4 processor with at least a Pentium II - that's how much slower the whole system felt.

But feelings aside, the fact is that the combined speed enhancements by KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6 make for a fine and fast KDE desktop. As for other new features in this Mandrake Cooker release, there aren't many at this time, unless one counts application updates as new features. This is not surprising, given that the main purpose of this pre-beta snapshot was to make sure that the main components function together and to test the hardware compatibility of the new kernel. The first beta of Mandrake Linux 10.0 is scheduled for January 15, although the date has now been postponed twice.

Better hardware compatibility, improved scalability and security, substantial advances in system speed and responsiveness - there is a lot to look forward to in the coming months.