Looking ahead to Mandriva Linux 2009

By Rebecca Sobol
May 7, 2008

With Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring out the door, the first steps toward Mandriva Linux 2009 are in progress. Ideas are being collected on this wiki page and Bugzilla is open for suggestions and ideas. The wiki page begins with instructions for entering ideas and suggestions into Bugzilla.

A number of items are in the wish list for kernel and hardware support. The ML 2009 kernel will use libata, the one item already marked as complete (better late than never). Other wishes include an installed and enabled kerneloops package, full support for Lenovo Thinkpads T60/T61 (and T62 in the future) (with all the bells, whistles, drivers, hotkeys, LEDs, etc. working), making Xen work properly (or dropping it), and patches for kernel-level mode setting.

There is a request for virtualbox 1.6 to be added to the toolchain, along with cmake and svn. The RPM, URPMI requests include better separation of free and non-free so that non-free sources do not get installed on an otherwise free system; and better dependency handling.

Some requests involve making it easier to use a lightweight desktop/window manager. There is an Xfce edition for ML 2008.1, but some would like the Xfce edition to be an official part of the 2009 release. Requests for improved icewm support are joined by requests for LXDE, and Enlightenment 17.

No matter how good an installer is, there is always room for improvement and some ideas are on the list. The same could be said for system tools, and several improvements to Drakxtools are also on the list. The list ends with suggestions for better internationalization and localization support.

Those who have ideas about improving Mandriva Linux, now is the time to get involved. File bug reports where features seem to be missing, and help make ML 2009 better than ever.