Mandriva 2011 Delayed Due to Major Changes

Mandriva 2011 has been delayed primarily because of the team's major changes to RPM5. RPM5 is a fork of RPM, (Red Hat Package Management) which was currently at 4.8.1, that offers faster performance and fewer operational errors. Because a preview was promised today, a Mandriva Technology Preview is being released to showcase some of the newest changes.

The Mandriva 2011 Technology Preview showcases some of the planned features of Mandriva 2011 currently available in Cooker and the upcoming Alpha. This includes native systemd, Networkmanager support, KDE 4.6.0, Linux 2.6.37, Firefox 4 beta 10, X.org X Server 1.9, Clementine 0.6 and lots of software updates. Most significantly, today's preview introduces the new ISO image version.

Mandriva Desktop will replace Mandriva One and Mandriva Free. This one image will run from live CD, USB flash drives, and can be installed onto hard drives. The Technology Preview has a few glitches which include Networkmanager not starting automatically at boot, artwork is not yet updated, and lots of other juicy bugs.

As a result of these changes and subsequent delays the new release schedule for Mandriva 2011 is:

- Mandriva 2011 Alpha: February 14 2011
- Mandriva 2011 Alpha 2: February 28 2011
- Mandriva 2011 Beta 1: March 14 2011
- Mandriva 2011 Beta 2: April 11 2011
- Mandriva 2011 RC: May 9 2011
- Mandriva 2011 Final: June 13 2011

The Mandriva 2011 Technology Preview is beginning to appear on mirrors already. Here's one.