Software Update: Mandrake Linux 8.2 Beta 4

Redlum informed us that a new Beta version of the easy-to-use Linux distribution is available mandrake† The new features in 8.2 Beta 4 are:

[What’s new]

• First, you’ll surely notice the appearance of the third ISO image. Up to now we have been concentrating on testing the “core functionality”, but now the time has come to test “everything”.
• This image among other things contains many i18n related packages for the “second tier” languages. “Second tier language” doesn’t mean that a language is “inferior” in any way, but it does mean that “we aren’t making much $$ with this language”. As a consequence, these packs get considerably less attention from our QA.
• Those of you with MandrakeClub accounts will be able to download the first “commercial” 8.2 packages in a day or two. These are still “beta” too, but they should be more-or-less OK by now.
• For the first time, OpenOffice.org has been included in the distribution. This may prove to be a very important package, as SUN apparently has decided to start charging for StarOffice again. Try it, it seems to work quite nicely, and Till has even added a special “StarOffice/OpenOffice.org configuration tool” to printerdrake.
• Printing strikes again: As noted above, Till has not been idle, and printerdrake knows how to produce a special configuration file suitable for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org! Configuration is made automatically for all local printers, and a few mouse clicks in printerdrake are all that is needed to produce an OpenOffice.org/StarOffice configuration for a remote printer. The coolest thing is that Till’s filter also assures that the Euro-sign is correctly printed from Star- and Open-Office packages.
• Talking about the Euro sign, Till has just installed the beta4 on his test machine (german as default language), and guess what: we were able to use the Euro sign in KDE “out of the box”. cute.
• Pixel and Dams have even found time to improve the “legacy hardware” support a bit. That is, setting up an ISA network card should work now, and in case you still have an ISA sound cards watch for the “summary” installation step. In case no sound card is found, and you choose “games” or “multimedia” packages, the “summary” step will feature an empty button called “Sound card”. Press it, and “sndconfig” will be installed. As a bonus, you’ll also get a message saying “run sndconfig after reboot”.
• Finally, our latest kernels have USB2 support. All we need now is autodetection – please stay in touch, an article on USB is comming soon.

[What’s hot]

• *drak* tools aren’t hiding their work from users anymore! On the contrary, thanks to the ‘explanations’ concept, each utility shows what it did by writing to a /var/log/explanations. Moreover, MCC lets you monitor the ‘explanations’ as they are written to the log file (/var/log/explanations).
• Then there is a famous “possibility to export directories using the simple mouse click”. Note: This has to be enabled in MCC first!
• “Rescue” mode has improved a lot, and offers a simple menu to aid inexperienced users now. It even got a new “remove LILO from MBR” option last week. Take a look at it, think you’ll like it. †
• Almost completely rewritten Msec.
• Support for encrypted file systems.
• Really cool “hotplugging” capabilities thanks to devfs
• “Return of super mount”. Apparently, supermount has evolved to a “rock solid” state, as all but one of the supermount related bug reports we got so far turned out to be false alerts. Hardware support for tons of new stuff. In particular, addition of the brand-new support for several new classes of devices: scanners, TV-cards, and HPs multiple purpose devices (scanner/printer).