Mandriva Linux 2008.0 Release Notes Contents * 1 Introduction * 2 General information about new features and major changes * 3 Deprecation + 3.1 Support for loopback-based encrypted filesystems * 4 Changes to the Mandriva installer + 4.1 Modular IDE drivers and new libata stack + 4.2 Package selection + 4.3 UUID support + 4.4 Faster operations on partitions * 5 Package management + 5.1 Chrooted environnemnts + 5.2 Rpmdrake + 5.3 Suggested packages + 5.4 urpmi * 6 New menu layout * 7 Changes to supported hardware and drivers + 7.1 Supported hardware + 7.2 Required firmware for Broadcom wireless adapters + 7.3 Default NTFS write support + 7.4 Support for the Belgian eID card + 7.5 TV card support * 8 Kernel changes + 8.1 Naming + 8.2 Source and headers + 8.3 AppArmor + 8.4 Modular IDE drivers + 8.5 New devicescape wireless stack * 9 Changes regarding software packages + 9.1 XFS no longer used + 9.2 Changes to the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary driver packages o 9.2.1 NVIDIA o 9.2.2 ATI + 9.3 Man pages now compressed with LZMA + 9.4 New development package naming policy + 9.5 Compiz Fusion replaces Beryl + 9.6 Services no longer restarted when updating glibc * 10 Input methods + 10.1 GCC 4.2 not advised for Java development + 10.2 php and suhosin Introduction This page contains important information the Mandriva Linux 2008 release. The following topics are covered: * General information about new features and major changes * Changes to the Mandriva installer and upgrade instructions for Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring users * Changes to supported hardware and drivers * Changes regarding software packages * Other technical information for experienced users Please also refer to Mandriva Linux 2008 Errata - the Errata for the 2008 release. The Errata page contains information on known bugs and problems in the release and instructions on fixing, avoiding or working around them. Mandriva Linux 2008 is not yet released. These release notes currently cover the beta releases of Mandriva Linux 2008. The current beta/release candidate is Mandriva Linux 2008 RC1. General information about new features and major changes Mandriva Linux 2008 includes the following versions of the major distribution components: kernel 2.6.22, X.org 7.2, KDE 3.5.7, GNOME 2.19.6, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, OpenOffice.org 2.2. Other major new features are the merging of the Beryl and Compiz 3D desktop technologies into Compiz Fusion, a new network management tool, a Windows documents and settings migration tool, and support for WPA-EAP. You can find an introduction to the most interesting new features in What's coming in Mandriva Linux 2008. Mandriva Linux 2008 will be available in several different editions: * the "One" edition will be an installable live CD integrating the latest proprietary drivers, available free of charge * the commercial editions will include support, services, a wider range of packages, and many third-party proprietary applications like Flash, Scilab and 03 Spaces * the "Free" edition will be pure free / open source software edition, without any of the non-free packages bundled with other editions; it is also available as a free download For more information on the editions in which the latest Mandriva Linux 2008 beta is available, see the specific page. For more information on the various editions, see Choosing the Mandriva Linux edition that's right for you. Additional information is also available online: * List of Compatible/Certified Computers and The detailed Mandriva Hardware Database * The Mandriva Club * The Mandriva User Forums * The Mandriva Wiki Deprecation Support for loopback-based encrypted filesystems Mandriva Linux has for some time included a tool named drakloop which can create and mount encrypted filesystems using the loopback technique via the losetup utility. This method of creating encryption is vulnerable to certain types of attack and is deprecated by the upstream kernel in favor of systems based on the new devicemapper framework. LUKS is the most prominent example of such a system. As of Mandriva Linux 2008, loopback-based encryption is deprecated in Mandriva Linux. Support will still be available for these filesystems, but we recommend all users begin the process of migrating to newer encryption systems. Support for loopback-based encryption may well be removed in future Mandriva Linux releases. Changes to the Mandriva installer Modular IDE drivers and new libata stack The old PATA drivers are now compiled as modules (see #Modular IDE drivers under #Kernel changes below). Due to this, the installer can now use either these old drivers or new drivers using libata stack. The installer defaults to the old drivers by default. When only new drivers are availlable for some controller, installation to partitions beyond the 15th on PATA disks is no longer supported by default. To install to a partition above 15, the installation kernel must be started with the parameter noauto, which will allow manual selection of an appropriate legacy PATA driver, which in turn will support up to 63 partitions per PATA disk, as in previous Mandriva releases. People needing complex disk lay-outs can also use LVM, which offers a much more flexible system to create volumes. Package selection The installer now offer to select between KDE, GNOME or more detailed package group selection, thus making easier default choice. UUID support The installer now supports using UUIDs for mounting partitions but doesn't enable them by default. Faster operations on partitions By default, the installer configures file systems to use the relatime option. This option greatly reduce the amount of I/O spent by the system in updating access date when a file is read or when a directory is browsed. Thus the load of both desktop and server machines is greatly reduced and lot of I/O tasks complete faster. For laptops, the installer still default to noatime in order to ease power management. Similarly, the sync option is no more used for FAT file systems such as on floppies. It has been replaced by the flush option which make operations way faster on such FAT formated devices. Package management Chrooted environnemnts Rpm, gurpmi, rpmdrake and urpmi now support to operated in chrooted environnemnt through the --rpm and --urpmi-root options. Rpmdrake The rpmdrake GUI has seen many improvements: * packages are displayed in a more friendly way with a short description, * version number, architecture are displayed in their own columns, * it's now possible to sort packages by name, selection status, installed status, version number or architecture by clicking on the proper column header By default, the installer and rpmdrake disable backport media when adding the whole distribution media, only enabling release and update media. Rpmdrake now enable to browse these disabled backport media in order to safely install a choosen backport. Similarly, the interface of the media manager was greatly simplified. What's more, it displays media type in the media list. Suggested packages Rpm, urpmi, rpmdrake and the installer now support suggests tag in RPM packages. This enables to provide full featured packages while still enabling users to optimize their system by removing packages they do not need. urpmi urpmi and rpmdrake now displays the list of packages that will be installed in a row / column layout, with separate columns for package name, version, release and repository. New menu layout A new menu layout has been introduced.This menu is a merge between our simplified menu and our standard Mandriva menu. It's now unified between KDE & GNOME. It provides less menu levels. We favor desktop aware applications: aplications for current desktop will be displayed at first level and other applications will be at second level. Deep hierarchies are dead (no more than 2 levels) Changes to supported hardware and drivers Supported hardware In addition to the improved graphics card support discussed above, support for other devices has been added or improved. Notable changes include support for: * NVIDIA Geforce 8400, 8500 and 8600 series graphics cards * Intel 4965AGN wireless chipsets * Intel Santa Rosa drive controllers * ATI SB700 chipset motherboards * Many newer onboard sound devices using the High Definition Audio codec, particularly on motherboards using Intel chipsets * Wacom Graphire and Intuos tablet input devices * Realtek 8187 USB and ZyDAS ZD1211/ZD1211B USB wireless controllers Required firmware for Broadcom wireless adapters Mandriva Linux 2008 includes a native driver for Broadcom wireless adapters. This driver requires firmware from the Windows driver to be useful. We cannot ship the firmware itself or an appropriate copy of the Windows driver along with Mandriva Linux 2008 for legal reasons. When you try to configure such an adapter, Mandriva will prompt you for a Windows driver, and offer to try and find it from your Windows partition. This will often work. If you cannot find an appropriate driver on your Windows partition, or you do not have one, you should download the Windows driver linked from this page. Make sure to download the driver marked "Version 3 firmware:". Then simply select that file when the Mandriva network configuration tool prompts you for the driver, and you will be able to enable and use your wireless card. Default NTFS write support In Mandriva Linux 2008, drives and partitions formatted with the NTFS file system will be writable by default (via the use of the ntfs-3g driver). This applies to both conventional internal disks and to external disks, USB storage devices and so on. Support for the Belgian eID card Support has been added for the Belgian national electronic identity card system. The acr38u package contains a driver for the most commonly used card reader (the one distributed by the government), and the beid package provides the tools that allow the card to be used. The acr38u package will be automatically installed if the card reader is connected to the computer during installation. TV card support Since TV cards are automatically configured by the kernel and since modern TV software come with their own channel scanner, drakxtv isn't any more used by the installer and the Mandriva control-center. Kernel changes Mandriva Linux 2008 uses Linux kernel 2.6.22, updated from 2.6.17 in Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. This involves many significant changes. Naming The kernel package has now adopted the kernel-tmb spec file, which means that the kernel packages have been renamed. The old kernel is now kernel-desktop. The old kernel-enterprise is now kernel-server. The old kernel-legacy is now kernel-desktop586. A kernel-laptop package is now introduced, which contains several customizations useful to laptops in terms of reducing power usage. Source and headers The official kernel packages have now adopted the kernel-tmb style for source and headers. Each kernel package now has its own -devel package - e.g. kernel-desktop586-devel - which contains the source and headers necessary for building external kernel modules. This is the package you should install if you need to compile external kernel modules. The single kernel-source package is of interest only to those who need to build an application against a complete copy of the kernel source, or those interested in building their own kernels. AppArmor Apparmor has replaced RSBAC as the in-kernel application security tool. Modular IDE drivers Drivers for IDE controllers are now compiled as modules rather than built into the kernel itself. This change should not have any consequences visible to the user: it will be handled by the installation / upgrade process. New devicescape wireless stack The new wireless stack known as devicescape or mac80211 has been added to the kernel. We now use the devicescape versions of several drivers by default, including the iwl3945 driver for Intel 3945ABG chipsets (replacing ipw3945), and the b43 driver for Broadcom chipsets (replacing bcm43xx). Changes regarding software packages XFS no longer used XFS, the X Font Server, is no longer used by default in Mandriva Linux 2008. It is still available and will function normally if manually enabled. This reduces the weight of the system with no regression in functionality in almost all cases. A new convention for defining font paths has been introduced with this change: font paths are added as symlinks in /etc/X11/fontpath.d/, which allows fonts to be installed and removed with the changes being reflected immediately with no need for XFS. More information on this change is available in this mail from the Cooker mailing list archives. Note that these changes are irrelevant to applications using fontconfig, which is almost all modern applications. Only fairly old applications will be at all affected by these changes. Changes to the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary driver packages The NVIDIA and ATI proprietary driver packages have a new maintainer, Anssi Hannula. He has made the following changes to the packages: NVIDIA The naming scheme has been updated. The new packages are: dkms-nvidia-current dkms-nvidia96xx dkms-nvidia71xx x11-driver-video-nvidia-current x11-driver-video-nvidia96xx x11-driver-video-nvidia71xx nvidia-current-devel nvidia96xx-devel nvidia71xx-devel Please note that users who upgrade from Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring or earlier to Mandriva Linux 2008 using urpmi will need to run drakx11 to re-configure their graphics card following these name changes. The name change should be handled automatically for users upgrading via the official installer. The NVIDIA configuration tools are now included in the package. ATI The naming scheme for the main proprietary driver has been updated. The new packages are: dkms-fglrx x11-driver-video-fglrx fglrx-devel A new package, fglrx-control-center, has also been introduced. This contains the ATI configuration tool. We have also introduced an alternative version of the ATI proprietary driver. The main driver package is version 8.40.4. Version 8.41.7 is also available under the name fglrx-hd2000. This version of the driver is included specifically for the purpose of supporting ATI Radeon HD 2400, 2600 and 2900 cards. ATI does not recommend its use for any other cards: although it supports older cards to some extent, it is known to contain bugs and be unreliable on these cards. Mandriva's automatic hardware detection code should correctly detect your graphics card and select the appropriate proprietary driver for it when you start Mandriva Linux One or install Mandriva Linux Powerpack. Please do not attempt to switch to a different driver unless you are entirely sure you know what you are doing. Man pages now compressed with LZMA During the development of Mandriva Linux 2008, the compression format used for man pages has been changed from bzip2 to LZMA. All packages built after this change have their man pages in LZMA format. Note that some packages have not been rebuilt since this change, and their man pages are still compressed in bzip2 format. This change should be transparent in typical usage. New development package naming policy In prior releases, the names of development packages contained the library major version number, matching the non-development library package (so the development package for libfoo1 would be named libfoo1-devel). During the development of Mandriva Linux 2008, this policy was changed. In future, development packages will normally not include this version number (so the development package for libfoo1 will be named libfoo-devel). This resolves several problems with upgrading development packages when the library major version is changed, and reduces the complexity required in building these packages. In the rare cases where it is necessary to include development packages for two or more different library major versions, the most commonly used will be unversioned, and the others will be versioned. This change requires no special action on the part of users. This change has been applied to all packages built since the new policy was introduced. Packages that have not been rebuilt since the new policy was introduced will still include the version number in the package name. This does not cause any problems. Compiz Fusion replaces Beryl The Beryl 3D desktop technology has been merged back into Compiz (it began as a Compiz fork). Mandriva Linux 2008 no longer contains Beryl. On upgrading from a previous release, Beryl will be replaced by Compiz Fusion. All plugins that were previously available for Beryl are now available as Compiz Fusion plugins. Please note that as of Beta 1, drak3d is not capable of correctly configuring Compiz Fusion. This will be resolved in future releases. Please see the Mandriva Linux 2008 Errata for more details. Services no longer restarted when updating glibc In previous releases, if the glibc package was updated, all services in the current runlevel would be automatically restarted. From this release onwards, this will no longer occur. We advise that all processes should be restarted by the system administrator as soon as possible after an upgrade of the glibc package. If continued availability of the system is not critical, the simplest way to achieve this is to restart the system. Processes that are not restarted will still be using the old glibc and will be vulnerable to whatever problems or security issues are resolved by the updated glibc. Input methods The iiimf input methods (which were not installed by default) were now officially dropped. The default input methods remains scim. Scim-bridge is now installed by default for legacy applications (ooffice, ...) GCC 4.2 not advised for Java development Due to issues described in Bug #21249, we do not advise the use of GCC 4.2 for Java development purposes. GCC 4.3 is available in the package gcc4.3, in the main repository. We advise that this version of GCC be used for the purposes of Java development. php and suhosin suhosin protection is enabled per default, if you don't want this please disable the php-suhosin extension by commenting the "extension = suhosin.so" line in the /etc/php.d/Z98_suhosin.ini configuration file. It is highly recommended to not disable the protection in critical production environments. Learn more about suhosin at http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/index.html.