Mandriva 2006 Hits The ‘Net

Out of three distributions comes one. Mandriva 2006, the convergence of the former Mandrake, Connectiva and Lycoris Linux
distributions was released today.

Mandrake acquired Brazilian Linux vendor Conectiva in February for $2.3 million. In April, the combined entity changed its name to Mandriva. In June Mandriva acquired desktop Linux vendor Lycoris.

And now it’s all together in Mandriva 2006, which is being offered to its “club” members, who pay fees ranging from $66
to $1,320 a year for membership

Among the new features in Mandriva 2006 is an improved installer, a desktop search tool and a new package manager. The distro also includes the 2.6.12 Linux kernel as well as KDE 3.4, GNOME 2.10 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.5.

Mandriva has been active of late trying to get its version of Linux into
mainstream distribution channels. Dell will sell notebooks pre-loaded with Mandriva. The Mandriva site also
offers HP notebooks pre-loaded with Mandriva in either single- or dual-boot
configurations.

Mandriva isn’t the only Linux distribution with a new release this
week. As anticipated and previously
announced, Novell has officially released SUSE Linux 10, which is the
first based on its openSUSE community effort.