Current Mandriva situation

These last days, numerous rumors have been spread about Mandriva’s situation. Out of respect for our clients and community, we want to clear the situation.

Mandriva has always been involved in investment and aquisition processes. Over the past years, Mandriva bought Edge-IT, Conectiva and Linbox FAS. Today, Mandriva is in takeover talks with various investors. These discussions concerning new investments in Mandriva are not new, they have happened all throughout the life of the company, and there are still going on today. We want to stress out the fact that Mandriva has not been bought by anybody.

Like many other companies, Mandriva has been impacted by the economic slow-down and took advantage of this period to develop and improve its products: an operating system dedicated to a uniquely ergonomic server (MES5.1), the most reliable free machine-management software on the market (Pulse2), Mandriva Smart Desktop to simplify the use of office desktops, education-dedicated distribution. Mandriva is also involved in many research projects, and is constantly working with the community to increase the efficiency and ease-of-use of its distribution.

We are beginning to harvest the results of this development work with hundreds of thousands of PCs using the Mandriva OS sold in South America, Asia and rapid sales of Pulse2 and MES5 in Europe. So it is unsurprising that Mandriva has once again attracted the interest of industry decision-makers.

Arnaud Laprévote
Mandriva’s CEO

Source

Mandriva is up for sale - The Inquirer

Mandriva is up for sale - The Inquirer

imapproxy will find a new home

This is a message sent out to imapproxy-info mailing list by the maintainer Dave McMurtrie:

Good morning,

I'm writing today to let you know that I'm officially retiring from my duties as, well, the sole keeper of all things imapproxy.

You've probably noticed that over the past year I haven't exactly been lighting this project on fire. In fact, I've been doing pretty much the bare minimum I had to do to keep it alive. Patches have come in and I've ignored them. Questions have been raised to me and I've ignored them, too. I can assure you all that it's been a matter of laziness and not hubris. Well, it's been a mixture of laziness and the fact that I've been extremely busy in my day job. I never took the time to make imapproxy into a "real" project with a real team of people working on it
and it suffered because of that.

I had considered just shutting the whole thing down, but there are still a couple people who run it so I embarked on a quest to find a new home for the software. The first group I thought of was the Squirrelmail team. imapproxy and Squirrelmail are a great complement to each other, and the Squirrelmail team is actually a team and not one guy like I am, so they're much more likely to be responsive to patch review and putting out new releases. Also, I've been running Squirrelmail myself for many years at more than one place of employment and I've been very impressed with their level of user support. They're a fine group, and I felt they would make for a much better caretaker of imapproxy than I have been.

With much trepidation, I contacted the Squirrelmail folks to gauge interest. I'm pleased to let you know that after much thought and discussion they're willing to take over the imapproxy project and keep it alive. Details of the transition are still being discussed, but it's already in the works. The imapproxy.org domain has been transferred over and they're now hosting the old website.

Many thanks go out to all the kind folks who have supported imapproxy (and indirectly, me) over the years.

Thanks!

Dave
--
Dave McMurtrie, SPE
Email Systems Team Leader
Carnegie Mellon University,
Computing Services

I myself, have been using imapproxy for 7 years and impressed with its performance. 4 years with squirrelmail and 3 years with roundcube. It helps a lot to enhance the performance of my mailserver. Hope the new maintainer will keep up the good job of Dave.

Thanks Dave. :)

Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Beta 2 available

Second Beta release of mandriva Linux is available for test now. Download the DVD iso for your architecture. You can also dump it on USB key as an installation media. This second beta release comes with many updates and improvements on major softwares. Mandriva tools have also been updated and propose new functionalities:

• data encryption: you want to protect your data. Encrypt your home directory or your system: it’s as easy as clic!
• parental control: many bug fixes, you can now control not only network access but also applications
• network profiles: add your network services in your network profiles.
• Mandriva Directory Server: this new release proposes new functionnalities to help you manage a LDAP directory (userquota module, massive users import, OpenSSH LDAP public keys management..)

More details on this Beta2 release can be read here. See here for download mirror.

Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Beta 1 available

First beta of Mandriva 2010 Spring Beta 1 released. Mandriva Spring final will be out on June 6th as planned by Mandriva Team. For those who want to test it, you can download it from your nearest mirror. For those who use Cooker like me, you don't need to download because you may get the upadates via drakrpm.

This release includes GNOME 2.30 (released on April 1st) and a preview edition of GNOME-Shell, which will be part of GNOME 3 (which is planned for release on september 2010). Of course, KDE 4.4.2 is also available, as well as various updates for many programs in the distribution.

As usual all your feedbacks are really important to help in improving global quality of distribution. You can report improvements proposals and/or bugs in Mandriva Bugzilla.

Mozilla 3.6.3 released. Fixed critical security hole.

Mozilla has just announced the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3. It only fixed a critical security flaw that could potentially allow remote code execution (see bug 555109).

The memory corruption flaw, demonstrated by Nils of MWR Infosecurity at Pwn2Own 2010, is caused by moving DOM nodes between documents and triggering garbage collection at the right time, leaving an incorrectly retained node which would be used later. This, in turn, could be used to execute remotely injected code. Mozilla say the exploit only affects Firefox 3.6, but that it plans to patch Firefox 3.5 in a coming release "just in case there is an alternate way of triggering the bug".

There are no other changes in Firefox 3.6.3.

KDE 4.4 is ready for Mandriva

Run one of these to add KDE-4.4.0 repo (depending on your OS of course):

32 bits:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.4.0 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/4.4.0/Mandriva/2010.0/i586

64 bits:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.4.0 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/4.4.0/Mandriva/2010.0/x86_64

After adding the KDE 4.4. repository you will need to update, download and install all of KDE 4.4 packages. You can do all of this in one command, but, I, for safety, prefer to do it in two steps. First, update the repositories and download all the packages before installing them to make sure that the installation is possible:

urpmi --auto-update --auto-select --test

When all packages finish downloading and you see a message at the end saying that the installation is possible, you can run the same command without the --test parameter to now actually perform the installation:

urpmi --auto-update --auto-select

After the package installation finishes, logout and log back in, that's it !! you will have a brand new, shiny, awesome and rocking KDE 4.4 desktop :D

Enjoy!!

Credit goes to Juan Luis Baptiste for the info.