Mandriva Linux is already well-known as a powerful and stable operating system that demanded strong technical knowledge and extensive use of the "command line"; Mandriva saw this as an opportunity to integrate the best graphical desktop environments and contribute its own graphical configuration utilities and quickly became famous for setting the standard in ease-of-use and functionality. Mandriva Linux 2008 is available in three editions: One, Powerpack and Free, for both i586 and x86-64 architectures. Mandriva Linux is based on the Cooker development project sponsored by Mandriva. Hundreds of passionate free software developers work openly on the core of the distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available. Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 RC 'thornicrofti'. This RC includes the newest release of KDE 4, KDE 4.1 final, GNOME 2.23.5, Firefox 3, OpenOffice. org 3.0 Beta and kernel 2.6.26 final. The new beta also switches to using splashy for boot and shutdown graphics, and adds synchronization support for Windows Mobile 2003 devices. As always, Mandriva reminds you not to use pre-releases in any critical situation; install them only on a test system or partition, or in a virtual machine. Additionally, they strongly discourage using this pre-release to upgrade from any earlier release of Mandriva Linux, as the transition process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not yet fully implemented and you are likely to end up with an unusable system. Please make sure to read the Errata and Release Notes, and file any bugs not covered in those pages on Bugzilla. Download from FTP \