UNLIKE the Scottish weather, I’ve warmed a lot toward Mandriva in recent months. The thaw in relations began when I reviewed Mandriva’s excellent 2008 Flash distribution (read it here) and has continued with their just-released desktop offering, Mandriva 2008 Spring.

There are three editions of Mandriva 2008 Spring: One, Powerpack and Free.

‘One’ comes on an installable live CD which contains non-free drivers, firmware and browser plugins.

‘Powerpack’ is the commercial DVD edition, complete with traditional installer.
It contains some commercial software the other editions don't have, but no free/open source software you can't get in the other editions.

‘Free’ is the version aimed primarily at FOSS diehards. It's a DVD or 3-CD set with a traditional installer and only contains free/open source software. That means no NVIDIA or ATI drivers, no Intel wireless firmware, no Java, no Flash, none of that really useful but morally problematical stuff.

Once you’ve installed 2008 Spring to hard drive, it’s possible to install KDE 4 from the Mandriva repository – just grab the ‘task-kde4’ package – but 4 isn’t yet considered stable enough to be the default desktop environment.

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