Kicking off what promises to be a couple of months packed full of great Linux releases, Mandriva Linux will today release Mandriva 2009, the latest incarnation of its popular Linux desktop. We take a look at what you can expect.

For a start, Mandriva will ship with both Gnome 2.24 as well as KDE 4.1 (version 4.1.1 was shipped in the second and final release candidate but KDE 4.1.2 was released last week so may well make it into this release.)

One of the more exciting inclusion in Mandriva 2009 is the incorporation of the LUKS encryption system into the diskdrake tool and the installer. What this means is that Mandriva 2009 will allow users to encrypt their partitions directly from the installer.

The other big change for Mandriva is much better support for the emerging netbook hardware range. Mandriva has already been expending some energy on the netbook market and in mid-September released Mandriva Mini for the OEM netbook market. Expect to see some of the benefits of that project to filter through to Mandriva 2009.

On the desktop Mandriva will have OpenOffice.org version 3.0 which is already in release candidate form and which is expected to be released in final form on October 13.

Apart from OpenOffice.org 3, Mandriva will also include the benefits of Gnome 2.24. Mandriva will be the first full release to include Gnome 2.24 which was released just a few weeks ago. Among those improvements are Ekiga 3.0 for VoIP calls, the new instant messaging client Empathy, and a deskbar applet that is seriously enhanced and can now be extended using plugins.

The most noticeable change on the desktop for Gnome users will be the improved file manager which not only includes tabs in the browser mode – an often-requested addition – but also a new compact view mode.

On the KDE side, Mandriva 2009 will include a fully themes KDE 4 desktop which includes the customised Mandriva splash screen, desktop background, screensaver and widget theme.

Faster boot times

Faster boot times is the holy grail of the Linux development world at the moment. Claims of faster boot times are almost standard-issue with most new Linux releases. In Mandriva’s case developers have put in a great deal of time to making 2009 boot quicker. (Mandriva developer Frederic Crozat explains some of the work done on boot times on his blog).

The end result is that Mandriva 2009 uses a parallel init process (starting a new process before another has finished) to speed up the actual time taken to go from switch on to working desktop. One of the ways that boot times have been improved, for example, is by loading the usb-storage module earlier in the boot process so that it doesn’t block later as well as doing some work with readahead and preload to speed up Gnome startup.

Many of these changes made it into the final release candidate and all will be included in the final release.

Mandriva 2009 will also include extended hardware support, particularly for some of the newer hardware found in netbooks.

Mandriva 2009 is scheduled to be released today (October 9).