Source: DistroWatch After several months of beta testing, Mandriva has finally unveiled the first stable release of Kiosk, a web-based utility for installing software applications of Mandriva Linux. This should be welcome news by many users who found the distribution's 1-year release schedule too long and who wished there was an easy way to install updated software before the arrival of a new stable Mandriva release. At the moment, Kiosk only holds packages for the i586 edition of Mandriva Linux 2006 and Mandriva One 2006, but the most often requested software packages, such as KDE 3.5.2, GNOME 2.12.3, Firefox 1.5.0.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2, and new hardware drivers, including the latest proprietary graphics drivers by ATI and NVIDIA, are all ready for one-click installation. Kiosk is available to the Mandriva Club members without any additional cost, but non-members can still take advantage of the new utility for a reasonable €30 per year. On a related note, Mandriva's development branch, received a large number of updates during the past week. These included a new kernel 2.6 16 and X.Org 7.0, which should compliment the earlier additions of KDE 3.5.2 and GNOME 2.14.1. A number of "bleeding-edge" packages are also available. Mandriva's Florent Villard (better known as Warly) has indicated that it shouldn't be long before the first alpha of Mandriva 2007 is released for testing; in the meantime take a look at this Mandriva Xgl video demonstrating various 3D effects on the GNOME desktop.
