Mandriva acquires Lycoris
The biggest Mandriva news in the past month was the acquisition of Lycoris, the popular Linux distribution aimed at novice users. Mandriva has acquired Lycoris' main assets and the services of Joseph Cheek, founder of Lycoris. Joe will be working on integrating the best features of Lycoris into Mandriva Linux, especially into the Discovery product aimed at new Linux users. We hope to bring the strong community of Lycoris users into the Mandriva community via the Club, so welcome them when they get here! Read the press release here. If you want to see what features Lycoris will be bringing to the Mandriva party, you can order now the Lycoris Desktop/LX 1.4 Gold Edition Bundle here.

Multi Network Firewall 2 released
This month saw the release of the second version of Multi Network Firewall, the Mandriva distribution specifically tailored for infrastrcture and security use. MNF 2 provides enterprise-class capabilities like IDS, VPN, traffic shaping, P2P traffic filtering and network interface bonding and bridging for a single competitive price with no complicated client licenses. There are also several enterprise level support options for MNF, depending on how much support your organisation may need. You can buy MNF 2 - on CD, or as a direct download - from the Mandriva Store or via our volume purchasing program, PSMP.

Limited Edition 2005 KDE 3.4 Club release available
During some of the recent changes at Mandriva, we set out a policy to provide regular updated releases of Mandriva exclusively for Club members. The first of these, an updated version of Limited Edition 2005 with the addition of KDE 3.4, was released this month. These releases will not be officially supported, but they're still a great way for Club members to get their hands on the latest new features first! You can read the announcement of the release here, and Club members can download it via Bittorrent (or, if Bittorrent is inconvenient, via FTP by request) from the download page. Try it today! If you want to update even more software, you can update the KDE office suite, KOffice, to version 1.4 using the packages created by the KOffice team. These packages, for Limited Edition 2005, are available at this page.

New Club site beta available to members
Big changes are coming to the Mandriva Club this summer. The biggest change of all is a complete overhaul of the Club website to a new, Wiki-based design. After much work, the new site is now accessible as a beta test for all Club members to try out! You can access it at this address: http://club-beta.mandriva.com. Please report any problems, and since the new design is intended to be edited by Club members as well as Club staff, go ahead and edit or add information wherever you can, especially in the Knowledge Base!

New Mandriva services authentication system installed
Another important change happening this month is the introduction of a new authentication system for Mandriva services. Previously, authentication for our various services - Mandriva Club, Mandriva Online and so on - was handled by several separate systems. Thanks to some hard work by our IS team, a new, centralised and more reliable system has been introduced to take over authentication duties for all Mandriva services. With this change comes an important change for all users of Mandriva services: under the new system, you now have a single user ID, which is your registered email address. Your Club nickname, for instance, is no longer your user ID for the Club.

The new system has a front end where you can register for an account or change the details of your existing account. In case of any problems, please try logging in to the front end first. If the problems persist, you can submit reports via this form.

One important change Club members must make with the new system is to remove any urpmi media they may have for Club RPMs, then re-add them with email address as user ID, instead of Club nickname as was previously the case. Finally, the new system caused a small problem in the Club download section. If you see no torrents listed on your download page, log out of your Club account, remove all cookies from the Club website, and log in again to fix the problem.

Name contest winners announced!
As we mentioned in a previous newsletter, we ran a contest to see which Club member could come up with the best idea for spreading the new name of the company far and wide. This month, the winners of the contest were announced! So congratulations to Nicholas Page, who won an HP laptop, to Jean-Philippe Gaulier, who won a Globetrotter, to Boudha Rejoui, who won a copy of Move with a 128MB USB key, and to Derek Pope, Archil, Greg Martyn, Raphaël Jadot, Adrian Berindei, Erich Kitzmüller, Julien Stickel and Xavier Moucheron, all of whom won three month extensions of their Club membership! You can see a list of the winning ideas, some of which have already been implemented and the rest of which are being worked on, here.

Google contest begins!
One of the winning suggestions in the name contest was to start a Google contest for Mandriva pages. The contest is now underway! On July 31st, the owner of the highest-ranked Mandriva-related personal page on Google will win a Globetrotter - so start polishing your site today! More details at the Club article.

Mandriva eTraining goes into public beta
The new Mandriva eTraining program (which takes over from the old Campus program) is now available as a public beta. All Club members have free access to the program, and members who contribute to the program could have their membership upgraded or extended. For those who are not yet Club members, a free Club membership can be had by designing a course for the program! Check it out here.

eCards available for Mandriva Club members
One of the winning ideas from the Club name contest was to allow Club members to send Mandriva themed eCards, and this idea has now been brought to life! Club members can go to this page to send Mandriva eCards to anyone. Try it today!

Mandriva announces support contract with MACIF
Showcasing Mandriva's enterprise support capabilities, a large scale support contract was recently announced with MACIF, the top European insurance company. Mandriva will provide level 3 Linux technical support for MACIF's network. You can read the press release here.

Academia program unveiled
Mandriva's new program for educational institutions, Academia, was unveiled this month. Academia is more than just a distribution for the educational market - it is a complete package of software, support and licensing. Academia provides a special education edition of the Mandriva Linux operating sytem along with services and an ownership scheme that ease large-scale deployment of Linux. Academia is sold to educational bodies on an unlimited site license basis. Only one license is needed to be able to run Mandriva Linux on all the computers of a given site. This means that there's a single price for an unlimited number of installations. If Academia sounds like the right thing for your school, you can read more about the program here.

Planet Mandriva is born
Did you know that many Mandriva employees and contributors have blogs or journals? Planet Mandriva, a collection of all these journals, was born this month! At a glance, you can see the latest entries by a wide variety of Mandriva-related people, from developers through to your humble editor.

Limited Edition 2005 reviewed at playREACTION
The gaming website playREACTION printed a review of Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005, praising it as "one of the most user friendly distributions ever created". You can read the whole review here.

Joseph Cheek does the rounds
Joseph Cheek, ex-head of Lycoris and now working for Mandriva, was interviewed more than once following the Lycoris acquisition. In one interview with GUILinux, he explained some of the history of Lycoris, some details about the merger with Mandriva, and some of our future plans. In an interview with DesktopOS.com, he went into more detail about specific Lycoris features, and his opinions of France. Catch up with Lycoris with these interviews!

Gaël Duval interviewed by TuxJournal
The Italian Linux website TuxJournal conducted a detailed and wide-ranging interview with Gaël Duval, co-founder of Mandriva. Topics covered included Gaël's history in computing, the Conectiva merger, the Academia education program, and software patents in Europe. Be sure to read the interview for an insight into Gaël's work!

Mandriva Updates
Of course, since the last newsletter, there have been several security updates for Mandriva Linux, which every user should update to as soon as possible. As always, we remind you to run Mandriva Update regularly, or sign up to Mandriva Online for automatic update notification and installation. Some of the bigger updates released in the last month included a fix for a serious vulnerability in php-pear, a kernel update to fix several vulnerabilities, and an update to fix vulnerabilities in gaim - so patch today!