Mandriva Kiosk Lite in beta testing for Club members
Hot on the heels of Mandriva One, Club members have another exclusive: the first version of the Mandriva Kiosk web-based simple software installation service, Mandriva Kiosk Lite, is now in open beta testing for Club members at the Silver level and above. Mandriva Kiosk Lite makes it as simple as one click (and your root password!) to install 'bundles' of software such as KDE 3.5 and OpenOffice.org 2.0. Mandriva Kiosk Lite currently contains i586 (not x86-64) bundles of KDE 3.5, OpenOffice.org 2.0, GNOME 2.12 and Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5, and is supported under Mandriva Linux 2006 Official and Mandriva One 2006. If you're a Silver or higher level Club member, and you want to help test Mandriva Kiosk Lite, first install all these updated packages, then visit the pre-release of the new Mandriva default home page, where Mandriva Kiosk Lite lives. For more information on Mandriva Kiosk Lite and how to help test it, you can read the announcement at the Mandriva Club site.

Join the Mandriva Club, get Linux training for $1!
That's right - with the latest special offer from the Mandriva Store, you can join the Mandriva Club and get access to four online Linux training courses for just one dollar, or one Euro! The regular price for a one year Silver membership is $132 / €120, but until April 30th you can buy it with the four online training courses for $133 or €121. The training courses provided are intended to prepare you for the internationally recognized LPI (Linux Professional Institute) certification program: they are LPI101, LPI102, LPI201 and LPI202. Each course is supervised by an expert Linux tutor. And of course, you get all the benefits of Club membership, like access to the special Club editions of Mandriva Linux, access to Mandriva Kiosk Lite, the special Mandriva Club software repositories, the Club forums, the Knowledge Base and more! Don't delay - sign up today.

Mandriva takes a leading role in the OSDL Printing Summit
Till Kamppeter, who oversees all printing-related development for Mandriva, was instrumental in the organisation of the Desktop Printing Summit mounted by OSDL (Open Source Development Labs, a non-profit organisation dedicated to driving the development of Linux in the enterprise computing arena, and the home of Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds) this month. Till helped in organising the event, and also moderated several sessions at the summit, which brought together open source developers and developers from many major printer manufacturers. The various sessions produced productive work on the automatic installation of printer drivers, the improvement of printing dialogs in Linux distributions and desktops, and testing and certification.

Mandriva to take part in major European IT management project
Mandriva this month announced that it has won a subsidy from the French government Department of Commerce and Finance to take part in ENERGy, a major pan-European project aimed at developing new theories and practical frameworks and tools for the efficient management of large-scale computer networks, such as those found in large enterprises or government facilities. The project will bring together software developers and researchers with representatives from government and industry. You can read more about the ENERGy project in the press release.

Linuxtag 2006 in Germany
From May 3rd to May 6th this year's German Linuxtag will open its doors in Wiesbaden, Germany. The 4 day event will feature a large exhibition of open source projects, companies and most of the major Linux distributors as well as many conferences and workshops. For the first time the German user community project MandrivaUser.de will participate with their own booth and present their project. Don't forget to stop by and say hello at Booth 936 in Hall 9.

Update, update, update
Every computer user should have three priorities: update, update, update! As always, we remind you to keep your system secure and working smoothly with the latest Mandriva security updates. Since the last issue, there have been updates to xscreensaver, openvpn, mplayer, klamav and other important packages, so make sure you stay up to date by running MandrivaUpdate regularly - or by signing up for Mandriva Online, the premium service providing instant notification and, optionally, automatic installation of updates.