Earlier today, December 23rd, Mandriva announced the 2010.2 release of its popular Mandriva Linux distribution, available for download on mirrors worldwide.

The new release of the Mandriva Linux operating system is an incremental update for the Mandriva 2010.1 version, released this year on July 8th. Mandriva Linux 2010.2 comes in three editions: One Edition, Free Edition and Powerpack Edition.

Mandriva Linux 2010.2 is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, with GNOME and KDE4 LiveCDs. See download links at the end of the article."As announced previously, Mandriva 2010.2 is an incremental update on top of Mandriva 2010.1, incorporating all the security and bugfix updates since its release."

"Since the 2010.1 release, the secteam has released a total of 5055 RPMs via official updates, counting both security and bugfix advisories, across 272 different packages." - was stated in the official release announcement.

Highlights of Mandriva Linux 2010.2:

· Linux kernel 2.6.33.7;
· X.Org 7.5;
· Xorg Server 1.7.7;
· Nouveau video driver;
· Intel video driver 2.11.0;
· Mesa 7.8.1;
· KDE SC 4.4.3;
· GNOME 2.30.0;
· Amarok 2.3.1;
· Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13;
· Oracle OpenOffice.org 3.2.0;
· Avant Window Navigator 4.0;
· The GIMP 2.6.8;
· GNOME Shell 2.29.1;
· NTFS-3G 2010.3.6;
· Spamassassin 3.3.1;
· libgpod 0.7.93;
· Glibc 2.11.1;
· GDB debugger 7.1;
· Python 2.6.5;
· OpenSSL 1.0.0a.

Storage demands are not getting any lower by the day and hard drive manufacturers keep increasing the capacities to cope up with all our digital data usage such as pictures, movies and audio files. We take a look at two drives today- the Western Digital Caviar Black with 1000GB of unformatted space and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 which has the largest capacity for a single drive at the moment- 1500GB of unformatted space.As you can see, both the drives support all the standard features such as NCQ, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and Power Management. Not listed above is the amount of cache which is 32MB on both the drives. Temperatures reported by the WD are lower than the Seagateaccording to HD Tune and we saw this at both Idle and after a full run on PC Mark Vantage.

One little “ouch” is the amount of capacity that is lost after these drives are formatted. With Vista NTFS, the actual usable space of the Caviar is 931.5GB and the Barracuda is 1397.3GB. To put things in perspective, my MacBook Air drive is 80GB in size- pretty much the capacity these drives lose when formatted.