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.

With Fedora 10 finally entering the world earlier this week, we have performed benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10. In our testing we used both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of each distribution and then ran a series of automated tests through the Phoronix Test Suite.Our test system consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at 4.00GHz, an ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, MSI 9800GT 512MB graphics card, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz RAM, and Western Digital WD1600JS-00MHB0 160GB SATA HDD. With each distribution we had manually installed the NVIDIA 180.08 driver and Phoronix Test Suite 1.4.2. Per our standard testing protocol, each distribution was left in its stock configuration (though as part of that, SELinux is disabled on Fedora). The final i686 and x86_64 builds of Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 were each tested.Ubuntu 8.10 ships with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5.2, GCC 4.3.2, and GNOME 2.24. Fedora 10 ships with the Linux 2.6.27.5 kernel, X Server 1.5.3, GCC 4.3.2, and GNOME 2.24. The tests we used to compare the Ubuntu and Fedora performance was Nexuiz, OpenArena, World of Padman, Lightsmark, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Tremulous, timed Gzip compression, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, BYTE Unix Benchmark, SciMark 2, GnuPG, and OpenSSL.