Here is our tribute to our founder and the community he and others created.

“The Scion” is a release dedicated to Mandrake , our ancestor, not lost but living on here:

Gaël Duval recently stated:

“I read a lot of sad comments on Twitter about it (the loss of Mandriva) and realized that few of those guys seemed to be aware that actually Mandriva, the company, wasn’t doing a Linux distribution anymore for several years. The Mandriva Linux distribution, which earlier forked as PCLinuxOS, Mageia and others, is now OpenMandriva”. (Gaël Duval is the founder of Mandrake ultimately to become Mandriva)

Just as any offering in the Mandrake spirit should be – it’s even more stable and it has loads of new fun stuff!

OpenMandriva Scion (2014.2) is a major update release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1.

What’s in and what’s new?

With this release you can boot the installer or live system from memory stick or DVD on any EFI or BIOS based machine. If you have one where it doesn’t work tell us we really want to know. The installer now offers full EFI support you can even choose which ESP partition you install to. What’s more it offers the option to create a BIOS boot partition which means you can install OpenMandriva in BIOS mode on a GPT partitioned disk and you can do this independently of any EFI installs. The release notes give help on how to do this.

Desktop The OMA-welcome application has been updated to reflect the new versions of software. This application introduces users to OpenMandriva Lx and shows them some of the features available, as well as providing quick links to common tasks such as updating, installing new software, and configuring your desktop.

Multimedia Stack. The entire multimedia stack has been updated and rebuilt to the latest available versions Some of the more popular MM applications have been updated in the contrib repository

Xorg Xorg is version 1.15.2, and Mesa – 10.4.7 these releases have proved to be very stable. A Compose cache is now incorporated which speeds up application startup times and reduces memory usage especially in locales with large Compose tables (e.g. all UTF-8 locales). We recommend that the composite manager in KDE be changed from XRender to OpenGL mode . This gives transparency the proper blur effect. This also allows our theme and it’s decorations to be shown at their best.

KDE 4.14.3 This is the main window manager. If you don’t know what KDE is, learn more at their website. We’ve switched our default menu launcher to Homerun kicker this comes in two forms; a traditional menu based version or a full screen selector. To learn more about Homerun, check out its features page and the release notes. The network management, media centre, and mobile device support have also been updated.

LibreOffice 4.4.3 The latest LibreOffice featuring much faster load times and many bug fixes. Firefox 38 The latest Firefox with it’s new graphical interface and all the latest features. You may wish to suspend desktop effects when Firefox is in full screen mode, as it speeds up scrolling.

Java 7-8 The OpenMandriva Java stack has been entirely rebuilt to version 7 and is completely functional. We currently provide Eclipse Kepler by default. Eclipse was broken on 2014.1 and is now fixed.

Printing Improved printing support, with an emphasis on the latest HP printers.

Upgrading to 2014.2 Please see details how to upgrade within our release notes: https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/2014.2/Release_Notes

Finally… All this is supported by a new Kernel 3.18.16 nrjQL – This ultra-fast kernel is configured for the best desktop performance, which helps to give a responsiveness you would normally only find in realtime kernels. The nrj mode adds CPU and RCU full Pre-emption and Boost mode. The QL mode gives extra kick by using the BFS CPU task scheduler, the BFQ disk I/O scheduler, UKSM memory management. TOI is included for rapid suspension and resumption from hibernation. The kernel uses multiple cpus when booting live images for faster start-up. An “EDID override” feature is enabled, with this it is possible to correct faulty monitor detection with boot time options. A package “edidbins” on the iso contains 5 basic firmwares for the most commonly used resolutions. It’s also possible to load a customised acpi table. For details of these features see Please, see: https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/Kernel and the release notes https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/2014.2/Release_Notes for more information. Lastly an update to the kernel firmware packages brings support for several new wifi adapters which will ease installation for some users.