Mandriva Shows Off 3D Linux Graphics, Opens Benelux Unit

Published: September 4, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Mandriva may not be as big as Novell or Red Hat, but the Franco-American company does its own share of innovation in the Linux space.

This week, at the aKademy 2007 annual KDE graphical user interface conference, which is being held in Glasgow, Scotland, Mandriva showed off a prototype of a future Mandriva Linux release with snazzy 3D graphics running on Intel's Mobile Internet Device, or MID. You can find out more about the MID here, but in short, it is a handheld computer with a 5-inch touch screen that is designed for communication by email, instant message, chat, and blog, as well as to play games, videos, and music. The devices are based on variants of Intel's Pentium-M mobile processor, called the A100 and A110, and its 945GU chipset.

Mandriva demonstrated the Intel MID running its Linux equipped with elements of the future KDE 4 and the Metisse and Compiz cube effects for KDE, which are a 3D means of organizing a desktop akin to what Microsoft has done with Windows Vista and Sun Microsystems is doing with Project Looking Glass for Solaris Unix and maybe Linux. Mandriva also showed the MID being used as a 3D camera running this software and also had another demonstration of OpenArena, a variant of Quake3, running on the prototype.

In a separate announcement, Mandriva also said last week that it has established a company in Belgium called Mandriva Benelux that will be the sole means of distributing and supporting Mandriva Linux in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The new unit will be able to ink its own OEM agreements to get Mandriva Linux distributed in the region, and will work with local educational institutions and governments to spur the adoption of Linux and open source software in those three countries. Mandriva's various Linux distributions are available in 80 languages and in 140 countries through a combination of direct and indirect channels.

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