Mandriva announced last night the second alpha release of Mandriva 2009, which brings KDE4 (default desktop), GNOME 2.23.4, and support for the newest NVIDIA and ATI/AMD video cards.

The development cycle of Mandriva 2009 will continue with two beta editions (one at the end of July and the other in middle of August), two release candidates in September, and it will conclude with the final release in early October, 2008. With the 2009 edition, Mandriva Linux will try to compete with the current release of openSUSE 11.0 and the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), and even to "steal" some of their devoted users. Below are some of the interesting features that will be introduced in Mandriva 2009:

• Linux kernel 2.6.26
• GCC 4.3
• GNOME 2.24
• KDE 4.1
• Firefox 3.0
• OpenOffice.org 3.0

More Here w/ screenshots.