Mandriva quietly released their second Spring release candidate and with it comes a few bug fixes found in the previous spring release candidate.

The Mandriva Spring Release Candidate can be installed without booting from disc by selecting "Install Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring" from the boot menu. Users can now encrypt a given file system, rather than defaulting to only ext3/ext4 and cryptoloop as been removed. Password encryption is also supported in the GRUB bootloader.

In the Free Edition, non-free media sources are disabled by default and have to be enabled by running the rpmdrake utility. With drakguard applications can be blocked on a user-by-user basis. The msecgui provides a security summary, tests can be run individually and scheduled periodic updates can be customized and task-oriented security settings are available for desktops, laptops, netbooks and other platforms.

Free applications in the Mandriva Spring Candidate 2 include Firefox 3.6.3, OpenOffice.org 3.2, Chromium, Transmission 1.92 and video editor OpenShot 1.13.

Mandriva Spring Candidate 2 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.33.4. Full release notes and available download mirrors are available at wiki.mandriva.com/eng/2010.1_RC2. As always, report any bugs to Bugzilla.