Mandriva and Turbolinux announce a partnership by creating a lab named Manbo-Labs, the result of an agreement between the two companies to share resources and technology to release a common base system on each of Linux distributions.

Mandriva, the European editor of Linux distributions, and Turbolinux, a leading Linux and server distributor in Japan and China, signed the agreement about Manbo-Labs last October and have been working together since then. Both companies decided to wait until first internal delivery to issue this announcement.

Manbo-Labs’ team is composed of more than ten developers from France, Japan, Brazil and also includes developers from the community. Altogether, they have been working on building a common Linux base system to be released in April 2008. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring will be based on this system.

By this Agreement, Mandriva and Turbolinux form a strategic partnership to pursue on Linux solutions to address new customers. By pooling together common engineering resources, Mandriva and Turbolinux will be able to invest more in technology and product quality. For instance this will help getting more hardware compatibility and stronger relationships with ISVs and IHVs.

The new common base will be released under the GPL license, and both companies wish to open the partnership to other RPM based Linux distributions editors.

“I strongly believe the Manbo-labs project, launched by our two companies who have grown their base in Europe and Asia, will create a new trend in Linux as we pass the 10-year milestone in the history of Linux commercial distribution systems,” said Turbolinux CEO Koichi Yano.