Tx's Journal: Mandriva 2007 Spring

Well, I gave up on Ubuntu 7.04. Spent a fair few hours trying to fix the various problems I had with it, but IMHO some things should work out-of-the-box, and an old WNIC and CD-RW (that both worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 6.10) are definitely in that category. So, having played with Mandrake back when it was still called Mandrake, and rather liked it, I decided to see what that's like these days.

I have to say, first impressions are that it's very civilized. Ndiswrapper is installed by default, and the network manager has a built in graphical interface to it. So no messing about trying to get a working net connection up so I can download ndiswrapper, then faffing around trying to configure it to get my ZyXel USB adapter working. Just put in the Windows driver CD for the ZyXel, select the .inf file, et voila - works great. Given that driver support is a recognized major issue for Linux, every distro really ought to do it this way.

There seems to be a lot of hype around Ubuntu, and it does seem to have a great community using it (seems to be much harder to find info/help on Mandriva), but I have to say right now, it ain't my favourite distro. I'll see how Mandriva goes for a while.