Mandriva 2007 Released

moyoto writes, "Mandriva has announced today the immediate availability of Mandriva Linux 2007. This new version includes the latest Gnome 2.16 and KDE 3.5.4, as well as a 3D desktop with both AIGLX and Xgl technologies. You can download Mandriva 2007 in one of the several free versions available with bittorrent, or buy one of the commercial packs. You can easily test the new 3D Desktop with one of the 16 Live/Install CDs, Gnome- or KDE-based, available in more than 70 different languages." The distro features a new theme named Ia Ora ("hello" in French Polynesian).

Distibution Errors: #1

[bfree]

Announcing a new release and having your web site melt under the load. Though I suppose it could be worse, they could be a hosting provider launching a new high availability service :-D

Today is the day of desktop linux!

[Reverend528]

A new Slackware and a new Mandriva! What a time to be alive!

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[AdamWill]

Hmm, let me know how Ubuntu is doing with its easy 3D desktop configuration wizard that allows to pick either AIGLX or Xgl depending on what your hardware supports. How's their SMB, NFS and WebDAV mount wizards? Their graphical VPN configuration tool? Their FTP, web, mail, DNS, SMB, NFS, and proxy server configuration wizards? autofs and ldap configuration tools? Their redundant firewall configuration tool? How's their internationalization going, is Ubuntu available in over 70 languages yet? Yeah, no reason to use anything but Ubuntu, obviously. Feel free to let me know what apt does that urpmi doesn't, too. And if apt was the winner of the Linux desktop 'wars', why didn't Debian win sometime in 1999?

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[BiggerIsBetter]

I think Novell would beg to differ. SLED 10 is very nice, IMO. (Yes, I've tried Ubuntu).

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do I start?

- No choice of the locale at install time (ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8).
- Installer won't let you leave a partition alone, they must all be assigned a mount point.
- Won't install on an external hard drive out-of-the-box.
- GRUB won't install anywhere but the master boot record of the first drive.
- No rescue mode on the live CD even though the option is documented in the Fn.
- No official kernel patched with the vastly superior suspend2.

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[AdamWill]

The new rpmdrake in 2007 is a combined interface - install / remove are in the same application again.

Re:I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://en.opensuse.org/Download [opensuse.org]:

BEFORE YOU INSTALL READ THIS:

The package manager in SUSE 10.1 is regrettably broken on most systems.

I wouldn't be bragging about QA on a distro that ships with a broken package manager (sort of an integral part of the OS).

Web site slow . . .download links below

[jonesy16]

Since the site is slow to respond, here are the download links for the 3CD version for i586 and x86_64, these are bit torrents . . .

i586
------
http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free- 2007-CD.i586.torrent [mandriva.com]

x86_64
------
http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free- 2007-CD.x86_64.torrent [mandriva.com]

dual architecture DVD
----------------------
http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free- 2007-DVD.torrent [mandriva.com]

Re:what about updates?

[AdamWill]

Yes. Always have, always will. Run MandrivaUpdate, there they are. We sell Online, but that's an update _notification_ service - it gives you the little panel applet that alerts you when updates are available (and, optionally, can install them automatically). It's just a little convenience.

Re:PPC Version?

[AdamWill]

There are no official PPC releases any more. The PPC port still exists and is maintained by volunteers (principally Danny Tholen, actually). They haven't had the resources to do a stable release since, I think, 10.1 or 2005, but Cooker is still kept mostly up to date and works pretty well. If you really want to run Mandriva on PPC, go with current Cooker. Frankly, though, I'd recommend a dedicated distro like Yellow Dog unless you specifically want Mandriva, because you're comfortable with it or all your other machines run on it or something.

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[Burz]

Gotta agree with that. SuSE is much nicer.

Ubuntu is too minimalistic in its 'control panel' options. There's too many things you cannot do without nursing those activities from the CLI. Ubuntu has no security features recommended on laptops: WPA, VPN, firewall, encrypted partitions, etc. Even home folders are not set as private. You must configure them all from the CLI or at best with afterthought add-ons like Firestarter.

The Ubuntu installer is complete amatuer-hour (no, really, it looks like a script that was whipped up in one hour): Instead of asking, it makes nasty assumptions like clock=UTC, and that your UBS/Firewire drives are to be mounted from fstab on bootup (when those drives are unplugged, your system *doesn't* bootup). Video card detection is often fumbled with common models like Radeon 7000.

I wish Canonical well with Ubuntu, but I'd say they'd better add a lot more standard features with a revamped installer in the next release (Edgy) if they want to maintain their standing.

Mandriva, SuSE, Xandros are all much better for normal PC use IMO. They always have been better, and even Xandros (was Corel) goes back to 1999.

Re:Bloated

[meringuoid]

There is always things like apt. No need to have it all on the install media.

Yes... and it seems they've thought of this. There's a single-CD download, which installs a minimal system and then lets you get the rest over the network. I'll be getting this one, I think: I don't care to clutter up my room with unnecessary coasters!

http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-fre e-2007-mini.torrent

Soon as the ADSL contention clears tonight at about half-elevenish, I'll totally nab that.

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[mislam]

No Suse is. Atleast in my books. Suse 10.1 installed out of the box on my Dell dimension 9150 without any tweaking. Before Suse I tried to install Ubuntu and could not get the graphics card to recognize nor the wifi will work.

Re:Laugh it up

[Mad_Rain]

I've wondered if maybe some Linux User's Group wanted to do this as a fund-raiser: do a bulk-purchase of some Linux-compatible peripheral (say a WL card or TV tuner) in OEM packaging, and then wrap it up with the appropriate drivers and sell it over the web at a 50-60% markup.

In case you haven't heard, there is a HDTV tuner card made specifically for linux [pchdtv.com], to receive Over-The-Air hdtv broadcasts, and analogue cable channels. I believe that as of kernel 2.6.12, driver modules are included with the kernel. Find or start your own LUG, and there you go. :-)

Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u

[foreverdisillusioned]

I'm glad it worked out for you, but I'm unconvinced that your experience is commonplace. Three (or was it four?) years ago, I tried to find a Linux distro that worked for me. I was fairly technically proficient, but I had no Unix experience and I didn't have the patience to spend more than a day (12~ hours) getting the basics to work. Red Hat (this was pre-FC) was first on my list--the installer inexplicably froze. Knoppix gave me all kinds of crap about my graphics card. I went down the list, including SuSe, Gentoo (with my expert best friend's guidance), Debian and Mandriva (or Mandrake, as it was then known), and every single one of them gave me major problems. Half of them wouldn't even make it through an entire install, and the rest refused to recognize a vital piece of hardware. Each time, I'd spend a most of the day screwing around on Google and IRC trying to get the sound card or the net connection to work, and then finally give up and move on to the next popular distro I could find--I did this for a week or two before finally giving up on Linux entirely. I wasn't just using a single problem box, btw--I tried installing them on my desktop, the family desktop, and my laptop and had the same horrible results.

A couple years pass, then lo and behold I hear about this new distro called Ubuntu. I fire it up, and EVERYTHING JUST FREAKING WORKS. Well, almost everything. I couldn't use my mouse 4 and 5 buttons nor disable tapclick on my laptop's touchpad nor get 3d acceleration to work with games like Tuxracer, but I was willing to live with minor crap like that until I could work out a solution--the important thing was, my computer was not horribly crippled--it FUNCTIONAL right out of the box, and so I had could afford to tinker with the details whenever I got around to them.

This is, of course, completely anecdotal but I've heard very similar stories from tons of other Ubuntu converts. I'm sure that distros like FC and MEPIS and Mandriva are AWESOME when they work properly; I'm sure that, when they actually WORKED out of the box, they offered a wonderful assortment of handy configuration GUIs and were just as functional as Ubuntu, but I would hazzard a guess that they simply were not as reliably functional out of the box, no tinkering and troubleshooting required. And I'm sure there are Ubuntu horror stories as well, but I think that the difference is in the probabilities--Ubuntu simply had a much better chance of actually WORKING for the non-expert user.

And given the open source nature of Linux, I'm sure that the other distros are catching up rapidly. Recently I've tried a few others, and they seemed to work nearly flawlessly, so perhaps Ubuntu doesn't have anything other than momentum going for it now. But really, in the OS world, that's all you need--just look at Windows, for fuck's sake.

So yeah, I'm sure Mandriva is great and all, but it had it's chance with me already, and it failed miserably. Why should I switch when I've already got a distro as complete and polished as Ubuntu 6.06? I'm not being confrontational here; it's a genuine question--what can Mandriva give me that Ubuntu can't?