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).

Re:Bloated

[Svartalf]

And to list what works 100% on all systems...

Not everything in the past has worked right (There's a reason I'm using FC5 or Ubuntu
right at the moment for my main systems...)- their SQA has left quite a bit to be
desired in the past. To be sure, 2006-1 was probably one of their best iterations;
but like before in the past, things like PCMCIA not working 100% of the time on 100%
of the platforms just mar the whole experience. Oh, I'll continue to be a member and
install on part of my platforms, but that's because I'm needing it for testing purposes.
Unless it really shows up nice and stable, it's not going on everything.

Mandriva/Ubuntu.

[haeger]

I recently tested Mandriva (LiveCD) on my KUbuntu-box. I must say that I'm very impressed with how polished Mandriva is. KUbuntu isn't bad, far from it but Mandriva is just better. Atleast the latest version. Just like KUbuntu everything just works but there is a consistensy in Mandriva that I don't see in KUbuntu. I really recommend everyone to take Mandriva for a testdrive. It's really impressive. I was going to switch my old Mandriva2006-box to KUbuntu but seeing this new version I don't think I will. I'll just do the normal upgrade-dance and all will be well.
One thing that annoys me though is the high price for the retail version. A silver membership will be more expensive than Vista in just 2-3 years. I think.

I might have to re-evaluate running KUbuntu on my laptop. I do however remember that there was something that annoyed me so much about the packages in Mandriva that I just had to switch. I think it was the fact that new packages came to the distribution at such a slow pace.

.haeger

I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu

[Yahma]

This will probably get modded down as flamebait, but honestly I prefer SUSE over Mandriva (Mandrake). I have tried Mandrake many times over the past few years, and even joined their "Mandrake Club" a few years back when they were on the brink of Bankruptcy to help them out; however, I have always felt that their Distro was never QA'ed as well as SUSE or Redhat for that matter. When you fire up the latest SUSE, you tell you have a professionally QA'ed product, as everything works out of the box. With Mandriva on the other hand, everything looks great on paper. They always have some of the latest packages, and include alot of the new technology; however, there are always a few things that dont work well with my system after I install it. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've even had trouble installing a new release of Mandriva.

Now I have nothing against Mandriva, and I like urmpi, but I think I may pass on this release, or try it out on a Virtual machine first before getting rid of my SUSE and Fedora boxes.... Now there's a thought..

Yahma
Browse the web safely, use Firefox [getfirefox.com] and an Anonymous Web Proxy [blastproxy.com] to avoid spyware and viruses.

Re:Why the stock 2.4 kernel!?!?

[AdamWill]

Er, what? The kernel is 2.6.17. There isn't even a 2.4 kernel in the distro any more (we still had a legacy one in 2006).

No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of use.

[IpSo_]

In my opinion Mandriva still takes the cake as far as distro ease of use is concerned. The installer is dead simple (yet has an advanced mode) but the most important part is once you get it installed, it has the most complete set of utilities to configure and maintain your system which are accessible from a single "control panel". Everything from one click network printer discovery, to setting up TV cards/scanners, to firewall configuration.

Sure some of the other distros are just starting to catch up now, they usually have a hodge-podge of utilties that work similar to the Mandriva ones, but few have a consistent interface and you usually need to know what they are called before you know what to click on, they aren't all located in one easy to find place. If you want a distro your mom can install and use, this is about as close as it comes currently.

Here is the list of just some of the custom utilties Mandriva (Mandrake) offers for configuring your system:

lsnetdrake,menudrake,drakbug,mandrakegalaxy.real,d rakconf,drakhelp,localedrake,drakoo,draklocale,man drakegalaxy,packdrake,userdrake,lspcidrake,diskdra ke,mousedrake,drakkeyboard,drakhelp_inst,drakconne ct,drakconsole,drakupdate_fstab,drakTermServ,drakn et_monitor,drakscanner,drakedm,drakids,draklog,dra knfs,drakx11,draksec,drakups,drakxtv,drakfirstboot ,drakconf.real,drakbackup,drakauth,drakboot,drakcl ub,drakconf,drakdisk,drakfont,drakperm,drakroam,dr akuser,drakautoinst,drakgw,keyboarddrake,drakonlin e,drakfirewall,draksplash,drakhardware,draksambash are,scannerdrake,drakxservices,logdrake,adduserdra ke,drakclock,drakhosts,harddrake2,drakmouse,drakpr oxy,draksound,drakxconf,userdrake,XFdrake,printerd rake,drakbug_report,drakprinter

Re:Simple XGL Setup?

[RobertLTux]

the one thing you want to do is pick up a silver membership if you have hardware that needs nongpl drivers (ati and Nvidia chips) benefits:

1 feeds a small group of monkeys that help a lot (HI ADAM)
2 offical club benefits
3 updates that won't (the monkeys hope) trash your system

Questions for those who've used it

[jiawen]

Here's what I'd like to know:

• How close does it get to solving the dependency hell problem? This is probably my biggest single problem with Mandriva.
• How's Menudrake? That's one of my other big headaches with Mandriva. How easily can you modify the main menu now?
• Where can I find a complete list of packages included? I have some very specific wants that the Mandriva website doesn't discuss.
• Are the problems with SCIM resolved? A lot of people just basically unplugged it, but I have to use it because I use Chinese input a lot. Several applications simply wouldn't start because of problems with SCIM, leading to hacks that ended up plopping core dumps on my desktop every time I started them.
• How does the new Cedega thing work? Is it just a one-month subscription, or a one-time version of the software or something? It seems like it has to be restricted somehow.

Re:Bloated

[scott_karana]

In any modern Linux distribution (and even most antiquated ones) ther is no need to worry about downloading tarballs or compiling.
It's just a matter of how many packages are installed by default, and I respect the fact that you like having lots of 'em to choose from.
I'm just being a pedant about packaging systems for Linux is all.

When it works.

[pavon]

My experiance with setting up hardware using the Mandrake control panel a couple years ago, was that when it worked it was easy as cake, but if it didn't you were worse off then having nothing. For example, I was attempting to setup a hauppauge TV tuner card, which I knew was supported in linux. The rest of the install so far had been a snap and it recognized all my hardware with no problems. So I run the TV tuner card setup from the control panel, it pops up a dialog box saying it is setting up my card then the dialog box closes. No success or error indication, just closes. I try to use the tuner and get nothing. So I open up the TV tuner script to see what was going on. All it did was issue a bunch of shell commands, without checking the return value, without verifying that anything worked, or providing any feedback to the user - just shoot out a bunch of command and hope it works. Because I had no idea how far it got in the script before failing I had no idea what state my system or config files were in. I looked at other configuration scripts and found some (although not all) of them to be just as bad.

I was not impressed. Configuration utilites should always verify that the changes they make work, and if not revert the system to the state it was in before they were run. They should always inform the user of the success/failure of the operation, and preferably provide enough information to let the user know how to procede - Run such and such program to test your new hardware, this is not a supported card, unexpected error, etc. Hopefully, this has been improved upon since I last used Mandriva.

Re:Bloated

[Shawn is an Asshole]

It's a pain in the ass to have to swap multiple CDs during an install. Especially when you get to #4 and the drive doesn't want to read a file off of it.

Ubuntu has the right idea on this. The install media is a single CD that contains a usable desktop. Everything else can then be installed over apt (though they really need to make a n00b-friendly alternative to Synaptic). If you want a specific desktop, download the correct CD for it. Ie, Gnome (Ubuntu), KDE (Kubuntu), or XFCE (Xubuntu).

Laugh it up

[Kadin2048]

Make fun all you want, but I've said multiple times that the way Apple does peripheral hardware ought to be a model for Linux and any other non-Windows OS.

Back before I just threw in the towel and started drilling holes in my walls, I would have killed a man for a "Linux 802.11 Card." When you want a wireless card for your Mac, you go into a store, and you buy it. Note that I said "it," not "one." Because there's only one. (Okay, at some points there have been multiple, i.e. Airport vs. Airport Extreme, but most computers could only take one or the other.) Yeah, it costs more, but there's no messing around with anything.

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. I think you'd move product -- too often do you get recommendations for a product that works well, only to find that it's been discontinued or only sold in some other country, or it's nearly impossible to tell which products use it. (This was my experience finding Prism-based WL cards.)

Laugh all you want, but "choice" isn't always good, particularly when it means just having a high signal/noise ratio. Having one and only one hardware configuration available is better than having a thousand hardware configurations available, if only one or two of them works perfectly. In the first case, you have a 100% chance of getting the 'good' config, in the latter, you might as well buy Lotto tickets.

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[RAMMS+EIN]

``And if apt was the winner of the Linux desktop 'wars', why didn't Debian win sometime in 1999?''

Plenty of things could be mentioned here.

  - Debian was doing a lot less marketing than certain other distros
  - People were still in the mindset that Linux == Red Hat
  - Many people refused to use Debian, because it had no graphical installer
  - Debian stable tends to be far away from cutting edge, and "unstable" sounds scary
  - Actually, _didn't_ Debian win around 1999? Do you have distro popularity statistics for that time?

Re:Ubuntu has already won

[technoid_]

I second that. While at Ohio Linux Fest this weekend I was lucky enough to attend Ted Haeger's talk on "Desktop Innovation at Novell". I am excited about Linux on the desktop again. I already use Linux as my desktop OS, but it just seemed kinda blah until seeing Ted's presentation. The work that Novell is putting into SLED and openSUSE is really cool, and they are giving back to the community at the same time (beagle and f-spot for example). While Ubuntu is nice, don't count Novell out when it comes to desktop linux.

For more info check out Ted's blog http://reverendted.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com] and his podcast http://www.novell.com/openaudio/ [novell.com].

Disclaimer: I do not have any association to Novell or Ted, other than he is a kewl guy to talk to and knows his stuff.

Re:Laugh it up

[lordofthechia]

Maybe manufacturers could be convinced to submit their hardware for linux testing and award them a logo they could attach (or imprint) on their product to demonstrate Linux compatibility... Just a though and sure most may not care but it could be a start.

Or we could draft up a generic letter to some manufacturers statings something along the lines of:

"Your (insert product here) has met or exceeded criteria to be considered ready for linux thanks to (community/oem drivers). As such please feel free to attach this logo to your packaging for (said product) as a means for your Linux using customers to identify this useful feature!"

Thoughts?

Linux is Linux, Regardless of Distro

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really get into the distro wars, because lets be honest. Linux is Linux regardless of distro. If you really know your Linux, it doesn't matter what distro you run. It's all the same code, it's all the same applications.

That aside, I constantly try out the top distros, and Mandriva seems to work the best out of the box. For example:

In Mandriva, DVD/Movie players work. (Kaffeine, Totem, Mplayer, Xine) If you want to play encrypted DVD's, all you have to do is compile and install libdvdcss. From download to install, libdvdcss takes, at most, five minutes. SUSE's DVD players won't out of the box with libdvdcss. Ubuntu only seems to play open source codecs out of the box.

If you buy Mandriva, the 3D video drivers work at install. If you buy SUSE, you have to download the drivers after install. Then they still wouldn't work. This happened on both my 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

Mandriva comes with so many apps, you can try them all out without wasting a ton of time downloading and compiling. My personal experience has been that if you want to spend more time getting things down, and less time installing/configing up you computer, Mandriva is the what you want. If you want to install all your apps and drivers individually by hand, you can just run that other operating system from the Northwest! ;-)