Mandriva Linux 2006 Released

mhrivnak writes "Today, Mandriva Linux 2006 was released to Club members, and the tree will be publicly available on October 13. New features include the Kat Desktop Search Environment, an interactive firewall, and enhanced wifi support with Mandriva being the only Linux distribution certified for Centrino hardware. The integration of technology from Conectiva and Lycoris has led to improved installation (in 40+ languages), better package management, and quicker boot time."

Comments

You mean released today, right?

[ReformedExCon]

After all, it is just Linux, so it should be covered by the GPL. Any "club members" who want to can upload a torrent.

Or is there some aspects of the system that aren't GPL and can't be uploaded?

Re:You mean released today, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont understand this certified shit. Dont they use the same kernel as everybody else or the they have special modules made from intel??

Re:You mean released today, right?

[soikoban]

Certifications usually cost money. No money == no certification.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

The images available to silver and above members contain proprietary programs like Sun's Java, drivers, Flash and other Adobe Acrobats, which are free as beer but not as speech, and cannot be legally redistributed.
So it is legal to redistribute the first 4 CDs, but not the whole shebang.

I guess the distributions that get away with 'freely' distributing those are simply low-profile enough to not fear the lawyers (and yes, PCLinux OS or Buffalo Linux for example are low-profile, commercially speaking).

Re:You mean released today, right?

[timbo234]

Or is there some aspects of the system that aren't GPL and can't be uploaded?

Yep. The powerpack versions (either the full DVD or 7 CD set) contain closed-source software and aren't redistrutable. The 4CD version (1 more than the publicly available download version) that's available to the lowest level of club membership should be alright though.

As always with Mandrake all the software available in the powerpack, except the closed-source stuff, and more is available through the mirrors listed at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

Re:You mean released today, right?

[imr]

The CDs available to standard club membres now countains the proprietary drivers. It's not equivalent to the download edition that should hit the mirrors in 2 weeks.
The standard members complained that they didnt get much for their 60$/ and have been listened to.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[ammoQ]

I can't imagine why Sun, Realmedia or Adobe would care enough to send lawyers after people "pirating" Java, Flashplayer or Adobe Reader,
since all this applications are available for free download anyway.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[prr56]

Ohh, you mean like on my Gentoo install I just can't "emerge nvidia-kernel" for free but have to pay to get the same as on Mancrap? No thanks, sparky. I'll never understand Mandrake-Mandrivel's approach to this issue. I used to be a Silver Club member when they were on the brink of fiscal death, and I thought that I would reap some benefit from it, but alas I could get the same everywhere else. I think this is just a scheme to pimp money from the users. Your OP's may vary, but mine don't.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[arivanov]

Intel will not allow you to use Centrino BRANDING if you cannot deliver the battery life and WiFi features promissed by Intel Marketing in the Centrino marketing campaign shots. This essentially means that you cannot mention the name Centrino in any of your promotional literature, adverts and compliance statements.

In order to comply with this spec (and use the name)you must have a system that is capable to use runtime frequency alteration and do it effectively enough to deliver the battery life promissed for an average load. No linux kernel prior to 2.6.7 can do it. 2.6.9-2.6.11 with a correctly configured cpufreqd gets close, but not quite enough. If you want to really do it you need to have the on-demand CPUfreq kernel policy manager working. Which means IIRC 2.6.12+ or a heavy dose of backported patches. Further to that you have to have Intel wifi drivers and improvements to the 802.11 stack which are not mainline kernel yet.

There are also a few other conditions, but these are the important ones.

Frankly, the only reason to get through all this idiocy is if there is a laptop manufacturer there waiting to start shipping Linux as an option on their laptops. Wonder who this is...

Re:You mean released today, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Gentoo case is a bit special, as Gentoo does not distribute the JVM or drivers themselves, only 'recipes' to download them from the distributor's site.

And, to be honest, Gentoo would also qualify for my "low-profile" criteria (on the commercial level, which is all that matters to Sun and their ilk).

You are always perfectly free to add any such proprietary stuff on a Mandriva system yourself, which is in essence what you are doing on Gentoo anyway, they are just not allowed to redistribute it freely. Club members are a limited and controlled population, and Mandriva probably has to report on the number of downloads.

If you like Gentoo, good for you.
But please keep the Mandriva criticism for their own goof-ups, not for respecting other's licenses.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[opkool]

Frankly, the only reason to get through all this idiocy is if there is a laptop manufacturer there waiting to start shipping Linux as an option on their laptops. Wonder who this is...

Mandriva already has a deal with Dell to sell Laptops with Mandriva pre-installed. http://www.mandriva.com/company/press/pr?n=/pr/pro ducts/2567

Regards

Re:You mean released today, right?

[paxmark1]

They listened to this paying customer way too late and not very well.

KUBUNTU

Re:You mean released today, right?

[paxmark1]

Well, one paying customer was not listened to very well.

Their bittorrent to Canada was slow as molasses in Winnipeg in January (as opposed to KUbuntu whose bittorrent was almost 100 times faster. The gui find did not work on two different machines on 10. 0 and 10.1 regular and official. When I asked questions how to fix it I got - "why don't you do it via command line"

I do a lot by command line - but the snotty attitude really rankled.

If you want to waste $66 (USD no less) on Mandriva - go ahead. I was not impressed two days ago with the email from Mandriva saying to go to a web site that I thought was seriously half baked. There were gaping holes you could drive a Zamboni through.

They seem so all over the map with what they want to do (OHH we are going to set up a coding facility in Brazil). etc., etc. that my head swivels to near whiplash just reading their press releases.

I really do not miss urpmi. I really do not miss rpm. Granted, it is a little more work to go to the web sites of Adobe, Java, etc, to get the .bin 's and install, but I really do like apt-get. It is so slick.

So, I did like Mandrake for two years. It seemed the best of class to me, someone who doesn't mind the command line at times, someone who likes to sometimes run IceWm to keep a snappier system, and someone who is trying to show people from all over the planet how to run linux (I am house leader for a L'Arche house - I have shown people from 10 countries and still counting - all continents but Antarctica) how to use Linux instead. But damnit - when the find gui doesn't work all of a sudden when they hit 10.0 and I can't get support to fix for $60 - f. o . a. d.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[imr]

Their bittorrent to Canada was slow as molasses in Winnipeg in January (as opposed to KUbuntu whose bittorrent was almost 100 times faster. The gui find did not work on two different machines on 10. 0 and 10.1 regular and official.
I see you posted the same comment about the speed of bittorrent some months ago.
Did you get the same speed with this release?

What is the gui find?

Re:You mean released today, right?

[GnarlyNome]

Got it ..and it sucks
going back to 10.2

Re:You mean released today, right?

[paxmark1]

No, I am aluminum, a non paying member for three weeks now. I cannot bittorrent via Mandrake anymore.

Gui find would be how I would describe going to the "Start" button on the bottom left in KDE and then clicking the "Find Files / Folders" which is just above Help. I kept asking, and got no answers.

I can not expect newbies from all over the world (at the time from Scotland, Korea, Kenya and Australia at that house)to be able utilize the command line and locate.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[imr]

Every thing that is in the panel is configured by right clicking on it and choosing configure panel.
Those alternative menus are configured there also.

The alternative menus have been removed by default because there is a crash of the panel when exiting KDE.
This crash is very difficult to find, they have been trying for weeks to pinpoint it, but no luck. It happen only to certain users, certain users have removed it by removing the alternative menus. To some users it is coming anyway, other users have removed it by creating a new ~/.kde.
They made this because it was the best way to remove the problem for 95% of those who would have got it without asking htem to go through difficult manipulations. And they documented it in the errata or release notes.
I found all this info in the forum, in the errata or release notes and in cooker.

Re:You mean released today, right?

[paxmark1]

the point is, I asked for help on it more than once.

That is the only thing that I asked for help on.

I receved no help.

For $60 USD (I have to convert my CD$ to USd$ for my us credit cards) I expect one answer to a question and fast bittorrent.

So, it was listed somewhere in errata, big whoop!

I run a house for the mentally challenged. There are times when medical issues surrounding the people I care for impact me severely, and it sucks up a lot of time.

The people involved with Mandrake did not give me the support I needed to continue with Mandrake. I want to say that it is a much, much better wiki and support and forums with Ubuntu. I get no flames for running KDE Kubuntu there - I am very impressed with that.

Frankly, Mandrake did not give me good enough support. Ubuntu does

And frankly - if you compare the jumbled mess that is Mandriva's web sit at this time to Ubuntu's or Debians - what would you choose based on that. There are huge gaping holes of things under construction. One might think that with a web site poorly integrated like that - what is the integration of the overall software.

I do appreciate hearing about how to click and configure the menus in KDE.

peace, mark

Re:You mean released today, right?

[imr]

I think the most damaging thing to the linux comunity right now is distro wars. It gives a false impression of "this" linux being good and "that" linux being bad.
Many users who would consider to switch are repelled by such distro wars, and those who do the big jump discover with time that many of the problems are structural and are to be found across every distros. They are then discouraged.
Good luck in your trip.

You didnt answer my question about when you used the torrents.

Yawn...

[Anonymous Coward]

This time of morning... if it doesn't make coffee, I don't want to know about it.

KAT

[Anonymous Coward]

"Kat is similar to the Windows application Google Desktop Search and the Mac OSX utility Spotlight. It is completely written in C++, using Qt3, KDE and KIO libraries." Lets see how it fares...

Re:KAT

[RiotXIX]

Yeah, I just read this about KAT, and had a look at the google desktop search bar thing (I don't use it). Could someone please fill me in - do either of these two tools offer any additional functionality over grep, find/locate?

Re:KAT

[Anonymous Coward]

KAT is similar to Google Desktop Search -- it needs to build a huge database before being able to search -- and that takes time and HD space. (It takes multiple hours on my AMD64 to index my 20GB Home directory). After indexing however, Kat's pretty instantaneous to search (it takes a few seconds to search for a phrase inside my home directory -- not bad at all! That's the advantage over grep/find/locate, not to mention that these tools can't search inside PDF's or ODT/SXW's without a struggle!

Compared to Beagle, I have to rank it below. Beagle searches virtually instantaneously with the help of Extended Attributes, with no need for a giant search index.

Re:KAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed (always instant) and searching in binary files whose format grep does not understand (such as PDFs).

Re:KAT

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to refute this. Beagle does not use extended attributes for searching. It uses a (possibly equally large) lucene repository for that.
Beagle, like Kat, uses bxtended attributes for remembering what files have already been indexed to avoid to reindex them.

Damn, Linux is fast

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even 2006 and Linux is already there.

Re:Damn, Linux is fast

[Al_Lapalme]

I never understood why cars are like that...

Re:Damn, Linux is fast

[Anonymous Coward]

So that the dealers can offload their existing inventories of last years model as a brand new 2005! Right now! Yes! Come in! We've got balloons!

You can say what you want

[Anonymous Coward]

But Mandriva is still the easiest Lunix distros, and it comes with everything most people would need. They're one of the few distros I'd raise a glass to.

some previous articles

[inglishs]

Dell offers Linux laptop in France
Features in the last RC
Reviews of 2005: Playreaction vnunet
Distrowatch

Interactive firewall ?

[HawkingMattress]

Knock knock, can i enter ?
I'm sorry sir, but i've been charged to disallow any bad guy to enter this particular port 25.
Uh bad news, but i have a very important message to send my grandma, and couldn't find any open relay to send it to her. it's a matter of life and death.
mmmmmm i see, since i'm not in a bad mood i'll let you pass this time but %@dùù%ù^$
Broadcast message from root (pts/6) :
The system is going down for system halt NOW!

Great day for linux

[darteaga]

With the release of the big three* user oriented linux distros: SUSE 10.0, Mandriva 2006 and the RC of Ubuntu 5.10.

(*) No flame intended.

Re:Great day for linux

[thebdj]

Actually by DistroWatch the big three in order are: Ubuntu, Mandriva and Fedora Core. I personally run FC3 on my laptop, but think I will switch to Mandriva once this goes public. I've been looking for some excuse to change and it has been a while since I ran Mandrake/Mandriva.

Re:Great day for linux

[a.different.perspect]

Actually, according to DistroWatch, the top ten distributions are:

1 Ubuntu 2724
2 Mandriva 1739
3 SUSE 1415
4 Fedora 1268
5 MEPIS 1115
6 KNOPPIX 931
7 Debian 888
8 Damn Small 679
9 Gentoo 612
10 Slackware 597

Perhaps my counting skilz are not as honed as yours. Really, though, DistroWatch visitors are notoriously fickle, and the rankings for the distributions in #2-4 usually depend on how long ago their last release was. Expect to see Mandriva's numbers soar shortly, and Fedora's to decline further, at least until FC5.

Re:Great day for linux

[thebdj]

No, I just use 12 month numbers because it evens out the jumps that occur when a new version of a distro releases. Granted on the 12 month Suse and FC are close anyway.

Re:Great day for linux

[BrookHarty]

I see Ubuntu is number 1, but I dont see many slashdot articles or much news on it. I guess its debian based, but does anyone have any info about this distro? What makes it so popular?

Re:Great day for linux

[opkool]

Based in my experiences with Debian/Ubuntu users:

IMHO it is because Debian users, so used to a last-century distribution , are now excited to see a Debian with the "new stuff" that , say, the same "new stuff" Mandrake/Mandriva (and RedHat, SuSE, Conectiva) users have been using since the time of MDK 8.2:

GUI installation
Excellent hardware support
GUI wizards
Ready to use as a desktop

And, of course, because Ubuntu is Debian, so it is 1337 H4X0R Linux, UberLinux and the only GPL Linux.

You might not like my comment. Well, guess what, this is a recopilation of all my experiences with Ubuntu and Ubuntu users.

There are lots of Debian-fan-boys that think "only Debian is Kosher" and ".deb ais the only package without dependency hell".

Guess what?

Mandriva is GPL, ships about the same number of packages (main, contrib, jpackage, plf-free) than Debian. AND urpmi is as good (or better) than apt-get. And .deb nor .rpm have nothing to do with dependency hell or heaven.

Cheers

rsbac

[Anonymous Coward]

it has rsbac :)
http://www.rsbac.org/

Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[deno]

I'm currently downloading the M2006, and I wonder how will it work with SP8000 mini-ITX motherboard.

It took me a while to decide upon actually buying such a slow system, but I presume it will be fast enough for a job at hand, which is: "quietly sit in my living room, act as a web, DynDNS, login and file server for my local network, and do the multimedia stuff when needed (mp3, TV, DVDs and DivX).

The problem is that VIA doesn't really play nicely with Linux, and one had to do quite a lot of work on his own in the past before getting a reasonably well working system. Wonder how much work has been done in this direction (if any) by Mandriva folks since 2005LE?

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[Nailer]

The problem is that VIA doesn't really play nicely with Linux, and one had to do quite a lot of work on his own in the past before getting a reasonably well working system.

Conversely, how much work have the VIA guys done?
It's their responsibility to write, or pay someone to write, their drivers. If you find them either non-existant or lacking, vote with your dollars.

Yes, this isn't an answer to your question, and no, I don't have one. Just making a point, hope you don't mind.

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[imr]

Are you THE deno from mandrake's club of old days?

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[imr]

Well, there is a lot done by via toward linux and open source.
More than other at least.

There are drivers that are released, some are even free and concern their graphic adapters.
I think this is part of one of their strategy which is to take a big part of the asian market where there is a demand for low cost low end solutions.
They are also very interrested in low energy solutions for the same reasons.

I kinda think they are wiser than some other who rely on selling high end more power hungry closed solutions in a world where oil price and therefore electricity prices are going to rise.

I go weekly there:
http://www.viaarena.com/
to find infos about this very interresting company. They even have tutorials for installing their new drivers on Mandriva and Fedora over there.

Nope, I don't have shares or anything.

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[zogger]

I've never tried it, but Beatrix linux claims to be originally optimized for Via mini-itx mobos/cpus.

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[SCHecklerX]

Huh? Doesn't play nicely how? I'm using VIA PD10000's for linux firewalls all over the place where I work (including as branch office IPSec gateways). They work flawlessly. Granted, that isn't desktop use (no video), but for what I am using them for they can't be beat. And this is on basically a stock Redhat 8 distro.

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[m50d]

The problem is that VIA doesn't really play nicely with Linux,

They play a lot better than most I've seen. Helpful on the driver side as I understand, and I was pleasantly surprised to see source linux drivers on the CD with my last via board. And if your board has hardware mpeg2 they produce a modified xine to utilize them, and it's on sourceforge.

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[deno]

yup. Which kind of explains why I prefer using mdk instead of epios. :-)

Re:Mandriva 2006 on Mini ITX?

[imr]

Well, I saw the pictures on your site and was very glad to see that everything is turning all right for you.
Do you go back to the club sometime?
I'm sure there are a lot of people over there who have a nice memory of you, like me.

Its too soon.

[Zombie Ryushu]

Its too soon. This version of Mandriva still has Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6, with backported patches. I would have waited until Christmas. I would have waited to refine some more. I think they moved too fast on this. I think that major work should have been done on Heimdal Kerberos Support. Because better LDAP backend support for Kerberos is critical to doing thinngs like Linux's "Almost but not quite" Active Directory.

Re:Its too soon.

[timbo234]

This version of Mandriva still has Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6, with backported patches.

Which is exactly the same as having 1.0.7 AFAICT. They freeze the version number and backport so they can keep a consistent updates policy.

Re:Its too soon.

[buchanmilne]

This version of Mandriva still has Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6

Why are version numbers important? Do you check the version number of every single package you use, and always update it even if it is one point release behind?

Realise that a distribution has a release schedule, and usually that involves imposing a version freeze, to prevent new bugs creeping into an otherwise well-understood release (with it's known bugs that must still be fixed etc). Regressions have occured in Firefox releases ... so there is no reason Firefox should be exempt (though the Firefox team seems to believe all linux distros should treat Firefox differently to the other 5000 packages they ship).

I think that major work should have been done on Heimdal Kerberos Support

So do I, but there are more important issues. And, since we don't build any packages against the heimdal libraries at present ... it's easy enough to provide updated packages for the distro later.

Because better LDAP backend support for Kerberos is critical to doing thinngs like Linux's "Almost but not quite" Active Directory.

Well, part of that requires a stable, supported LDAP server, which was one of those more important issues. The OpenLDAP packages we ship are quite decent, and all packages were rebuilt against the new major version, plus we are committed to shipping updates as 2.3.x matures (although most users of 2.3.x seem to find it more stable than 2.2.x already).

Of course, real "Active Directory" features will come with samba4, which won't be available any time this year.

So, delaying the release for one aspect would not compare to the commercial comittments Mandriva has to shipping this release in time for stocking shelves ahead of the festive season.

But, the work in preparation for samba4 will continue, and as always, packages for older releases will be made available as well.

Re:Its too soon.

[FullCircle]

I agree with the Firefox team.

Firefox is too much of a high-profile application and web browers are an easily hit target. IMHO, Apache and SSH among others, should be treated similarly. The risk factor is too high not to give them special attention.

The fact that the team wants everyone to keep Firefox updated is just quality control and looking out for the end user. They may have regressions occasionally, but they are trying and it works more often than not.

Re:Its too soon.

[Rudeboy777]

AFAYCT, yes but not to browser exploit writers. 1.06 contains a buffer overflow vulnerability and it should not have been shipped this way in a major distro release with the patched version available for at least 2 weeks now. Like it or not, many Linux users don't pay a lot of attention to security and may not set up automatic updates of their packages once they have 2006 installed. Shame on Mandriva for letting that slide on one of the most important packages in ANY distro these days. For more info see this Slashdot link

Re:Its too soon.

[dchamp]

So, you want them to hold up their release for one package out of thousands? If they (or any other distro) followed this strategy, they'd never be able to release anything.
As someone already stated, Mandriva addresses these security issues with backports. If you can't be bothered to do security updates, then you *deserve* to be hacked.

Re:Its too soon.

[deno]

Hi Buchan,

I've used the LDAP+kerberos at home for a while now, and what I missed the most is some friendly front-end that will simply do the user/group/pass/etc. managment for me with LDAP&kerberus in the back.

Another thing would be kerberized services, such as IMAP, ssh, NFS...

Sure, it all can be done, but one year ago it was a general PITA and DYS all the way. Have things changed in a meantime?

For me it just does not feel right to think that samba will soon be the simplest way to get a secure linux-only SOHO. :-(

Re:Its too soon.

[Rudeboy777]

This isn't just one out of thousands, it's one of perhaps a dozen or so that have a greater need than any other to ship without security holes (others might include the kernel, openSSH, samba, cups, bind, sendmail, ...). I guess we have a difference of opinion, but there was a lot of press from the security community given to that firefox vulnerability in late September.

Re:Its too soon.

[fcrozat]

Guess what. mozilla-firefox-1.0.6-15mdk shipped in Mandriva Linux 2006 contains ALL the security fixes from Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7. Next time, check the facts. Shame on you. Oh, and btw, we released a new security fix for Firefox yesterday, although Mozilla.org had not released a fixed Firefox yet.

Re:Its too soon.

[buchanmilne]

Yep ... this is still the issue, but it is something that can probably now be addressed more easily (since OL2.3 and back-config).

In the end, it just requires someone to write such a tool ...

I hope to start getting somewhere with something like this ... if I have time.

They could have been more specific

[bogaboga]

When it comes to a product,

- that I believe has been tested,

- is so popular,

- is expected to improve,

- has acquired other distros in order to improve,

- is regarded as one of the simplest distros,

Mandriva could afford to be more specific especially on boot times. Heck, the developers know how long it takes this new distro to boot. So they could have been more specific.

Re:They could have been more specific

[pterjan]

Err the developpers don't know how much time it will spend to boot on your machine with your set of services activated...
Some examples on tuxmachines for the RC1 http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/2551 vs http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/2569

AMD 2800+, kt400 mb, 512mb 333ddr ram, and a NVIDIA 6800.

        * Boots: 20 seconds
        * KDE: 12 seconds
        * OpenOffice: 4 seconds
        * Mozilla: 3 seconds
        * Shutdown: 15 seconds

Compared to opensuse on the same machine :

        * Boot up: 26 seconds
        * KDE: 22 seconds
        * OpenOffice: 7 seconds
        * Firefox: 3 seconds (not counting loading the default Novell webpage)
        * Shutdown: 20 seconds

Re:They could have been more specific

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Why is everybody obessed with boot/shutdown times on Linux boxes? Thought the whole point of Linux was to avoid reboots.

Re:They could have been more specific

[Anonymous Coward]

you have a good point, people like myself and some other people I know do not shut down computers and don't mind slightly higher power bill. Other people have a mindset that they need to shut down the computer for one reason or another.
For example, my laptop has a dead battery so I have to shut it down as opposed to hibernating for a week or so in suspend to ram. In this case I find boot time to be an important issue.
Best regards,

~omi

Re:They could have been more specific

[Yosho]

Actually, the point of Linux is to have a free (as in speech) operating system. Stability is just a useful feature. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who don't want to leave their computers turned on 24 hours a day.

who comes up with this names?

[AnonymousYellowBelly]

I really want the source code for the IA software that 'invents' this names for Linux distributions and every little piece of OS/GNU/libre software out there. What comes next?

- RTFA, an 'HTML' editor?
- CowboyNeat, a file duplicator?
- IMHO, a trolling tool for /. posters?

Just in case some OSS developer reads this post, use the following names for your next text editor: Tlaloc, Escuintle, Vivanderix or Parangaracutirimicuaro. Highly descriptive names, right?

Re:who comes up with this names?

[Al_Lapalme]

Vista?

Re:who comes up with this names?

[TubeSteak]

You might mock them, but there are companies whose sole job is to pick out names for stuff.
Naming Products Is No Game

Coming up with catchy product names is a lot harder than the layman might imagine, especially in this Global Age, when a word that might inspire admiration in one country can just as easily inspire red faces or unintended guffaws in another

Re:who comes up with this names?

[imr]

This was an inspired comment from TubeSteack.

Re:who comes up with this names?

[eibon]

That reminds of the time some car company (Honda, I think), decided to name a new model "Honda Fitta." Which, in my native language, translates to something like "Honda The Cunt."

Re:who comes up with this names?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, especially when names are trademarked and you can sued for using someone else's trademark. But "Mandriva"? Sounds like a kinky website for putting big, hairy men on 4-wheeled flatbed carts, steering them by grabbing their ears, accelerating by stepping on them with your high-heeled red stilletto heels yelling "Faster, faster!", and I don't even want to think about how you downshift.

Re:who comes up with this names?

[frn123]

Honda Fitta - "Small on the outside but large on the ... "

Re:who comes up with this names?

[LarsWestergren]

Yep, Honda. That's a good example. A friend also told me a counter-example, a Swedish headache medicine had to change name before launch in Thailand, as the name sounded something like "The stench of a fart" in Thai.

Re:who comes up with this names?

[hotdiggitydawg]

Likewise the "Mitsubishi Pajero"...

Re:who comes up with this names?

[Kelson]

Mandrake + Conectiva = Mandriva. Still not a fan of the name, but I'm just glad they chose it before they added Lycoris. Mandriva is weird enough. And it sounds like the name of an equatorial third-world country. "The Republic of Mandriva." Or maybe, given the way business types tend to look at FOSS, "The People's Republic of Mandriva."

Re:who comes up with this names?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still read it as Man Driva (think of Driver spoken with an accent). Almost sounds like the name of a gay porn DVD.

Re:who comes up with this names?

[jonadab]

> Just in case some OSS developer reads this post, use the following names for
> your next text editor: Tlaloc, Escuintle, Vivanderix or Parangaracutirimicuaro.
> Highly descriptive names, right?

The obvious problem with those names is, they are all easily pronounceable to the English-speaking tongue; even the last one is, once you break it into syllables: Par ang ar ac ut ir im ic u ar o. Instead, you should try words with a worse balance of consonants and vowels (preferably either no consonants at all, or else five or six consonants per vowel), more letters with high scrabble values, such as x and q, and, if at all possible, unusual capitalization anomolies. For instance, you could call the HTML editor "mRurmx", the file duplicator "oAEuilio", and the trolling tool "BrnqTju".

Or you could name them he, fd, and sdt. Or ghtmled, gfdup, and gtroll. Or xHTMLed, XFileDup, and XTroll. Or KWebEd, KDuplikator, and KTroller. Or gnoHTML, gnofileduper, and gnotroll. The problem with these naming schemes is that you have clearly categorized your program as belonging Unix, with the Gnu tool suite, with the X Window System, with KDE, or with Gnome, respectively. Similarly with WinHTML, WinDuplicator, and WinTroller, or with MacHTML, MacDuplicator, and MacTroller, or for that matter BeWebmaster, BeDouble, and BeTroll. You could attempt to be more platform-agnostic, open, and generic, by naming them things like OpenHTMLEditor, FileDuplicator, and OpenTroller, but then the names start sounding very verbose, and at that point you might as well make them OpenHTMLEditor.org, FileDuplicator.org, and OpenTroller.org, so that people know where to find them.

Indeed, if you're going to be *verbose*, you could give them names that're both descriptive *and* branded, e.g., Zotso HTML Editor, Vincto File Duplicator, or the Xpanta Smagoric Slashdot Troller. Then again, if you're going to do that, you could go with recursive acronyms: ZWE Web Editor, VFD File Duplicator, and the XSST Spantasmagoric Slashdot Troller. Then people can at least shorten it (ZWE, VFD, XSST) when they're trying to be more terse.

Oh, wait, you wanted a *good* name? Well, that's harder. Names like "Mandriva" have the advantage of being simple and clearly unique; they're not descriptive, but calling it "Desktop-Oriented Linux Distribution", besides sounding awefully generic, will end up getting shortened to DOLD, which sounds very dull.

Re:who comes up with this names?

[chawly]

Yelling "Faster, faster!" wont work by itself. You gotta change up when you get to maximum revolutions. Sorry about that. And changing down saves the brakes ....

improved wifi support?

[freak117]

What I really want to know is: Will my crappy D-Link Air DWL-520 Wireless Adapter(rev.E) be supported? It uses a Prism2.5 chipset that seems to confuse several distributions, including Ubuntu. I was using Mandrake and then Mandriva with functioning ethernet, but when I dropped my cable internet subscription a few months ago and started piggybacking on the neighbor's wifi, I could no longer use linux to get online. I am not a linux guru, but I can edit config files and such. I tried some 3rd party drivers but I had no luck. Getting this piece of hardware to work is over my head.

I'd love it to just work out of the box.

(The neighbors are cool with sharing their bandwidth.)

---------- My blog: Both of Us http://jspjbbphilly.blogspot.com/

Re:improved wifi support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love it to just work out of the box.

You are barking at the wrong tree. Blame the HW vendors...

Re:improved wifi support?

[ozmanjusri]

Not sure if you're trolling of not, but my DWL 520 works out of the box with both Suse 10 RC1 and Knoppix 3.9. If you're for real, try here http://www.linux-wlan.org/ for drivers and help.

Re:improved wifi support?

[Anonymous Coward]

That card is a royal pain to get working, but I was (partially) successful with Mandrake 10.0. I purchased it because one of the earlier revisions was listed as working with linux, and I neglected to check exactly which one I was getting. The card requires at least part of its firmware to be uploaded to it at boot / initialization time to be detected and set up properly. I don't remember the full procedure, as it was over a year ago that I did it, but here are a few hints to get you started. I used the hostap drivers, with the hostap_fw_load script. Check this howto for some helpful info. It looks similar to what I did to get it working. It was still a bit buggy, though, and worked only two out of every three boots. Good luck.

Re:improved wifi support?

[jayloden]

I had the exact same model and revision number card. I ended up buying a card that's supported without any hassle, but I did at one point get the DWL-520 working. I don't remember the specifics on it, but the card will most likely never work out of the box on any distro, because it requires some firmware from the Windows software. You have to get the firmware from the Windows installer, load the firmware, load the driver, and then it works. It's highly unlikely that that particular revision/chipset of the DWL-520 will work out of the box on any Linux distribution.

I suggest you go to ebay, spend 20 bucks, and pick up a cheap wireless card that works without any hassle. For example, the Netgear MA311 works just fine. The only configuration I've ever had to do with the Netgear since I got one was the WEP key. Every distro I've tried, including Live CDs, works out of the box.

Linux has pretty decent hardware support overall, but part of using Linux is recognizing that if the hardware vendor is totally unsupportive, you are better off choosing something from a different vendor that you *know* will work under Linux. Either that, or get used to be frustrated and spending a lot of your time hacking things to get them to work.

Re:improved wifi support?

[6*7]

He could be for real, the "problem" with Prism wireless cards is that there are (atleast) 3 drivers that may work:
-orinocco
-wlan-ng
-hostap

While the oriniocco dirver is included with the kernel I have never seen in working on any of my cards but for some silly reason the pcmcia tools set it as default for both my Asus wl-110 and Edimax ew-7102pc.

I can't remember ever have used wlan-ng after finding out that the hostap driver existed. Unless the GP's card is non standard he should do a search for hostap.

Elitism

[Anonymous Coward]

"Today, Mandriva Linux 2006 was released to Club members..."

Mandriva: We treat Linux like a snobby nightclub.

That's okay though, at least it'll protect us "normies" from winding up with fried disc drives when yet another fatal flaw is discovered in their distro like last time.

Re:Elitism

[GraemeDonaldson]

Yes, because it's totally Mandr[ake|iva]'s fault that LG decided to use a certain ATAPI command (which, according to ATAPI spec, should do nothing or return an error) and make it nuke the firmware. For the record, I experienced the same problem on 2 other mainstream distros which I shall not name, to minimise flamewars.

Screenshots

[hrstrand]

(from the beta )

http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=419&slide=35&title=mandriva+linux+2006+beta+ 3+screenshots

Re:Screenshots

[ilyaaohell]

Who cares about screenshots? Just link to the general KDE screenshots, all distros that use it look pretty much the same, like a slightly pretier version of Windows 98 with GIGANTIC tooltips for the blind.

By the way, are there any KDE themes that try to mimic real-world objects? Like how Vista's theme makes it seem like the minimize/maximize/close buttons and items on the task bar have LED lights under them that glow when you move your mouse over them?

Kat vs Beagle?

[zeth]

How does Kat fare against Beagle? I have used Beagle for a while and I find it really nice.

Has anyone tried Kat?

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[Gibberx]

Cats vs. Dogs! Now that's taking a shovel and widening the trench between GNOME and KDE!

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno... but unless it's just not rendering correctly for me,
http://kat.mandriva.com/ has to be the *fugliest* web page I've
laid eyes on in quite a while. It's sad. Really.

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[imr]

kat is not really ready for primetime. It has been included already as a gesture of faith toward the developper and his solution.
The mandriva KDE guy is working a lot on this, and they are hosting the site of the developper.
I expect it will improve and get updated frequently, but tight now, the best solution is to disable it:
Before login do this in your home directory
touch ~/.mdv-no_kat
or for all new users:
touch /etc/skel/.mdv-no_kat

Simpler, remove it:
urpme kat

Now, that I said that, I think they did the wise thing in choosing kat. Kat is the first brick in what will be tenor, the underlying search engine of KDE4.
They have to make a move in this direction because google and others are already moving toward it. And if linux is not to be left behind once more, distros need to move now.
By not choosing beagle, they imply they don't want to go the (patented) mono road. (beagle will still work on a mandriva, one dev wants to have it soon because he doesnt like kat :) ).
All this is pure speculation on my part.

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[Anonymous Coward]

The site works just fine for me and it is not ugly at all. Simple, clean and well structured. What browser are you using?

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better not come to any of my sites then. :)

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[hcob$]

Well, last time I tried Kat, she had the Herpes. Now that's cool and all cause she let me slip in the back way instead. Of course that was after she let her "roomate" and I have some fun to...

Oh, wait! KAT... that search thing... nah, haven't had that before.

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[freezin fat guy]

I'll I know is that naming everything with a "K" helps makes Linux look like a joke to outsiders. At this point it is downright childish and it is high time to start renaming the applikations, I mean applications, grr!

Re:Kat vs Beagle?

[chawly]

Kat versus Beagle = Cat versus Dog, right ? 'Twas ever thus.

Release date...

[Mad_Rain]

Mandriva Linux 2006 [...] will be publicly available on October 13.

Funny, that's also Ubuntu's 5.10 (Breezy Badger) final release date. I wonder - does "Ubuntu vs. Mandriva" sound like a knock-off of a Japanese monster movie to anyone else? Or is this a "friendly" competition between linux distros?

Re:Release date...

[Alwin Henseler]

I wonder - does "Ubuntu vs. Mandriva" sound like a knock-off of a Japanese monster movie to anyone else? Or is this a "friendly" competition between linux distros?

No, that's really a knock-off of another innovation in the software industry, known as "Microsoft Patch Day". Which is expected around the same date - coincidence, you think?

Ofcourse with Linux, patches are streamed directly from developers' keyboards to your machine for beta-testing, you get a lot more patches for less money, and you can make your own if you feel like it ;-)

-- Sig generator version 20050721/dot-pre18u2. Send bug reports to:

Re:Release date...

[AussieVamp2]

ManDrake the fire breathing dragon, what special powers does Ubuntu have? :)

Or to quote The Blue Oyster Cult: "Oh! No! There goes Tokyo!"

Re:Release date...

[CapnGrunge]

Ubuntu wraps the dragon in a group hug.
*ducks*

Same announced release day as Ubuntu 5.10 final...

[GozzoMan]

(Mentioned in the Release Candidate annoucement)

Is this telling us something?

:Sighs:

[TubeSteak]

Its GNU/Linux dammit

GNU GNU GNU

:Starts tearing out his hair:

I've spelled it out for you, but there's going to be several hundred posts that only say "Linux"

:Stallman starts pounding his head against a wall, hoping everyone else will follow along:
G......N......U....../......L......I...... N......U......X

Re::Sighs:

[m4dm4n]

What did you say? Linux?

Re::Sighs:

[Anonymous Coward]

It says Mandiva Linux right in the title, and no slash. Get with the program.

Re::Sighs:

[jellomizer]

But is everything part of this distribution GNU? Or does it have apache?

RMS is actually quite wrong about it. He just want to gain attention by saying it should be called GNU/Linux Linux is the kernel the Operating system is actually different from each version. I think in order to have an Operating System called GNU Linux all the parts need to be GNU not just some of the parts. RMS needs an other hobbie something that will help him release some of the stress in his life, maybe he should take voice lessons or something, or skiing. If not having you license as part of a name really makes you annoyed you should reconsider your life.

Re::Sighs:

[Nasarius]

No no no. The operating system is more than just the kernel, but it does not encompass everything in the distro. In particular, glibc is a crucial part of the OS. That said, "Linux" has come to mean any Linux-based OS, so RMS will just have to deal.

Re::Sighs:

[Anonymous Coward]

"...in order to have an Operating System called GNU Linux all the parts need to be GNU not just some of the parts."

You mean, like in order for us to call it Linux, all the parts have to be Linux, not just some of the parts?

Stallman's point, which is a very good one, is that, in the absence of GNU, there would be no Linux kernel. At least, no Linux kernel as we see it today, since the kernel itself relies on glibc and is compiled using gcc, among a whole host of other things. Very nearly every external command the kernel relies on to do anything useful is GNU. I mean, let's get real, here. The OS is every bit as much GNU as it is Linux. That's why you can swap out the kernel and use a BSD kernel or the Hurd kernel or whatever and, at the end of the day, the user experience is not significantly different.

Don't get me wrong, the Linux kernel is a beautiful thing and Linus and the rest of them are owed a huge debt of gratitude. But no more so than Stallman and the GNU project, to be fair.

Re::Sighs:

[synthespian]

The operating system is more than just the kernel

The funny thing is Andrew Tanenbaum doesn't agree with you (or Stallman).

Re::Sighs:

[jellomizer]

Why Can't I compile the kernel using says Intels Compiler, and Build it against it to my own compatible version glib which may not be GNU. Then after the kernel loads I start running my own personal applications. Wouldn't it be a Linux Based Operating system that isn't GNU/Linux. You and stallman confusing licensing and legal matters with technical. It is like saying Microsoft owns all the applications I build under .NET And I will need to call my Application Name.NET or .NET/AppName it is just silly. While Linux is GNU it din't have to be. It could possibly work just the same under a different license.

Re::Sighs:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Linux" has come to mean any Linux-based OS, so RMS will just have to deal.

In that case, its wrong to claim that it was written by Torvolds. (wrong in both senses of the word: incorrect and unethical.)

Re::Sighs:

[xybe]

While awkward to pronounce, calling the OS GNU/Linux creates a way to diferentiate the kernel from the OS. I'll be the first to admit that GNU/Linux is a toungue-twister but it helps avoid confusion.

Re::Sighs:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why Can't I compile the kernel using says Intels [non-free as in speech] Compiler, and Build it against it to my own compatible version glib which may not be GNU. Then after the kernel loads I start running my own personal applications."

Go ahead, knock yourself out. But you haven't done that nor are you likely to do it anytime soon. The system you use today is dependent upon literally scores of tools that were developed by the GNU project.

As Stallman writes: "An inappropriate name gives people the wrong idea... if you call pens 'roses', people may not realize what they are good for. If you call our operating system 'Linux', that conveys a mistaken idea of the system's origin, history, and purpose. If you call it GNU/Linux, that conveys (though not in detail) an accurate idea. But does this matter for our community? Is it important whether people know the system's origin, history, and purpose? Yes -- because people who forget history are often condemned to repeat it. The Free World which has developed around GNU/Linux is not secure; the problems that led us to develop GNU are not completely eradicated, and they threaten to come back."

I, personally, use the name GNU/Linux because it acknowledges the huge contribution to the system that the GNU project makes and it reminds people that the purpose of the system is to ensure software freedom. If you run your own, non-GNU tools and you compile against a non-GNU compiler, have at 'er. But don't try to make us believe, even for a moment, that that's what you've done.

You, on the other hand, seem not to feel it important to acknowledge the work of others nor do you value the acknowledgement of the cause of freedom. Be that as it may. But even you would admit, I imagine, that if we stuck to using the term 'Linux' for the kernel, which is what it is, and GNU/Linux for the kernel with all the GNU tools that make it work, it's a much more meaning-laden and more accurate description.

Apparently, accuracy also is not important to you. It is to me. Hence, I will continue to use the term GNU/Linux and I will continue to advocate that others use it. Don't do likewise, if you don't want to. It's your choice.

Telling me that you're right and Stallman is wrong or telling me that I'm confused and that you're a beacon of clarity just makes you look foolish.

It truly is possible to have disagreements about philosophical matters, you know, without anyone being confused or wrong.

Re::Sighs:

[myowntrueself]

"so RMS will just have to deal"

RMS will just have to sit in their lobby for a few days scaring off customers and vendors reps with his stinky beard and fly-eating ways.

Then they will cave in, you watch

Re::Sighs:

[Anonymous Coward]

"The operating system is more than just the kernal."

Wha?! I know more than one professor that would shake their head after hearing that one, and one that might even laugh openly at you.

Not the only centrino certified Linux

[stm2]

Linspire people said they also were centrino certified, the even sell laptops with Linspire on in.

Re:Not the only centrino certified Linux

[Diwann]

They says they support Centrino, not that they are wertified. Intel said the only Centrino certified - Gnu/Linux Distribution is Mandriva. Cheers

All Right!

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG, Just what I was looking for- another Linux distro!

Released Today?

[1000baseFX]

Hell, I had my Official PowerPack DVD and CD's (for my machines w/o DVD's) at the end of September.
Early seeders advantage I guess. I suppose I need to reseed them on the company OC3

fatal flaw in LG's CD-ROM firmwares

[buchanmilne]

Come on, you can read, you should know by now that:
1)Mandrakesoft tested on LG hardware (including affected models) for this release, but none of the CD-ROM drives they tested had an old enough firmware to be affected
2)Gentoo had the same bug in their ready-for-the-world live gaming CDs (and hadn't tracked it down).
3)The bug was on LGs side, using a valid CD-RW command to flash the drives on their CD-ROM drives, violating standards
4)LG replaced/fixed drives
5)Mandriva did their bit in tracking down the issue, re-issuing installation media, providing a list of affected devices
6)If Mandriva hadn't merged the patch, some other popular distro would have, and would also likely not have picked it up until the release was out the door. Since Mandriva found it, the packet-writing patch was fixed to use another means to check if the drive has write capabilities, and now all linux users can have the feature without danger.

Stop bringing this up, hardware problems due to a vendor's faulty firmware is irrelevant.

Re:fatal flaw in LG's CD-ROM firmwares

[wolf31o2]

2)Gentoo had the same bug in their ready-for-the-world live gaming CDs (and hadn't tracked it down).

No. Gentoo did not have any such bug, but only because Gentoo did not release those CD images. It was Daniel Robbins under another commercial venture, called Gentoo Games, where he was leveraging the Gentoo name to turn a profit for himself. These were not a part of the community distribution, and even the distribution developers were not told about it until the release date. We found out about it when it hit the front page of Gentoo's website just like everyone else. Also remember that Daniel, through this venture, violated Id Software's copyright on Enemy Territory by distributing it in a modified form, without permission of Id Software. Gentoo Games also provided no support for these discs, and tried to dump the support on the Gentoo Linux developers. Needless to say, Gentoo Games died a very quick and uneventful death.

Re:fatal flaw in LG's CD-ROM firmwares

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Robbins work for Microsoft nowadays? He should feel right at home there.

Re:hardly newsworthy

[John Nowak]

Apple is ahead because they built on top of NEXTStep, which has been around for quite awhile. Perhaps you recall OS 9 and what a mess what was? Well, I suppose it did have a nice desktop...

By supported file types:

[a.different.perspect]

Beagle:

Office: OpenOffice.org 1.0 (SXW, SXC, SXI, and more), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (ODT, ODP and more), Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), AbiWord (ABW), Rich Text Format (RTF)

Standard: PDF, HTML, Plain text

Documentation: Texinfo, Man pages, Docbook, Monodoc, Windows help files (CHM), Application launchers

Multimedia: Images (JPEG, PNG, SVG), Audio (MP3, OGG, FLAC)

Network: Evolution mail, calendar, and addressbook, Gaim IM and IRC logs, Firefox/Epiphany web pages (as you view them, through browser extensions), Blam and Liferea RSS feeds, Tomboy notes

Kat:

Office: OpenOffice.org 1.0 (SXW, SXI, SXC, SXM), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (ODT, ODP, ODS, ODF, ODS, ODC), Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), Rich Text Format (RTF), Gnumeric, KOffice (KWD, KPR, KSP, KFO), Lyx, Tex, Device Independent Document (DVI)

Standard: PDF, PostScript, HTML, Plain text

Documentation: Man pages, Debian Package (DEB)

Other: BibTex Bibliographic database (BBL, BIB), Molecular Database Limited Molecule (MDL), DocBook Document (DBK)

Re:By supported file types:

[Anonymous Coward]

Kat also supports MP3, OGG, etc... Actually, it uses KDE's kfile meta data plugins, and there are *many* of those. The list given is only for full text plugins, but MP3 does not really have full text. Or, does Beagle download the song text from the internet??

Egon

Re:By supported file types:

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a note on Kat's list of supported formats.
The formats you mentioned are only those for full text extraction. Kat is able to extract metadata information from a lot of non-textual formats such as images, videos, sounds, mp3 and so on.
Kat uses the standard KDE metadata plugins for that.

MOD PARENT UP

[John Nowak]

Such brilliant trolling deserves a reward.

Oh... and if he was serious, please shoot him.

Mandingo Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is mandingo Linux?

Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Azureflare]

I installed it on my desktop and laptop, and this version of Mandrake/Mandriva is definitely one of the best in a while. Everything just works (wireless setup/installation has become a breeze). If you haven't used Mandriva before, wait until the Discovery shows up on some torrent sites or wait for the public release. It's well worth it. Especially after the Connectiva merger, Mandriva seems to have gained a lot in terms of stability. I don't use KDE all the time so I can't speak to the features, but when I fired it up it looked very nice

A lot of the artwork has changed to a much more professional look than 2005LE (You will know what I'm talking about if you installed/used 2005LE).

I'm using the powerpack since I'm a silver club member and I volunteered to be an early seeder so I got it early, and I couldn't be happier. If you want a linux distro that Just Works, try it out some time.

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Maqueo]

Mandrake 9.2 was my first linux distribution, and I have to say, it was the ONLY distribution that supported everyhting out of the box correctly on my laptop (except wifi, but that was quite easy to install). Stuff that still nowadays takes me a good while to get going on another distribution.

What I really didn't like was Mandrake's logo all over the place, and the rpm installs. Dependencies were a real pain in the ass.

How's the package handling? I prefer downloading it from the net, as opposed to installing from the CDs (that is if they had what I needed on them).

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Azureflare]

Yeah, really in the long term downloading from the net is the way to go. After the urpmi mirrors come up, usually a few days from release due to propogation delays, I uncheck all my removable media and use only net sources. It's the only way to go; it's so convenient since the internet is always on.

Dependencies are really not a problem with urpmi, as long as you stick to official mandrake/mandriva rpms. As soon as you go on pbone or get rpms from other distributions, problems will probably happen.

Usually if it's not in the mandrake main or contrib repositories (that's pretty rare) then the best option is to either search for a mandrake rpm, look for a .i386.rpm (one that isn't distribution specific) or failing that compiling from the tar file.

Mandriva isn't for everybody of course, if you've got debian working great then that's the way to go. I really like it because I just don't have to waste time (though debian is pretty awesome, if you know what you're doing).

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Fred_A]

I don't understand what your problem with packages is, Mandk[ake,iva] has dupported installing packages from the net (or a local server, or a local disk) for a while now via the urpmi tools (or the graphical frontends if you are so inclined).

They work more or less in a similar way to the apt tools of Debian or whateverit'snameis of RedHat (haven't used RH in ages).

As with any other distribution, it's up to you to setup the sources for your packages though.

After that, basically you do "urpmi foo" and it installs "foo" and whatever is required for it to run, pulling stuff off the network as necessary.

I seem to remember urpmi was there in 9.2 and already worked pretty well.

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Rinnt]

A lot of the artwork has changed to a much more professional look than 2005LE (You will know what I'm talking about if you installed/used 2005LE).

Yeah, I do know what you mean. I'm assuming you're refering to that crazy, star-eyed looking penguin that is displayed on boot. Man that's embarrassing. My wife seriously though it was Daffy Duck! So now whem I'm booting my LE2005 install at work, I have people thinking that Daffy Duck is built into my OS?

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I do know what you mean. I'm assuming you're refering to that crazy, star-eyed looking penguin that is displayed on boot. Man that's embarrassing. My wife seriously though it was Daffy Duck! So now whem I'm booting my LE2005 install at work, I have people thinking that Daffy Duck is built into my OS?

I know it's a stupid reason to change, but as a linux newbie who just installed Mandriva LE after trying to install Gentoo, I was so annoyed with the star-eyed duck/penguin thing that I downloaded and installed Ubuntu.

It took me literally HOURS to get the damned boot image out of my system, and I never did figure out the right way to do it. I ended up getting my Windows 2000 disk back out to repartition the hard drive. I'm still kind of pissed at all the trouble I went through to nuke the gay-assed bird, and Ubuntu still doesn't boot off my SATA drive like Mandriva did. I had to make the PATA the primary boot drive, and I was planning to use the SATA as the primary boot and applications device, and RAID my two PATA drives for data only.

Re:Mandriva 2006 rocks

[chawly]

Daffy Duck you say. You sure that they didn't think it was Daffy Duck that was using the computer ?

Re:hardly newsworthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Ho Hum. Another "Another distro in the fragmented Linux world featuring the same desktop" post.

This will probably get modded down as trollish, or as flamebait

"Redundant" would be my pick, as I can't remember a distro article in recent memory that didn't have at least one post raising the same old issue as yours.

Look at Ubuntu and Debian - another fine example of counterproductive BS where they fragment, have different ideas about how things should be done, and wind up not really helping each other like they should be.

The perception of some weird kind of "rift" between Ubuntu and Debian is way overblown. Read this for more information: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarkShuttleworth Suffice to say that Ubuntu obviously makes excellent use of Debian, and also contributes plenty back.

Want to amaze me? Invent a new desktop that doesn't suck, and actually works without all the glitchiness I've come to expect from the two (KDE and Gnome) most popular desktop environments. Do something different! Innovate! Change the way I look at my computer! Don't give me *yet another* search tool. Or, at the very least, don't make it the *focus* of your new release.

Woo - another desktop. Won't that be grand! As for innovation, check out the plans for KDE 4. Also, if you're not going to whine and offer up interesting and new ideas rather than vauge accusations of glitchiness, I can think of no reason at all why distros maintainers (who, incidentally, are not responsible for inventing brand new desktops) would wish to "amaze" you.

If people wanted to help Linux mature, they'd stop fragmenting in to dozens and dozens of distros, and focus on *one* of them. Imagine what could be achieved if we weren't all pulling the same horse in different directions at the same time.

Very well - if it were up to you, *which* distro would you choose to dictate that people focus on? If you say "SUSE", ten people will say "Mandriva". If you say "Mandriva", ten people will say "Ubuntu". If you say "start a brand new one from scratch" - well, why do you think there are 200 distros already available? Fact is, rallying all developers across the globe - many of which contribute purely voluntarily, remember - to One United Cause is an impossible dream. The only thing we can do is let nature take its course.

If it so happens that a handful of distros attain such a degree of superiority that developers drop their tools and flock to work on it, then great. If it simply transpires that the constant flow of code causes all distros to become completely alike in terms of capabilities, then that's fine, too - somewhat wasteful of resources, yes, but there's nothing you can do about it, certainly not by posting Tired Old Arguments Against Fragmentation v2110 on slashdot.

Finally, a word about distros themselves. Here's my theory - distros aren't important, or at the very least, they are far less important than the body of open-source software available is. The function of a distro is to package a bunch of code together into a whole for consumption by the end-user who has no time to do this for themselves, and to improve the end-user experience as much as is possible - after all, a distro that fails to do the latter will quickly descend into irrelevancy, at which point it ceases to be either a "confusing" additional choice, nor a waste of significant man-power. This improvement often comes from improving the desktop environments, or productivity software offered. Here's the crucial point - all of these types of improvements can (and are) adopted by other distros. For example, Novell have put a lot of work and effort into Beagle, and this work can be and is harnessed by other distros. Put like this:

The fragmentation of distros, and really the distross themselves, are almost wholly irrelevant, as each produces code th

Up next

[Khlept0]

Coming to a torrent near you.

Re:hardly newsworthy

[Thanatos Starfire]

OSX gets further along than linux not just because of one vision, but also because of one set of hardware specs. They are the manufacturer of the equipment, making development of an OS a helluva lot simpler. Also, they charge for their software.

Just use Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Its free. Bunch of geeks!

Re:Just use Windows

[chawly]

Windows is Free ? Does Bill know ! Twit !

One thing I'd like to see

[ajs318]

I can name one feature I'd like to see in Mandriva.

Either Debdrake or Portagedrake.

RPMs are bollocks - either that, or every RPM distro that I've used or seen had a package repository that was bollocks, which amounts to the same thing either way: bollocks. Anyway, back in the days when I was using Mandrake 8.2, one of the first things I learned was how to spell "make install".

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[jiawen]

I agree, RPMdrake is a pain in the butt. I have been stuck in dependency hell probably a dozen times. Latest example: I was trying to install something that required Gnome-Panel. Gnome-Panel requires libhowl, which requires howl -- which requires libhowl! Arrgh!

However, I don't think Mandriva including an additional DEBdrake or Portagedrake or whatever would solve the problem. I've tried installing Apt-Get on Mandriva and, while the app itself installs fine, getting a decent source for packages is a huge pain. Why? Because, due to architecture, it looks like (from my experience) Mandriva would have to come up with their own .debs, etc. Otherwise, the packages won't install right. (I've tried using non-Mandriva apt sources, and they don't work.) In other words, for Mandriva to have both an RPM-based application installer and a .deb installer, Mandriva would have to split its time between two complete package sources. (If anyone knows otherwise, please correct me! I'd love to stop having dependency problems.)

I'd rather see Mandriva move to a completely .deb based system -- or better yet, make a concerted effort to get rid of dependency conflicts. That would probably even get me to buy into the Club.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[Anonymous Coward]

How would moving to a deb system fix any problems? The reason the debian packages are great has to do with the developers and not the packaging system. RPM and DEB are very much alike - they are packaging systems which describe how to build a package and what dependencies are required.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[ajs318]

The fundamental difference between RPM and DEB is that RPM packages depend on specific files while DEB packages depend on specific packages. Debian packages can also implicitly provide other packages. So, there is a Debian "virtual package" called "www-browser". It doesn't contain any files, but it has dependencies which will be satisfied by any of links, lynx, firefox, konqueror, mozilla, &c. In turn, the browser packages claim to provide "www-browser" when any one is installed. If you have some application that requires something that implements "sendmail" functionality {exim, postfix and so forth all call their binary "sendmail" and use the same command line options} then you need only depend on the "mail-transport-agent" package.

Portage is different again. I haven't used it too much. By the time Gentoo arrived on the scene, I was already fluent in Debian, so my experience is limited to an experimental "just for the hell of it" installation. I was impressed with what I saw, though: with a GUI front end, I think it would have the potential to make the whole business of downloading and compiling from source as painless as InstallShield but without the spyware. I've resolved to do some serious GTK-perl hacking at some stage in future, so I'll see if anything comes of that.

Whether APT {which Conectiva bodged to work with RPM packages: it will be interesting to see whether they stick with Mandrake's urpmi tool, which is an APT work-alike} and Portage are actually superior to RPM is not certain, because both Debian and Gentoo feature enormous package repositories including pretty much the whole of Open Source; it's like comparing a few apples to several kilos of oranges.

By the way, circular dependencies can be solved very easily, but it took me ages to figure it out. What you have to do is specify both package names in the same command.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[lbbros]

Apt4rpm is unmantained. The next step with Conectiva/MDV integration is the use of the smart package manager.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[jayloden]

Since 9.2 onward, Mandrake's 'urpmi' tool has been excellent. It's the only other distro that I think compares with apt-get on Debian (I haven't any experience with portage, only ports on BSD).

The problem with RPM isn't the format, it's simply the RPM managers that have come previously weren't very good. apt4rpm and Yum are ok, but the repositories for Fedora Core and RH/Centos etc seem woefully incomplete compared to what you can find for Debian and mandrake. The end result is that you end up with a disillusioned feeling about RPM and package management with it in general.

If you set up good Mandrake repositories for PLF, JPackage, main, contrib, and updates, you can find most stuff, and urpmi is a very decent package manager. I've since switched from Mandrake to Kubuntu since the Kubuntu repositories just plain have more packages, but Mandrake/Mandriva is nonetheless excellent and it's still high on my list of good distros. I recommend that you give it another try if you're actually interested in Mandriva, and check out the current urpmi situation - it's a hell of a lot improved over the 8.2 days :)

Also, there's EasyUrpmi out there for setting up your package repos all in one shot with no annoying fiddling and googling for repos.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Ach, I've forgotten my login. I'm AdamWill. Disclaimer - I work for MDV.

Sorry, but this is just so horribly wrong and misguided I had to step in. RPM does _not_ only work with file-based dependencies, and DEB does _not_ only work with package-based dependencies. You can use either type of dependency on both systems. RPM allows perfectly well for virtual provides (which is what you're talking about, virtual packages is something different) - for instance, on MDV 2006, mailservers that provide the de facto standard sendmail setup all provide sendmail-command, so you can install whichever server you prefer. We also have virtual packages properly speaking - for e.g. the package gnome2 is an empty package which pulls in a full GNOME desktop via dependencies.

"both Debian and Gentoo feature enormous package repositories including pretty much the whole of Open Source; it's like comparing a few apples to several kilos of oranges."

No, it's not - it's like comparing 11,000 oranges to 17,000. MDV has about 11k packages, and covers a heck of a _lot_ of open source. It's not quite as many as Debian, but it's still in the same ballpark, and close enough to make a valid comparison between urpmi, smart and apt.

Oh, and urpmi / rpmdrake and smart will both handle any circular dependencies for you.

Thanks for playing.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[moranar]

You can already. Install smart (urpmi smart) and find a good .deb repository for mandriva. Though I doubt you'll find many, the possibility's there.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking udpkgi would be the thing to go for.

urpmi eliminates the most frustrating thing about rpm. Deps. I HATE RPM DEPS. urimi smoothly handles them and keeps the baby jesus from crying.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[chawly]

Oh Aye, I don't work for MDV - but I think you probably have fun. I'm down loading 2006 at the moment. I have copied your post. I think I'm gonna have fun.

Re:One thing I'd like to see

[Vintermann]

urpmi gnome-panel.
(You must make sure you have apropriate repositories registered, of course, but the installation CDs should do for gnome-panel. If not, google easy urpmi)
The old-fashioned way to install packages is to resolve the dependencies yourself and then specify all packages at the command line, in case of circular dependencies. But no one has been doing that in Mandrakiva for years, have they?

Nice bootup times

[ashyanbhog]

Have been using Mnadrake at home since their 9.1 release, running LE2005 now. They did have a buggy release in 10, but 2006 seems to have shaped up to be a good distro.....

I stick to centos in office. Why do people keep cribbing about the zillion linux distros? KDE feels great at home and gnome looks perfect for office..... and after having used both for few years, I can say they have come a long way.....

We have started to slowly roll out CentOS to other workstations here, and people who have began using prefer CentOS over WinXP. Only issue holding us back from a complete rollout is lack of Catia(CAD) for Linux

Even my bro has mostly stopped booting Win at home. Looking forward to Mandy 2006.... I think it'll be a distro that will allow me to recommend Linux to a lot of people

Re:Nice bootup times

[Anonymous Coward]

I never encountered any major bugs in Mandrake 10. In fact, I'm still running it on like 3 of my servers. I was wondering what kind of issues you faced?

Some tips and first impressions

[InodoroPereyra]

Allright, I am running it (from the development branch, Cooker, when they froze all checkins).

If you are planning to run it, you may consider a quick look at: The Mandriva 2006 Twiki Page. It has links to the Errata Page, Release Notes and the Distro Changelog

My first impressions:

• Very Fast. Boots fast (see the link above). It runs very fast, I guess because of the use of gcc4. Very, very responsive.
• Sexy. Fonts look great, KDE 3.4.2 looks fantastic. It also is very useable, again, mainly because of KDE in my setup. The Mandrake tools are, as always, greatly appreciated, including urpmi. Haven't tried using s.m.a.r.t. yet.
• No Kat, No ACPI. YMMV, but Kat brings my desktop down ot its knees. It takes way too much CPU usage. I uninstalled it. And there is a know bug (follow the links above) in X org that they will try to fix soon, but the quick workaround is to disable ACPI. Please don't bitch, if you can't live without it (like if you have a laptop), just wait a couple weeks for the fix and then you install
• OOO 2.0. I am running the Open Office 2.0 from the contributed packages, it runs great, I am really loving it. Point your software manager to the Contrib medium and install (or join the Club and everything will be even easier). There is a nice ooo-kde package to integrate (not perfect yet) with KDE. Sweet.

Cheers,
Don Inodoro

Re:Some tips and first impressions

[lbbros]

You can just stop logrotate from rotating acpi (see Errata on the wiki)log and you'll workaround the X 99% CPU usage.

Re:Some tips and first impressions

[ccp]

Y Mendieta?

Saludos,

Carlos Cesar (Tigre)

Oct 12: Apple!

[bach37]

Could have made it Oct 12....

Site is down

[linuxgurugamer]

Well, I was downloading since yesterday. Had to stop the download and go to work. Now the site is down, getting Apache Tomcat errors on almost all the pages. I guess the /. effect is in progress Still, I would have expected better from them. They should have anticipated the load from a release, and planned accordingly.

Re:Site is down

[chawly]

Maybe you have another problem. I started to download yesterday too. I also had to stop 'cause I don't leave machines running when the house is empty. It's running for me, but slowly. If we don't go out tonight, I think it'll finish around midnight. What are you using as bittorrent software ? I'm using Azureus.

Re:Site is down

[linuxgurugamer]

No. I had to stop because I was using my laptop. When I got in to work, I was unable to get through. The site came back up about an hour later, after Mandrake had abbreviated the site to allow for the large numbers of accesses.

LG

[Anonymous Coward]

I have bought exactly one LG device. When I die, I will have bought exactly one LG device.

The device is my phone, which I paid $130 for (not wanting to be locked into a contract).

It wouldn't take a speed dial number in slot two. Well, actually it would, but as soon as you closed the phone it lost the number. Plus it shut itself off at random times.

Then after a couple of months it wouldn't hold a charge for more than eight or nine hours. It was under warrantee, so I sent it back for a raplacement.

Every production line produces a few lemons and I figured I just got unlucky and was glad it was under warrantee.

With the new phone, half the people I call can't hear me, and the screen randomly stops working. I have to reboot the phone to get the screen back. Sometimes I have to actually remove the battery for a minute to get the screen to work.

On top of that, it still randomly shuts itself off, although not as often as the first phone.

I've had Nokia and Motorola phones that I used for years for no trouble.

But both LG phones were identical pieces of shit. I will never, EVER buy another piece of hardware from this company, EVER, and will think twice about ever knowingly buying a device manufactured in Korea.

So, it doesn't matter to me if Mandrake or any other distro works on LG, as I will never knowingly subjuct myself to their gawdoffal shit again.

(there's a CSS bug in IE that's laying the preview text on top of the reply to text, so apologies if this contains typos, I can't preview it)

Tuner Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about native support of popular (or any) tv tuners? I've tried to get myth working on previous versions of mandrake and basically gave up cause I have a life outside of linux. Doesn't anyone else out there see the opportunity for a linux distro to make serious (yeah I mean really serious) instrides to the home pc/desktop or pvr market by offering an really cool out of the box media solution? Even if it meant a limited list of supported tuners to start with. I know I'm sick of booting the kitchen pc to windows just so my kids can watch cartoons in the morning... btw the tuner is a hauppauge pvr250.

I Submitted Yesterday, And It Was Rejected

[saudadelinux]

Odd...

But dude...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnu's Not Linux!

(mind reading capcha="cranks")

Re:12 months 6 months, 3 months or 1 month

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

12 months:
1 Ubuntu 2183 2 Mandriva 1627 3 Fedora 1317>
4 SUSE 1311 5 MEPIS 1184=

6 months:
1 Ubuntu 2724>
2 Mandriva 1739 3 SUSE 1415 4 Fedora 1268>
5 MEPIS 1115>

3 months:
1 Ubuntu 2633 2 Mandriva 1749 3 SUSE 1561 4 Fedora 998=
5 MEPIS 991=

1 month:
1 Ubuntu 2891 2 Mandriva 2106 3 SUSE 2018 4 Fedora 1038>
5 KNOPPIX 1008>

SUSE does appear to have a solid claim to third place, with Ubuntu and Mandriva consistantly taking 1st and 2nd respectively.

enhanced wife support

[splatter]

"an interactive firewall, and enhanced wife support"

did I read that wrong? I sure could use some of that kind of support!

All I want to know is were do I sign up and how much?

Re:enhanced wife support

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL!!!

kernel vs. operating system

[dallaylaen]

You're completely right! I've had no problems with jupming 2.2->2.4, but lots of bugs with a third-figure shift in glibc.

So I'd rather call the glibc and GNU userland "Linux" -- they're harder to replace then the kernel.

As far as I can see, in today's technical English the term "Linux" refers to "the GNU/Linux system", while "the kernel written by Mr. Torvalds" is actually called "the Linux kernel" or simply "the kernel". (The most used word becomes the shortest).

This BTW is like having the car you're manufacturing referred to as "the car" or the bank you're running called "the bank". Sounds cool to me :^)

Re:Club vs. easyurpmi

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you can downloand 95% of Mandriva gratis on easyurpmi.

However, doing so contributes _nothing_ to the cost of development and QA for the Mandriva distribution.

Instead, you could consider getting a Mandriva Club subscription and downloading the full version via http://club.mandriva.com/ and thereby help ensure the on-going development and support of the distro.

Non-Existant Mandriva Documentation

[algae]

It seems like Mandriva have put out a fine operating system, but as an admin, it sucks to not have any kind of documentation or bug support. For example, both Debian and FreeBSD have extensive documentation easily accessable from their web sites. Where's the equivelant for Mandriva? Same goes with bug reporting; I'm not going to track down the links, but it's pretty trivial to submit bug reports for any of Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, even RedHat, but I looked all up and down Mandriva's site and didn't see any kind of bug tracking system, not even a mailto: field.

So, like I said, as an IT admin, I'm not going to support an OS that isn't going to support me.

Re:Non-Existant Mandriva Documentation

[lbbros]

There is bugzilla and a wiki.

Re:Non-Existant Mandriva Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you haven't heard about Mandriva's bugzilla :

http://qa.mandriva.com/

On the wiki, you'll get a big amount of information (there is for instance an rss feed for latest packages uploads) :

http://qa.mandriva.com/wiki/

You can even see how to use your hardware and validate if it functions or not. Using TESTZILLA, a set a pre-ordered procedures allowing anybody to improve easily the distribution's work.
Using this procedures will allow you to follow a guided way of making your hardware work (thus eradicating wrong manipulations) and doing an automatic bugzilla post in case of any problem.

You can find this wonderfull tool on bugzilla's main page (http://qa.mandriva.com/ section Testzilla.

If you want to test a component, just create a bugzilla account, perform a test (Perform any test) and you're done !

Doc may be missing -a little- but saying nothing is available seems -a little- exagerated.

(My ./ account is still not opened, so i post this as anonymous)

Stef

Re:Non-Existant Mandriva Documentation

[opkool]

* Documentation:

Aside from being in the form of rmps (look for mandrake-doc-* packages), you can fin documentation here:

  - http://www.mandrivaexpert.com/index1.php
  - http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/en/fdoc.php3
  - http://www.mandriva.com/products/faq/beginners
  - http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/Mandriv aLinux2005Errata
  - http://www.mandriva.com/security

* Bugzilla:

  - http://qa.mandriva.com/

Hope this is enough for you.

Cheers

Mandrake/Mandriva supported prism for years

[Sits]

I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva for years and my Netgear MA311 has worked since around 2002. This is a Prism 2/2.5/3 chipset card.

In 2005.0, for some reason the wifi drivers for such chipsets was defaulted to hostap rather than orinoco. Due to driver bugs this meant that the ncessary extra magic did not ncessarily make it into modules.conf causing wifi to fail to come after first boot until the necessary line was added. See this Mandriva bugzilla bug.

2006 now appears to default to orinoco and required no extra prodding to get working in my tests of the Beta releases. Of course I don't have your exact machine so no one will be able to tell you for sure.

As others have said, make sure that your DWL 520 really is prism based. That model of card has been through lots of chipsets (upping the model number each time would have saved the world a lot of pain but I guess marketing and cost to reprint stuff won over).

Mandriva seems to boot quickly

[Sits]

I'm not sure if it's simply down to starting less stuff but Mandriva 2006.0 boots much faster than Ubuntu Breezy or OpenSUSE 10 (50 seconds versus over 1 minute 10 seconds) on my machine here (it's a fairly old slow machine). It's is far far faster than Mandriva 2005.0 and currently seems to have some sort of lead here. My hat (Fedora?) goes off to the Mandriva developers for improving (and integrating other's improvements) so much over their previous release in this area (that's not to say that further improvements won't be forthcoming from the other distros though).

However boot up and shutdown vary enourmously from machine to machine (and also by how fragmented your partition has become) and I don't have a printer or bluetooth etc. attached to this machine.

Re:hardly newsworthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact is, rallying all developers across the globe - many of which contribute purely voluntarily, remember - to One United Cause is an impossible dream. The only thing we can do is let nature take its course.

You see, I had this idea, with these rings, right? I give them to all sorts of people - Debian people, Gentoo people, hell, even the FreeDOS people - and I'd have this ring that would control theirs, and they'd all work for me. But I'll be damned if someone always comes up and cuts off my hand or throws my ring in a friggin' volcano ...

You guys think it's all peaches being Bill Gates, but let me tell you -- nothing but suffering. Boo hoo.

You didn't look very long for bugzilla

[spinel]

I can't believe that you claim to be an admin but couldn't find qa.mandriva.com. You can generate a new bug report, query for existing bugs or just read the docs about how the system works. How can it get easier than that? Bugzilla is pretty mature and easy to use. I don't think anyone has a more open development process than Mandriva. DC

Re:You didn't look very long for bugzilla

[algae]

OK, they've redesigned the web site since I last looked at it, and it's a big improvement. Still can't get to qa.mandriva.com from the front page - where is it linked from? When I searched the site for 'bugzilla' and 'bug report', it didn't come up.

So yeah, I looked for it.

Re: SUSE takes third place on the 12 month cycle

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

as of this morning:

Rank Distribution H.P.D*
1 Ubuntu 2188 2 Mandriva 1632 3 SUSE 1319 4 Fedora 1317=
5 MEPIS 1185

Re: Non-Freely-Distributable Freeware

[some guy I know]

I can't imagine why Sun, Realmedia or Adobe would care [...] since all this applications are available for free download anyway.

I've got two words for you: Advertising.

Install went fine

[deno]

Installing the ML 2006 on this MB is quite eventless. It works. Watching DVDs works fine (i.e. it`s not too slow for this task) out of the box. Haven't tried the divX yet. No idea how much faster the SP8000 will be when I re-compile the Xorg, but "out of the box" the 3D stuff is deadly slow.

I added the plf and contrib as urpmi sources, and installed the pre-copiled ivtv and myth* rpms. Also seems to work OK, but m still missing the fb device associated with PVR350. Now I'm stuck on trying to get a frequencies list for Austria. :-(

In the meantime I tried recompiling the kernel, which just proved what we already know: this machine shouldn't be used for CPU intensive tasks.

BTW, the machine needs ca. 40W, and runs withouth any fans. Its getting somewhat warm, but seems to be stable for now. Let's see hw long will it survive. .-)

Re:Install went fine

[imr]

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=22&DSC at=155&DCatType=3

Re:hardly newsworthy

[chawly]

You been taking your pills regular ? Well, have you ? Have you ? You haven't .... ah, now I understand. Nobody wants to amaze you, my dear sir, we're just happy that you're here, with us and being amazing your own self. There is a limit to the amount of amazingness that we can take. You are enough for us, sir, so stay as you are.

piratebay link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3393403

Re:hardly newsworthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Another smug iDiot.
Sure I have a super useable OS. I have limited the hardware to support nothing and the functionality to do nothing. It works amazingly. No one has any problems with useability - it does exactly what they expect it to every time. Never crashes. 100% reliable.

Choice is a good thing.

Seriously, it is all very well saying that Apple stuff "just works", but if you are limiting yourself to buying expensive hardware, then you are going to have to go out and earn those extra pennies. Factor that into the time it takes you to do install a new piece of hardware on a Mac. I would rather spend that "working time" learing how stuff works and achieving a bit of understanding of my system.

Where do you draw the line?

[buchanmilne]

Firefox is too much of a high-profile application and web browers are an easily hit target.

And firefox has a lot of issues on Linux, all distributions patch it to work sanely. Porting all those patches, and testing all the features, layout etc on thousands of locales is non-trivial. So, I don't agree it is "easily hit".

IMHO, Apache and SSH among others, should be treated similarly.

And, I think samba, openldap, and amarok should be too.

But, other users will have other favourites.

So, where do you draw the line?

Everything? No.

Some? Most? The most popular? The ones that prove to have a good track record? The ones that consider the distro a primary platform?

Firefox only qualifies as one of those -> it shouldn't be special.

Thus, I support the policy. Firefox devs need to get a clue. They aren't the only software a user installs.