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

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?

[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: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: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: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).

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. .-)