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Mandriva Linux 2006 Review Continued
Anonymous Coward writes "The second part of the extensive Linux Tips for Free Mandriva Linux 2006 review has been published, going into details about the state of Linux hardware support and compatibility, hardware configuration and software with a whole section on digital photography. Part one was previously discussed on Slashdot."
I'm not making a stab at the quality of the article here, but this seems to be like a little bit of self promotion. I mean, http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr? http://www.when.was.this.in.style.com? And the poster comes from the website.
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Please don't mod this up or down, I'm just saying that I find there's something wrong with how this story got on
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If I wanted to build a Linux system that would have the same functionality as this (nevermind that I could just go ahead and install Mandriva; I want to do it myself), how much effort would go into that sort of thing? Let's say I started with a Debian release, how difficult would it be to get all the software together to create a basic clone of something like this?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Look at his URL (http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/) one of the things google piorties in ranking of keywords is if the keywords are located in the URL.
As a SEO expert my guess is give it a few days but that site is going to come with in the first few results for the term "Mandrake" and "free" as slashdot has many high ranking sites that mirror it content... such as http://mirrordot.org/
I am sorry I can't explain this in more detail or give proof of my claim but firstly its impossible to prove exactly how PageRank works as Google keeps this info classified. Secondly there is a thunder storm coming soon... so I am going to unplug right after this post.
This kind of a guide is extra sweet for folks like me, who Aren't hardcore Linux users/coders. (To Many 'advanced users' the occasional function string or what-have-you is expected, but having to open up your source code every time you make a change--e.g.: replacing your $10 keyboard with a new, slightly different $10 keyboard--is too much of a bloody hassle)
Makes it a touch easier to gauge whether it's Worth said bloody hassle for a particular desired result--setting up my spiffy home theatre thru Linux, or (no flame-age plz, I know the sacriledge I speak here) Winblows Media Edition.
This sort of guide, made readily available, can only assist linux penetration.
Oh, and the first two posts are exactly the sort of reason I can't stand slashdot more than occasionally anymore. Chock-Full-o-Trolls I'm thinking we all could use some sort of alternate forum...
A couple fans told me that my last journal entry was mint; give it a shot. Hope you like.
Not Mandriva specific, since all of the distrobutions and packages are guilty to some degree, but this is a perfect example of what's wrong with the Linux desktop. Mandriva pops up a window when you connect a digital camera to give you the option of importing your photos. Great! But the title bar reads "Warning". No problem for us geeks, but now, think Grandma. What is she going to do when she gets a warning? Will she think that an error has occurred? Perhaps. That's why these dialog boxes need to have the polish and unified feel that they do on XP or OS X.
But...
Now that lots of Linux distros are fairly easy to install, what's the motivation to go with a commercial RPM-based distro?
To me, the hard part about Linux now is not the install, it's stuff like getting sound and printing to work. Is that any easier on Mandriva than on Ubuntu, or vanilla Debian?
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Before I knew any better, I used to run Mandrake. This article gave me the first moment in many months that reminded me of the existance of Mandrake. Was that just me or did we all collectively tune out from Mandr*? To rephrase, what has Netcraft confirmed? :)
Every .0 release of Mandrake/iva has been ridden with problems
URPMI an PLF and Coooker are the reaseons I keep coming back to Mandrake
but seriously 2006 is one of the worst releases they have put out since 8.0
It is Much slower than 2005(10.2), much less stable;
it lacks apache1, which I still prefer, the list goes on and on.
KDE 3.4 with its kat and kdewallet annoyances...
but again it's a .0 release, so It's almost expected.
This review is excellent. This is exactly what Linux community needs to make the operating system friendly enough to be interesting to new users. These kind of articles combined with the efforts like the one few days ago, where there was a bunch of flash movies about using the OpenOffice, are invaluable resource for non-computer-savvy people to get to know Linux-based environment better and especially to find the rich set of applications it can provide.
For those who want to try this brand-new version, ISO images (CD,DVD, mini-CD and live-CD) of the 2006 have hit public FTP mirrors last week-end (note: the x86-64 version only comes as a 3-CD and mini-CD image). Tip: right after a fresh install, don't forget to apply all security and bugfixes updates if you want a secure and stable system.
Download mirrors are listed here.
All 2006 reviews have been summarized here.
debian isn't hard to set up a functional desktop. there are a lot of online references for both sarge and etch/testing. google is your friend here. just append "debian sarge" to whatever you're looking for, e.g: dvd playback debian sarge. the marillat repository comes in handy, it's one-stop shopping for all the goodies the debian repositories don't have.
if you've got a half-ways decent net connection, skip the whole cd's (there's like 14 of them, but you don't need them all. the first 2 or 3 is enough for a basic gnome or kde desktop) and get the netinst image instead. you'll be up and running before you even get mandrake^H^H^H^Hriva iso's downloaded. the ubuntu single-cd install isn't a bad place to start either, and nets you (over sarge) newer desktop environment, xorg (in place of sarge's xfree86), oo2, and a few extra packages in it's repos that aren't in debian's "official" ones.
the last deb-based desktop i set up was my own (i've recently set up several others). i used ubuntu breezy instead of debian this go around, for easier upgrade to dapper (and it's extended support cycle) in the spring.
installation, including additional packages, configuration and testing (installing a few things at a time; and several reboots) including nvidia drivers, dvd playback and ripping, mp3 playback and ripping, usb scanner, digital camera, acrobat, realplayer, flash, java, additional media players and cd burning tools, additional apps like abiword & gnumeric; all installed, configured and tested, it took less than 90 minutes. or a bit less than the time it would take me to download 3 iso's at my full download speed.
a similar sarge setup would take about 20 minutes longer to download the packages that are already present on a breezy cd.
to illustrate the additional packages available in "official" breezy repos; the only packages i took from marillat (etch) repo was libdvdcss2, w32codecs (which wasn't needed, libdvdread3 has a script in it's docs directory to install them), and realplayer (to get version 10 vs 8 in multiverse). with a debian install, you'd have to install more from there and i think fetch java runtime from blackdown to configure it similarily.
one of the nice things about ubuntu (besides the far superior apt vs rpm) is you can download a single cd installation for either gnome or kde (one for xfce4 is in the works too, and they all use the same repos). which means, when downloading the install image, you're getting only what you need, so it's faster to download and faster to install. i don't see much point in having duplicate apps in an install (i.e. 5 browsers or email clients, etc). a little common sense and restraint by the developers translates to a more convenient install process and an uncluttered desktop for the end user.
Anybody know if online upgrading the rpms from an old version of Mandrake (say LE2005) to 2006 works? I mean, if I just use urpmi.addmedia to add 2006 repos to an installation of LE2005, install the base header rpm of 2006 by force and just update all the other roms to the 2006 ones via urpmi, will that work or will it be a wasteland of broken packages and unresolvable dependencies? What about using the "upgrade" option on the boot cd? I've googled for this and It seems to work for some people and not for others.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Some people actually don't see tinkering with their OS all night as a time good spent, there are better ways to spend nights.
All I want is to listen to music, watch my videos, write documents for work and studies and do webdesign (yes, you can actually webdesign on Linux).
I have Mandriva 2005LE and it's a beautiful OS, does everything I could possibly want and is quiet, rock solid and doesn't bother me with annoyances or different config matters.
1) Installed Mandriva Linux 2006.0 on my Acer Travelmate 8104 (very fast install, very easy to do)
2) Failed to boot the freshly installed OS.
That's it, this reviewer gives the OS a score of 0/10 for failing to even boot.
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Ive already tweaked my old Mandrake 10.1 to near-perfection (enlightenment, some Mplayer capability thanks to somebody that packaged it in RPM) and i can play *some*, but it seems that the totem/kaffeine/xine apps are all crippleware. Thanks to Hollywood, I can't just pop in my regular Region 1 DVDs and play them. Is anybody selling their Region1-DVD-capable MAndriva DVD? I would like very much for a distro to work out-of-the-box.
To be specific, the error consists of 'Your DVD seems encrypted' yadda yadda yadda, and 'Scan DVD' on xine will only show 2 unplayable titles. And I dont want to install/urpmi/upgrade to a multimedia-less distro.
A new release of yet another Linux Distro! That's absolutely zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz