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."

Comments

Quality of Articles

[Kawahee]

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.

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 /.

Re:Quality of Articles

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. This is slashdot. The articles people submit get posted as stories. Anyone can submit.

What do you think the natural result is? Besides, how else will we know about it unless the author tells us about it??? Sheesh. Do you get angry when Jeremy White posts an article about codeweavers developments? Because if you do, you're being a tad unreasonable. Not all submissions come from uninformed 3rd parties that copy and paste from the original site.

Re:Quality of Articles

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Free.fr is a French ISP offering free web hosting (up to 1 GB, one of the first free PHP/MYSQL host company here), free mails, free dial-up (which was their main business few years ago).. Well pretty much everything free except their excellent ADSL2+ (24 Mbps) offer which costs 30 euros (and comes with tons of other goodies like free phone/VoIP and ADSL TV, a static IP and a custom reverse DNS and.. and .. and much more). These guys rock: they only use OSS (mainly Linux powered) and provide us with their "best effort": if a new technology comes they'll offer it to every subscriber without any more condition; my bandwidth changed from 20 to 24Mbps recently and I didn't have to sign another contract or to do anything. I know a few techies from the company (we used to lurk on IRC) and they all are free software fanatics. Free provides official support for OS X and Linux, and their ADSL2+ + TV + phone modem (the "Freebox") runs Linux.

On the other side, the website http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/ is only an hosted website, it has nothing to do afaik with Free itself, while the Mandriva (and Debian, and pretty much every major distro) mirrors are managed on the official ftp.free.fr FTP server by Free's team.

So yeah Free rocks, but this website is only an hosted website (please note: to get an account you must be a French citizen, they send you a request by traditional mail, but they don't put any ad on your website and their bandwidth is huge, so they couldn't freely allow everyone).

Btw, they're already starting WiMax experimentations and installations, it should be available next year or so :). We used to struggle to get a decent connection, and now France seems a good place for Internet connectivity. Talking 'bout Japan and Tokyo? Wait: in Paris (15th arr.) too, they have optic fiber (100Mbps symmetrical) for 50 euros a month (and with TV and VoIP once again) :)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ugh

[Lord Byron II]

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.

Re:Ugh

[ookaze]

this is a perfect example of what's wrong with the Linux desktop

No, this is a perfect example of what's right with the Mandriva desktop.

Mandriva pops up a window when you connect a digital camera to give you the option of importing your photos

Except you're completely wrong, which just shows that you were modded by anti-Linux zealots.
It pops up a dialog when you connect a USB card or when you see the camera as a USB storage device.
If you actually access your camera by its protocol or PPTP, it won't pop up a dialog because obviously, Mandriva knows that there are photos on it.
It's great there, because then it guides the user to the photo managing app.

Great! But the title bar reads "Warning". No problem for us geeks, but now, think Grandma

No problem for Grandma either, as she will see the big friendly warning icon, which :
- is not red
- does not contain a cross
- looks like ... a warning

I'm pretty convinced your rant is a red herring, as most people will look, in order, at :
- the icon
- the big bold text in the dialog
- what's written on the buttons
- eventually the text in the dialog
There's a big chance they will never even see the dialog had a title.

What is she going to do when she gets a warning? Will she think that an error has occurred? Perhaps.

No, she sure as hell won't, as the first thing her eye will catch is the icon, which sure as hell do not look like a frightening error, but just a friendly warning.

That's why these dialog boxes need to have the polish and unified feel that they do on XP or OS X.

Which they have ...
In case you did not know, these dialog icons are stock GTK icons (not even Gnome, GTK !!).
If you talk about the mix of GTK and KDE on Mandriva desktop, please remember that even some MS apps have not the same toolkit on Windows than the rest of the desktop, and have exactly the same problem.
For example, some security dialogs of WinX SP2 are completely out of place compared to other dialogs. Or look at MS Office. Talk about "unified feel".

Re:Submitter is a PageRank whore.

[A.K.A_Magnet]

And you are a conspiracy theorist. Check my post earlier: Free.fr is just an ISP offering free hosting, the Website creator just used the domain name to create a pseudo "vanity host". Nothing wrong. Quite funny, in fact, who would ever pay for Mandrake tips anyway? :)

Re:why?

[rolfwind]

Now that lots of Linux distros are fairly easy to install, what's the motivation to go with a commercial RPM-based distro?

Well, for one, the for-pay distribution target mostly businesses so a loss at the individual level (home user) is not so important - and Businesses want peace of mind that comes with support.

Also, there are licenses that for-pay distributions have to pay to be allowed to distribute. This isn't in the base linux system but stuff like various non-free multimedia codecs or the nonfree mp3 format IIRC. It's too much hassle for businesses to track these down but they don't want to be caught with their pants down if a software audit ever comes in. Enter Redhat/whover, they took care of this already.

Notice that distros like Ubuntu have you download this stuff from other repositories and not their own, meaning that you are responsible for having the correct licenses. For a home user, this is not likely going to be a risk, but the business owner is well to cover is ass.

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?

In my experience, (current Ubuntu user), the distro that autodetects the most stuff for you is the easiest^_^ And all package based major distros are all about the same amount of work getting something to work if it's not autodetected. Source based distros like Gentoo can be another can of worms, I'm not sure.

Re:Sweet deal (contains /. sacriledge x2)

[rolfwind]

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)

What kind of keyboard you have that you need to look at the source code to switch them around?

???

Re:It looks good

[Hosiah]

Your question is wildly ranging into the hypothetical, so I can't give you an answer like "six months, 32 days, 11 hours, and five minutes". To get an idea what it takes to make a Linux distro from the ground up, try one of the source-based distributions: http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Source- based&origin=All&basedon=All&desktop=All&architect ure=All&status=Active I can't vouch for any personally except Linux From Scratch, which works if you Follow the Book exactly. Now, to start with Debian and release it as your own distro, that's less work...provided you did the from-the-ground-up thing so you understand what and why of the guts of a Linux system. Almost all of the distros out there are based on derivatives of Red Hat or Debian (*sniff* and something like only two for my fave Slackware!). Pick up Knoppix sometime for a prime example of a Debian-based distro.

Now, Mandriva is one distro with it's act together. No text-mode installer or arcane package manager syntax for Mandriva - it's the *easiest* distro you'll ever run. But that comes at a price, because it's also *hardest* for a developer to create an interface that's a smooth, seamless uh.. $EXPERIENCE than it is to just make the damn program work already and slap the command line interface on it with a shell script wrapper.

Re:flakey market

[rmm4pi8]

Not everyone, I'm still on Mandriva. I know everyone says it's just for new people, but no one has given me a reason to switch: SuSE's YaST screws up hand-edited config files, Fedora requires much more set up to get running, and Ubuntu--why? Slackware and Gentoo just don't make sense for a laptop user who upgrades frequently. So why the beef with Mandriva--what's the downside? Everything they write is GPL, too.

Besides, Mandriva has a fairly good community, as I'll demonstrate here by reiterating my offer to provide free email/IM support to any Slashdot-reading Mandriva user (or potential switcher). I'm not a kernel-hacker or anything, but I have been using it on desktops, laptops, and servers for 4 years now, and I can fix most things when they break.

Re:Submitter is a PageRank whore.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not really - my site was always the first non-Mandrake owned Mandrake oriented site that showed up when searching for Mandrake Linux, and it's never been mentioned on Slashdot before. I guess it will help to be on Slashdot, but frankly, for google ranking, my site has never needed it.

Naturally, it took some time to get back in the top 20 for Mandriva Linux since the name change (and why would I be whoring for 'Mandrake' anyway - the name has gone the way of the dodo), but that too has happened without being on Slashdot.

What is this obsession with figuring out conspiracies anyway? The real conspiracy is that I want to show how cool Linux is, in this case with the example of Mandriva 2006.

Enjoy Linux,
Rob
www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr

Mandriva 2006 ISO: now available + all reviews

[joestar]

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.

Re:deb instead

[opkool]

you'll be up and running before you even get mandrake^H^H^H^Hriva iso's downloaded

Actualy, it will be faster to be up and running with Mandriva.

You can either download only one ISO image, or you can download the 12MB ISO for a network install, with fully GUI installer and all. I believe that debian netinstall ISO was around 85 MB.

This way, you can start installation after just downloading and burning an 12MB ISO.

And as for the software available for Mandriva, you have 12306 packages, plus the PLF packages.

So, right now, both Debian and Mandriva have more or less the same (very high) number of packages readily available with urpmi (CLI) / rpmdrake (GUI)

Peace