Mandriva 2007 RC1 Released

boklm writes "The first Mandriva 2007 release candidate (codename Mona) is out. The final version is due soon. 2007's new features include Gnome 2.16 with New 'Ia Ora' Mandriva Theme, parallel initscript (for faster boot), 3D desktop (with both AIGLX and Xgl to support more graphic cards). Installable Live-CDs including Gnome or KDE are available in different languages, and because it is a live-cd it is possible to try it without installing. Don't forget to report bugs if you find them, in order to get a solid final release."

Comments

Mandrakes place in the Linux world?

[cloricus]

As a long time user of Mandrake till about two years ago I'd like to ask a very simple question; what is its place in todays modern Linux desktop world?
 
This isn't a troll or a flame as I enjoyed using MDK back in the day though really it is still as bloated and confusing as when I used to use it (I've played with the latest version extensively). Ubuntu and Novell SLED seem to serve the purpose that Mandrake used to fill far more effectively and I can't help but think that those still working on the free parts of Mandrake are wasting resources that could be more effectively used to help other areas in more up to date (philosophy wise) distros...Like decent GUI tools for wireless networking!

Re:Mandrakes place in the Linux world?

[mavenguy]

As have some other repliers, I feel the same way. I've used mdk from, IIRC, 7.x and have upgraded since, up to 2006. At the time it was a great distro for someone who lacked the skill set to run a more "hardcore" distro, but allowed me to, on a very selective basis, get into the guts for study, and modification. It offered a great install that (mostly) ended up with lots of things "just working" (well, again, mostly). I was rather enthusiastic, and decided to support the Mandrake effort, even through their bankruptcy, by joining Mandrake Club, even though, on review, I didn't make all that much use of it; it's main use was early downloading access of releases via bittorrent.

But, then they got out of bankruptcy and began a transition from a struggling commercial distro into what they hoped would be another Red Hat or Novell. This was signaled to me when their web site was redesigned. They replaced their cluttered but link rich home page with a boringly slick, but sparse front page that immediately sorted out the business from the casual users, each herded down separate, controlled paths to the common functions. For example, sometimes I needed to to go to mdk's development area, the Cooker. This used to have a link from the old page, but, on a few forays onto the new site, I have yet to find a link to it. Fortunately I had saved a link to the cooker page, but someone new to Mandriva would have to do some work to find this link.

Nevertheless, I was invested in the distro and, not having been shut out completely, continued to renew my club membership through 2005, but earlier this year I just let it expire. Firstly it was mostly working for me, and the update service still works for me, so I can keep it patched. Secondly, the rise of Ubuntu provides a distro that appears to be n00bishly comparable to the old Mandrake I started with. I've torrented a recent (6.06.1 desktop) Live CD and only briefly played with it twice, but I'm reluctant to make the switch now since I don't have a spare box nor hard disk space to create a pristine installation and dread the thought of even thinking of trying to "upgrade" over my existing mdk installation.

So, whither Mandriva 2007 for me? Perhaps I'll wait for the general release in a few months and upgrade (if there aren't a slew of issues with doing this, as has happened in the past). On the other hand if I could be convinced that I could, with minimal risk, transition to Ubuntu with my current resources, I think I'd do it with a parting "Thanks Mandrake (sic) we had great times together, but we've grown apart."

Re:Mandrakes place in the Linux world?

[Air-conditioned cowh]

Agree with all that!

Mandriva's control centre is what sets it apart. Most other distros have a similar looking desktop (if they're KDE based), a bunch of apps etc but if the auto-hardware-detect of these distros can't tell what monitor you have then you only get 1024x768 and there is nothing short of editing your xorg.conf file to fix it. And what do you do to get your WLAN card and DVB tuner working?

This is why I settled on PCLinuxOS which is Mandriva based but seems to be more polished and uses Synaptic instead of urpmi.

BTW, what is it with (K)Ubuntu that makes other distros obsolete? I tried it and couldn't really see what it really had going for it compared to PCLinuxOS. Like their website though.

Re:Madriva's old news

[ErroneousBee]

I still recommend it to newbies for the following reasons:

• Suse makes it a bit harder to install media players, and makes it hard to update the system from the command line.
• Suse has fewer 'entertainment' packages.
• Redhat is even more business oriented than Suse.
• Mandriva's partitioning tool has the best useability. and this is the step a newbie is most likely to get wrong.
• Ubuntu, in its vanilla install, has very inferior configuration tools. To do anything sophisticated (E.g. A static IP address) you need to vi stuff in /etc.
• Ubuntu is gnome based, I think KDE is better. I think new users will get confused over kubuntu, edbuntu, etcbuntu.

Note that I do not dis any of Suse, Redhat or Ubuntu. These are all mighty fine distros, and I run Suse and Ubuntu on a laptop and server. I even think Ubuntu is better than Mandriva for some newbies, as they wont want to do any configuring after the install.

I dont recommend gentoo as I have tried it twice. Install took days, common hardware was unsupported out of the box, configuration was all about editing /etc files, and there were regular fuck-ups that just broke the system when you tried updating packages. Its also increasingly pointless to compile now that 64bit is here and distros produce 64bit versions.

Manriva's weaknesses are:

• Horrible artwork.
• Some poor decisions to use bleeding edge releases of KDE (2006 had quite a few niggles caused by going to 3.4 with its API changes).
• Some configuration dialogs have poor useability (e.g. setting up printers).
• A seriously deficient layout to the club pages. Its really hard to find anything useful on them, and the whole site is confusing.