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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."
There was a time, when Linux distros were measured by how close they were to in terms of functionality to MS Windows. Now they are inovating like crazy and this 3D desktop from Mandriva beats anything that will ship in Vista.
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!
I ate your fish.
Man, I ran it on my Macbook Pro and shit it got hot....
A 'release candidate' is equivalent to a final release in all respects except name. It is a candidate for release. The development team believes that this build is as bug free and featured filled as it needs to be and is branded a release candidate. It is then sent over to testing (or to users as is more frequently the case) where it undergoes final testing. If it passes final testing, it is rebadged as RTM, but THE SAME BITS GO INTO AN RC AS TO AN RTM. This isn't a testing release or a beta release where you are expected to find and squash bugs. The bugs are expected to be worked out of the system or are so uninteresting as to not warrant further development time.
If you find a serious bug in an RC, someone, somewhere fucked up royally.
By the time their final release is ready we will have Ulteo to play with. http://www.ulteo.com/main/
Common sense is not so common
While their video does show (some) of the things that the 3D desktop can do, it's actually *far* smoother in real life. Possibly they recorded it on a machine that was too slow to run the app and xvidcap at the same time.
Up to this point it's been a bit of a pain in the backside to set up but now distros are integrating it the next batch of releases should make it trivial.
Compiz and co are really slick and I find it rather amusing that everyeone *except* the world's biggest software company has managed to get their next generation desktop released prior to 2007.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I would like to see how far Linux has come since Redhat 5.x (my last test-run) but I see that to use my dial-up modem beyond 16k I first need to get the US$20 driver for my chipset. The instructions to get it working are unnerving for a soft, indulged, undisciplined XP user like me. Thanks but no thanks.
Mona means "c**t" (female reproductive organ) in an italian dialect...
He started with "I'm really not trying to troll or flame" or something similar. That's the internet equivalent of "I'm just sayin'", which some people follow up rude or instulting comments under some illusion that it makes their statement less insulting or rude. Apparently, it works.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
The administration tools of Mandriva are *a lot* better than Ubuntu's. Have you read all the blog posts about how difficult it was to get a printer working with Dapper's default Cups configuration. In Mandriva, your printer will be configured automagically during install if it is switched on or connected to the network, and after install, it suffices to start an automatic detection of printers, and there you go.
Mandriva also has graphical tools for configuring a basic firewall, setting up xgl and aiglx, configuring a VPN connection, configuring back-ups, configuring your UPS,.. Ubuntu has none of these.
Thanks to parallell init, Mandriva 2007.0 also boots faster than Dapper, and it has a more recent kernel and better support of some very recent hardware. Remember that Ubuntu is already some months out.
windows XP also doesn't come with ati or nvidia drivers... it uses a vesa driver by default, too
this whole graphics-card driver disaster is not mandrivas fault by the way... the thing is that ati and nvidia don't allow linux distros to include the binary drivers - they don't even allow them to include self-written open drivers...
anyhow, to get nvidia drivers running in mandriva, do this:
download the driver (i'll assume it's in root's home directory)
in a shell: urpmi kernel-source
init 3
(you are now in text mode)
login as root
cd ~
sh NVIDIA[tab-key to complete the filename of the driver installer]
follow the instructions of the installer
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I think its more of the other way round...no free Linux distro would include those drivers by choice.
I still recommend it to newbies for the following reasons:
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:
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
I use it and I love it =)
I tried ubuntu some month ago - I didn't like it, although I can't remember why I didn't like it... might have been hardware issues... I'll defenitely try ubuntu 6 before installing mandriva 2007 final (when that's done)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Actually, you can get the Ubuntu DVD.. Then you dont need an internet connection.
windows XP also doesn't come with ati or nvidia drivers... it uses a vesa driver by default, too
Um, I call BS. I installed a Windows XP system from scratch as late as yesterday (from an original retail disc with SP2 slipstream'd) and it gave me proper nVidia drivers. Old ones, mind you, but the chipset had gone out of production and I couldn't find any newer drivers from nVidia's site. The ones included in Windows supported everything essential, though.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Very true. I temporarily switched to Mandriva at 10.1 and found the configuration tools to be very nice, but I ended up switching back to Redhat (Fedora) after a few months. Fedora also has decent config tools (system-* are quite nice). Fedora pissed me off for the last time a few months ago, so I'm now an Ubuntu user. I was really supprised by the lack of decent config tools, and the networking scripts are quite bad. I ended up having to write my own.
Have they finally fixed the update proplem? When I was using it I kept having to manually change mirrors every few weeks as one would stop responding. That's what I like about yum, it automatically switches to a different mirror when one isn't reachable. With Ubuntu the listed servers are always up and fast.
I used to think that until 2.14, and I've used KDE as my desktop since '99. With the progress Gnome has finally made, it's going to take a lot to make me switch back to KDE. Give it another try.
Have you seen the defaults in Fedora or (even worse) RHEL? Mandriva is beautiful by comparison. So is Windows 95.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Ubuntu includes Nvidia's (it's in linux-restricted-modules).
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
I like mandriva because: - lots of packages updated in cooker which has lots of mirrors - it is not biased towards any desktop environment - has zshell well configured that boost productivity in shell, as opposite to ubuntu that seems more of a MS invention to keep people out of their keyboards that are a great power of linux - penguin liberation front - in 2006 release the kernel was compiled by the intel compiler giving the fastest boot time i ever seen on a distro - makes great use of dkms to install kernel modules on boot and the kernel comes with a great configuration, i never needed to compile a kernel since i moved from slackware The only true competition (have enough packages available) are : - suse : they suck in latest software, where are the distros ?!?!? - gentoo : productivity sucks because everything needs to be compiled, no interfaces, PAINFULL !!!! 10 years ago this would be ok, not now. - ?ubuntu : sudo ? sudomania is not for me... typing the password 100 for 100 commands ... is that safe ? just keep asking the sysadmin some commands while you take notes of the password.
Despite users not participating much in slashdot it can be seen that the distro is very active from the package contributions and if someday i have to switch to other linux i will be in big trouble because all of them SUCK.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5792753647 750188322&sourceid=docidfeed&hl=en
Ah yes, because if Ubuntu has a DVD download, only Ubuntu has a DVD download. This is number two on my list of annoying this Ubuntu users do. The other is the happy land of the average Ubuntu user - where replacing the word 'Linux' with 'Ubuntu' in any post gets you a quicker path to OT III.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
The problems with graphics card drivers are not unique to Mandriva.
Graphics card manufacturers are blatantly flouting the law which says that a person is privy to every secret embodied in every article they rightfully own, by simple virtue of the fact of ownership, even if that article be a graphics card and the secret be how to program it. Both ATI and nVidia licence their drivers on egregious and legally unenforcible terms which ride roughshod over the user's common law property rights. They get away with this by having the upper hand to begin with.
Neither ATI nor nVidia are willing to comply with the law by releasing the necessary details that would allow the creation of Free drivers for their cards, for fear that this might help their competitors; despite each spending vast amounts of their R&D budget on deconstructing competitors' products {most of the rest is spent bribing games publishers to make their games run slower on certain setups; ATI will pay good money to any software company to write a game which runs half a frame per century slower on an nVidia display, and vice versa}.
The GPL quite sensibly forbids the linking of non-Free code with the Linux kernel. Everyone must be free to work on the Linux kernel and everything which links to it, otherwise the authors of the non-Free parts would have an unfair advantage over tha authors of the Free parts.
As a half-arsed compromise gesture, ATI and nVidia have created free wrappers that interface between the Linux kernel and the Windows driver for the graphics card. You have to compile the wrapper against the kernel, and the resulting binary is considered to be a derivative work of the kernel source. Now the kernel is under GPL, which does not permit such a derivative work to be made. The only thing allowing it is the Fair Use / Fair Dealing provision of Copyright law. Basically, it's OK to make a copy or derived work if it's an unavoidable, necessary step in doing something else you already have permission to do: for example, the copy of part of an audio CD that exists in the buffer memory of a portable CD player with anti-shock is fair use, since otherwise you would not be allowed to listen to your own CD. The derivative work you make based on Linux is fair use, to the extent that it is being used with a graphics card that you rightfully own. However, distributing it doesn't qualify as fair use, because that isn't an unavoidable step: the recipient could obtain all the parts and build it themself.
This means that you can't distribute a Linux kernel compiled with the ATI or nVidia drivers. You probably could distribute a kernel with one or the other wrapper and no binary driver module, relying on the user to download it. However, this would crash straight away due to the absence of the important bit. And ATI and nVidia have also seen to it that you can't expect for a kernel compiled with more than one option {Free VESA driver, nVidia non-Free driver, ATI non-Free driver} to work.
You may not care a whit for software ideals, but do you care about not getting shafted up the arse by hardware vendors' illegal practices?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I used to reccomend Mandrake to everyone.. then when they switched the mandriva release was so buggy and broken I had to start suggesting something to the LUG members so I tested and started suggesting Ubuntu.
Mandriva did a bone headed move and really screwed up MAndrake on their first mandriva release. it was crap, buggy installer and it sighup'd more than any other linux install I ever saw.
I'll try it again if it's back up to the quality that mandrake was noted for.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The GPL quite sensibly forbids the linking of non-Free code with the Linux kernel. Everyone must be free to work on the Linux kernel and everything which links to it, otherwise the authors of the non-Free parts would have an unfair advantage over tha authors of the Free parts.
Thanks to companies like nVidia, it's a darn good thing that this statement isn't true. I could write something capable of working with the Linux kernel, distribute it as closed source, and not make it GPL.
I wouldn't be able to actually distribute it with the Linux kernel, so it wouldn't actually work by itself - it'd be a DIY type project...but I could do it.
This is the biggest reason I use Gentoo. Forget ricing/compiling for speed/compiling for pride. It saves time if you're one of those people who ends up with a lot of these things.
Most of the "you have to build this yourself" work is just downloading the package. Gentoo can do the building for me, integrate it in a package management system, and handle any patches/intricacies that I'd rather not bother with.
Even if nobody else has done this, it's generally not bad to write a build myself (by comparison to writing my own RPM).
Of course, for a lot of programs, you really don't need recompilation. Its only to get around things like the GPL, or because the authors haven't yet made a distro for your thing.
I'm thinking someone needs to make a decent Gentoo hybrid that combines binary and non-binary package management into one so that you get the advantage of quick installs when you can while getting automated building when you can't.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Are you serious? I have used both distros and Ubuntu is no way better than Mandriva! For starters the "user" that Ubuntu creates to start with has root privileges or a close approximation there of. Not just that but it auto logs in this user to the gui which is even less intelligent. I mean put first time user together with root privs in a gui environment and you are asking for trouble. Mandriva creates a root user and a non-privileged user at start and this way is secure. I mean most lazy people will not bother to create a non-root account they will just continue to use the account created on install. Secondly Mandriva's package management system is way smoother than Ubuntu's. Thirdly I just installed the new Mandriva on my laptop and I didn't have to configure anything at all. Even my wireless worked out of box. I would like to see Ubuntu do that. zero
From the parent: "Ubuntu feels foreign to me as I just don't like the way things are set up and it' s only on one CD so you need a net connection when you want more software"
All I said was that Ubuntu has a DVD download, meaning that you don't need an internet connection when you want to get more software, I *never* said that other distros don't have a DVD download... Where on earth did you get that from?? All I was doing was informing him/her that a lack of internet connection on an Ubuntu box isn't a problem
Honestly you sound like you have a real problem with Ubuntu users. Why? Ubuntu is nice for those of us who want simplicity (I am not saying other distros don't offer this, Ubuntu is just one of those that does).
The Linux = Ubuntu thing? It just happens, the amount of times I have heard "I am using Linux 3" when they are refering to Fedora Core 3 or such...
I have to agree that this post sounds as though posted from someone that has never used Mandriva. I run Ubuntu on one machine and Mandriva 2006 on the other and far too often I find myself preferring Mandriva. I'm no n00b, and spend the bulk of my time in bash, but the administrative tools (and installation process) really are quite a bit ahead of Ubuntu's. Using urpmi, you have most the power of apt-get available as well. In terms of free distros, Ubuntu is ahead in that it will inform you when new updates are ready...you don't find yourself having to change package mirrors as often as you do with Mandriva's free servers. Additionally, apt-get is much faster than urpmi. But to say Mandriva is dead and Ubuntu is the best is ludicrous and uninformed. Don't forget, as well as Mark Shuttleworth has guided Ubuntu thus far, it's still a pretty new distro, and has plenty of time to improve.
I'm pretty excited to read about parallel init in the new Mandriva. Maybe I'll take this distro for a test drive soon. But like everything else in life, "don't knock it till you try it."
(Side note: As a company, I'm not too fond of Mandriva. The way they ousted the original head of the company is reprehensible, and obviously I like what Ubuntu does for the community much better than I like the actions of Mandriva.)
I don't think anybody claims that Gentoo is a newbie distro. However, in my experience if you are interested in really learning about Linux, I have to recommend Gentoo. The documentation is very good and beats the pants out of anything else including Ubuntu which I use now. Mandrake is terrible as far as documentation goes and it drove me crazy when I had to use it over the course of a summer. While Ubuntu forums is good for newbies, I find that most of the really interesting questions I ask get responses like "Hey, I have the same problem, let me know if you find a soln." I still take recourse to the Gentoo forums, although I use Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop.
I used Mdk/Mdv for 5 years and just, within the last month or so, switched to Kubuntu. 1. Mdv installation is vastly better than Kubuntu. Printing, and to a lesser extent networking, are simply better in Mdv. I had to fight for ages to get networking printing to work right in Kubuntu, even though with exactly the same boxes it worked fine in Mdv. In the end, the way I got it working in Kubuntu was simply to steal all the configuration files that Mdv had created. 2. Once you have an up-and-running system, Kubuntu makes Mdv look second rate. Especially if you are running a 64-bit system. Mdv's policy of basically not updating packages except for security reasons means that one ends up with a system whose apps get rapidly out of date. And since 64-bit apps tend to be still at the stage of fixing pointer bugs, it means that one cannot get supported, more stable versions of many common apps. And don't get me started on URPMI. It used to work great. And maybe it still does on pure 32-bit systems. But in the end it was URPMI that drove me from Mdv to Kubuntu. Too many of Mdv's own packages simply refuse to install properly under Mdv. I imagine that it's not really the fault of URPMI, but more the fault that the packagers don't build dependency lists properly; but whatever the cause, the frustration of not being able to install stuff properly using URPMI on 64-bit systems became too great. There are things about Kubuntu I strongly dislike; but on the whole I am glad that I made the switch. I might try out Mdv 2007 in a virtual machine, but unless it is a vast improvement over 2006, I won't be switching back to Mdv, at least for my main desktop system.
Urghh, can we have a break from all Ubuntu-is-tha-best/Ubuntu-is-sooo-coool/Ubuntu-is- sssssexxxyy shit, at last? There must be a dozen reasons a man may preffer to have a trusted friend rather running after each new bitch that pops around...
:-)
Mandriva from its beginning is a community effort - something that appears sooo new and modern to bitch-lovers...
Mandriva is organized far better than most other distros and OSes...
To people that value what it stands for and what delivers, the name doesn't matter. While I can understand the freaking ignorance of native english freaks that associate Mandriva with whatever they do, in most other languages it is just a name, and one far better than Ubuntu negro-mumbo-jumbo, huh!!!
And to your "question" - yes, it has very good "userbase", and one that fortunately gets better and healthier without parasites
Madriva's old news
(Score:2, Insightful)
by Fyre2012 (762907) Alter Relationship on Monday September 11, @01:43AM (#16079082)
(Last Journal: Sunday January 16, @01:15AM)
Do people even stull use this distro? Everything it does, Ubuntu does better.
Personally, I prefer Gentoo, but for what Mandrake^H^H^Hiva is supposed to be, is there really a userbase for it anymore?
I realize I'm feeding a troll, tempting to just mod you into oblivion...
But...
Install MythTv on Ubuntu, then get back to us.
Mandriva is a nice, solid distro with ~bleeding edge package versioning.
It also has an excellent package manager in urpmi.
(IMHO, at least the equal of apt and friends)
I ran Slackware, RH for ages (pre-Fedora), and ran Debian for a long while.
I have also REPEATEDLY tried Ubuntu, due to the hype---
I just don't see what the Ubuntu fanboys are raving about.
Mandriva simply works better for me.
You are living in the past. I run both mandriva 2007 beta 3 and Ubuntu 6.06 and mandriva does many thing much better than Ubuntu. I recently added a disk drive to the Ubunutu rig and two to the Mandriva rig. The ubuntu disk wizard is very primitive compared to mandriva's tools and required me to manually edit /etc/fstab to add the drive. No big deal, but for a newbie that can be daunting. Mandriva's Wizard allow me to set up a RAID 1 configuration with just a few mouse click and automatically installed the mdadm package for me. It was a big difference.
Mandriva One, their one cd install solution is still a good choice for newbies and I would recommend it just as highly I a would recommend Ubuntu.
In one italian city slang "mona" means "pussy".
Are mandriva folks heading toward Lesbian GNU/Linux?
I would love to see where you get this 'the law requires companies to supply documentation' thing. It's still legal to poke at the hardware and write your own driver, it's just bloody hard, which explains why most efforts haven't gotten very far.
So... use VESA or don't patronize nVidia and ATI? No, you won't get the same performance, but you will still have your pride.
Do you know this to be fact? How? Or are you just making this up?
I really, really doubt it works that way, especially because it isn't in the game developer's interest. Lavish money/time on devs so they spend extra time optimizing for company X's card I can see, but a bribe to cripple performance on company Y's card?
More drivers might have come in with SP2, I dunno.
With XP Pro original or SP1 (the two that I've worked with -- I'm the hardware dude for the local PC user group) most ATI cards are not recognised, not even fairly old ones (1998?!) Croggling, considering how common they are. XP-concurrent S3 and Matrox cards are usually recognised; NVidia sometimes.
In my random pokes at various linux disties, I've found the dividing line for whether video works right off is VESA 1.x vs 2.0 -- the latter usually work, the former often don't.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
That's okay since the high-performance drivers come with the video card.
It's amazing the difference some details can make: my environment of choice is Windowmaker, and Mandriva is, as far as I know, the only distrib that integrates it properly (read recent release and menu consistent with the distrib witout having to set it up). I know many will say Windowmaker is a thing of the past, but at least you can switch between virtual desktop using the wheel.
If you want to do that in Gnome Ubuntu, you have to switch from metacity to openbox, but then trying to use the update manager crashes the system.
Not to mention that I like having a control center you can start up with one click/command. Since it's gpl, I still don't understand why nobody (except PCLinuxOS which is a spin-off anyway) has grabbed it yet. It may need some tweaking to do so, but I feel it'd fit perfectly well in a distro such as Ubuntu.
Whether he'll something out before the kinks are worked out of 2007 is an entire different thing altogether
Similarly to you, I had made the switch from Mandrake to Kubuntu; for me, it was a year ago. I found that, unlike the k/Ubuntu distros, upgrading Mandrake didn't work, so I had to keep reinstalling from scratch, putting all my config tweaks into a script file so that I could easily reproduce them after I had made yet another clean install of the newest version. Urpmi was easy to use but would produce broken installations from time to time; I didn't realize what the problem was until I read about how other people had no problems with other package managers. (Example: I installed third-party packages, such as "Thac's RPMs", and urpmi happily installed them without telling me that the dependencies were messed up.) I got tired of reinstalling new versions every time a new version came out, so I stopped at v10.0-official (which is why I still call it Mandrake, since the silly "Mandriva" name change didn't come until later).
Like you, I found that Mandrake/Mandriva's printer config for my HP PSC-1210 worked smoothly whereas Kubuntu's doesn't. Where exactly did you find the printer config files (pathnames), and where did you insert them into Kubuntu to make it work? I would love to know details. If a reply to this posting is not appropriate, please email me at "kwtm-zrezwtid" under tamlylin stripe net, except replace "under" with "at" and "stripe" with "dot". Thanks.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Either you are privy to the secrets in it, or you don't rightfully own it. That is fundamental to the definition of property. They can't have it both ways. By selling it to you, they have agreed to let you "in" on the secrets. If they didn't want people to have the right to know what is inside their graphics cards, they shouldn't sell them.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It's not for next year. 2007 will be released this month. It's called 2007 because it'll be the current version for most of the year 2007.
Those *are* the only differences (well, and whether it's a KDE or GNOME live CD, which is also mentioned for each one). Each language supported equates to a certain amount of space used on the CD, and we just can't fit every language we support (nearly 100, more than most distros) on a single live CD, there'd be no space left for actual applications. Hence we produce a lot of live CDs, each with a different selection of languages supported.
And to short-circuit all the crap in this post and the replies, we do provide the nvidia and ATI proprietary drivers in several editions. They're in the commercial boxed editions of 2007. They'll also be in the Club-members only commercial editions. They will also be in some of the editions of One 2007 that are released, for no charge. There will be some One editions that contain only free software, and some that contain some non-free stuff, including the Nvidia and ATI drivers. This gives you a choice between supporting software freedom and actually having 3D acceleration. :) We do think it's important to always provide an edition that is 100% free software, as we believe in the free software ideal.
This is already the case with the betas and RCs - some of the One editions include non-free software, and some do not. If you're not a free software idealist and want your nvidia / ati driver out of the box, get one of the editions that are tagged as including non-free software.