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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.
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
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.
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.
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
If you're still stuck with dialup (which I unfortunatley am in this damn area), buy a 3com 5610. It's a full hardware modem and works out of the box and every distro I've tried. It's a bit of a bitch to get working on Windows, though (2000 at least).
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
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 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.