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Mandriva 2007 Released

moyoto writes, "Mandriva has announced today the immediate availability of Mandriva Linux 2007. This new version includes the latest Gnome 2.16 and KDE 3.5.4, as well as a 3D desktop with both AIGLX and Xgl technologies. You can download Mandriva 2007 in one of the several free versions available with bittorrent, or buy one of the commercial packs. You can easily test the new 3D Desktop with one of the 16 Live/Install CDs, Gnome- or KDE-based, available in more than 70 different languages." The distro features a new theme named Ia Ora ("hello" in French Polynesian).

173 comments

  1. Bloated by millwall · · Score: 5, Funny

    This new version includes the latest Gnome 2.16 and KDE 3.5.4, as well as a 3D desktop with both AIGLX and Xgl technologies.

    With Mandriva it's probably easier to list what it doesn't include.

    1. Re:Bloated by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But that's the way some of us like it. Why should I have to download and compile some .tar.gz files rather than just opening up the GUI, selecting the packages I want, and install. No need to worry about dependancies or weird compile errors.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:Bloated by Svartalf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And to list what works 100% on all systems...

      Not everything in the past has worked right (There's a reason I'm using FC5 or Ubuntu
      right at the moment for my main systems...)- their SQA has left quite a bit to be
      desired in the past. To be sure, 2006-1 was probably one of their best iterations;
      but like before in the past, things like PCMCIA not working 100% of the time on 100%
      of the platforms just mar the whole experience. Oh, I'll continue to be a member and
      install on part of my platforms, but that's because I'm needing it for testing purposes.
      Unless it really shows up nice and stable, it's not going on everything.

      --
      I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
    3. Re:Bloated by plantman-the-womb-st · · Score: 1

      There is always things like apt. No need to have it all on the install media.

      --
      Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
    4. Re:Bloated by ronadams · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There are always things like install media. No need to require everything be obtained from apt. It's a war of preference.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
    5. Re:Bloated by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      But if there's room for it, then why not? It still all fits on a single DVD. If I have to download all the packages I want to install then it may take me ages to get the initial install done. Not everybody has a 5 Mbit connection. I'm on a 1Mbit connection, because it's fast enough for most stuff. But I don't want to have to download all the packages that I want to install.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    6. Re:Bloated by nine-times · · Score: 5, Insightful

      To be fair, what OS works 100% of the time on 100% of the platforms it supports? Maybe OSX comes close, but only by limiting the supported platforms quite a lot.

    7. Re:Bloated by couchslug · · Score: 1

      A DVD/full-featured CD install is convenient for doing additional machines, and when it's a live disk you can take advantage of that for rescue, hardware compatibility checking, and having your OS of choice portable to any machine you like.
      My install media weigh the same if I burn Damn Small Linux or a full DVD worth of software. :)

      --
      "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
    8. Re:Bloated by scott_karana · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In any modern Linux distribution (and even most antiquated ones) ther is no need to worry about downloading tarballs or compiling.
      It's just a matter of how many packages are installed by default, and I respect the fact that you like having lots of 'em to choose from.
      I'm just being a pedant about packaging systems for Linux is all.

    9. Re:Bloated by Afrosheen · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah, OSX has bragging rights with hardware compatibility.

        "Our OS will run on every single supported platform. All 5 of them!" ;)

    10. Re:Bloated by Shawn+is+an+Asshole · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's a pain in the ass to have to swap multiple CDs during an install. Especially when you get to #4 and the drive doesn't want to read a file off of it.

      Ubuntu has the right idea on this. The install media is a single CD that contains a usable desktop. Everything else can then be installed over apt (though they really need to make a n00b-friendly alternative to Synaptic). If you want a specific desktop, download the correct CD for it. Ie, Gnome (Ubuntu), KDE (Kubuntu), or XFCE (Xubuntu).

      --
      "It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
    11. Re:Bloated by meringuoid · · Score: 3, Informative
      There is always things like apt. No need to have it all on the install media.

      Yes... and it seems they've thought of this. There's a single-CD download, which installs a minimal system and then lets you get the rest over the network. I'll be getting this one, I think: I don't care to clutter up my room with unnecessary coasters!

      http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-fre e-2007-mini.torrent

      Soon as the ADSL contention clears tonight at about half-elevenish, I'll totally nab that.

      --
      Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
    12. Re:Bloated by noamsml · · Score: 1

      Uh, Vim with syntax highlighting?

    13. Re:Bloated by taylortbb · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why choose? Mandriva has a multi-disk version and a single disk one. And the multi-CD version has a single DVD version. Not every location has a high speed internet connection, and even if it does it takes a while. As someone who installs most of what's on the DVD it sure beats waiting for everything to download. Sure I have to download it initially but when I've got 5 machines to install on it takes less time in the end.

    14. Re:Bloated by Fallingcow · · Score: 1
      though they really need to make a n00b-friendly alternative to Synaptic


      They did. Applications->Add/Remove... opens a simple install/uninstall gui, that includes most apps that someone who's likely to be confused by Synaptic could possibly want. It's at least as easy as MS's add/remove programs in Control Panel. Need more? File->advanced in that same program will open Synaptic.
    15. Re:Bloated by nocomment · · Score: 0

      also things like urpmi.

      --
      /* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
      /* http://allyourbasearebelongto.us */
    16. Re:Bloated by Generic+Guy · · Score: 1
      Not everything in the past has worked right ... - their SQA has left quite a bit to be desired in the past.

      Here's an example even more basic than PCMCIA issues.

      I own a pretty standard Microsoft optical mouse (2 buttons, plus that wheelie thing). My last attempt with Mandrake/Mandriva the installer system found the mouse and worked great, but after installation it could never find the mouse. Just try navigating without a mouse, even just to try to find the control panel for the mouse.

      How could the installer use the mouse fine, but not the full system? For shame, Mandrake! Anyway, as you can probably guess, I haven't bothered to spend the money on it since.

      --
      { - Generic Guy - }
    17. Re:Bloated by tepples · · Score: 1
      It's a pain in the ass to have to swap multiple CDs during an install.

      It's a pain in the ass to dial the Internet multiple times during an install.

    18. Re:Bloated by Liam+Slider · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, what's bloated is when you buy and install the lastest version of Windows, which is about the same size and takes just as long....only to find your list of applications is one web browser, a media player, one rather crappy shell, one e-mail program, a calendar, one built in photo gallery (finally?), one crappy DVD burning program, and a handful of crappy tools.

    19. Re:Bloated by Shawn+is+an+Asshole · · Score: 1

      I'm aware of that, but it is fairly limited. Also it doesn't let you remove anything included in, say, ubuntu-desktop.

      --
      "It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
    20. Re:Bloated by tehcyder · · Score: 1
      With Mandriva it's probably easier to list what it doesn't include
      But does it run Windows?
      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    21. Re:Bloated by ronadams · · Score: 1

      Well said. The GNU/Linux "movement" has always been, and continues to be, all about options, in everything from installation to usage. While I'm a fan on Ubuntu's one CD install, I appreciate the options Mandriva is offering.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
    22. Re:Bloated by cbolton · · Score: 1

      I agree. I was a Mandrake usr for years, but the last distro left a bad taste. Freespire does much more, with less effort. Give it a go.

  2. Pfffttt... by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's just like Mandriva 2006 only it has a new player roster...

    --
    This guy's the limit!
    1. Re:Pfffttt... by MrAnnoyanceToYou · · Score: 3, Funny

      The funny thing is that Linux might actually be more popular with Madden-esque voice overs plugged in as error messages. Like clippy, only openly farsical.

      EX:
      "OOOoh.... It looks like he's caused a segmentation fault. That's gotta hurt."
      "Wow. Now, that there's just some good old fashioned permissions problems. He's gonna need to log as root and run some chmod and chown commands."
      "You know, right there's where you really have the option of some good coding. The rehashing of that string with the library function would make your code quite a bit more efficient. Just like in the old days."

      And everyone's favorite,
      "Boy, that's a good little piece of code, but you could really use a run back to the manual on that one."

      I'd love to see the whiteboard-enabled screen on my code sometimes, and have someone who knew what they were doing scribble out what was wrong with it, but maybe that's just me.

  3. Distibution Errors: #1 by bfree · · Score: 3, Informative

    Announcing a new release and having your web site melt under the load. Though I suppose it could be worse, they could be a hosting provider launching a new high availability service :-D

    --

    Never underestimate the dark side of the Source

    1. Re:Distibution Errors: #1 by sumi-manga · · Score: 0

      Mandriva Free 2007 is distributed via BitTorrent

  4. Today is the day of desktop linux! by Reverend528 · · Score: 4, Informative

    A new Slackware and a new Mandriva! What a time to be alive!

    1. Re:Today is the day of desktop linux! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A new Slackware and a new Mandriva! What a time to be elive!

      Ahem, released the last week :)
      http://distrowatch.com/3720

    2. Re:Today is the day of desktop linux! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And Fedora Core 6 in just over a weeks time too.

  5. Dunno... by nathan+s · · Score: 1

    I dunno if this new oral theme will fly with my gf...

    1. Re:Dunno... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't have a gf.

    2. Re:Dunno... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apparently not one worth having anyways

    3. Re:Dunno... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Guess you need to upgrade to gf-2007.

    4. Re:Dunno... by joebutton · · Score: 2, Funny

      > dunno if this new oral theme will fly with my gf...

      Get yourself a Windows box. It'll go down much more often than your gf.

  6. Re:Ubuntu has already won by papaia · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The reason is urpmi.

    --
    == With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
  7. But at least... by Roadkills-R-Us · · Score: 2, Funny

    ... it has a new, French Polynesian, "Hello World" theme!

    If only it were "Hello Kitty" I dould download it at once for my niece.

    1. Re:But at least... by beckerist · · Score: 1

      ...just to have it explode in her face? No thanks!

      ah but I jest!

  8. Mandriva/Ubuntu. by haeger · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I recently tested Mandriva (LiveCD) on my KUbuntu-box. I must say that I'm very impressed with how polished Mandriva is. KUbuntu isn't bad, far from it but Mandriva is just better. Atleast the latest version. Just like KUbuntu everything just works but there is a consistensy in Mandriva that I don't see in KUbuntu. I really recommend everyone to take Mandriva for a testdrive. It's really impressive. I was going to switch my old Mandriva2006-box to KUbuntu but seeing this new version I don't think I will. I'll just do the normal upgrade-dance and all will be well.
    One thing that annoys me though is the high price for the retail version. A silver membership will be more expensive than Vista in just 2-3 years. I think.

    I might have to re-evaluate running KUbuntu on my laptop. I do however remember that there was something that annoyed me so much about the packages in Mandriva that I just had to switch. I think it was the fact that new packages came to the distribution at such a slow pace.

    .haeger

    --
    You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
    1. Re:Mandriva/Ubuntu. by l3v1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A silver membership will be more expensive than Vista in just 2-3 years. I think

      Just one question: what do you think how many new releases Mandriva will live to see during those years ? And Windows ? I'm not saying it's cheap, I'm saying your comparison is flawed.

      --
      I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
    2. Re:Mandriva/Ubuntu. by ErroneousBee · · Score: 1
      A silver membership will be more expensive than Vista in just 2-3 years.

      Or 4-6 years for 2 PCs.

      Or 6-9 years for 3 PCs.

      Or 20-30 years if you install on a small office or install for relatives too.

      --
      **TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
  9. Simple XGL Setup? by sumi-manga · · Score: 0

    This could be great. Maybe this will be an instant painless, and woking, XGL setup. When the 1337 dude rocking Aero sees how quick and smooth an ATI 9600 can perform XGL fancies - the look on his face will be priceless.

    1. Re:Simple XGL Setup? by RobertLTux · · Score: 2, Interesting

      the one thing you want to do is pick up a silver membership if you have hardware that needs nongpl drivers (ati and Nvidia chips) benefits:

      1 feeds a small group of monkeys that help a lot (HI ADAM)
      2 offical club benefits
      3 updates that won't (the monkeys hope) trash your system

      --
      Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
  10. Why the stock 2.4 kernel!?!? by BeeBeard · · Score: 1

    *runs*

    1. Re:Why the stock 2.4 kernel!?!? by AdamWill · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Er, what? The kernel is 2.6.17. There isn't even a 2.4 kernel in the distro any more (we still had a legacy one in 2006).

  11. Re:Ubuntu has already won by AdamWill · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hmm, let me know how Ubuntu is doing with its easy 3D desktop configuration wizard that allows to pick either AIGLX or Xgl depending on what your hardware supports. How's their SMB, NFS and WebDAV mount wizards? Their graphical VPN configuration tool? Their FTP, web, mail, DNS, SMB, NFS, and proxy server configuration wizards? autofs and ldap configuration tools? Their redundant firewall configuration tool? How's their internationalization going, is Ubuntu available in over 70 languages yet? Yeah, no reason to use anything but Ubuntu, obviously. Feel free to let me know what apt does that urpmi doesn't, too. And if apt was the winner of the Linux desktop 'wars', why didn't Debian win sometime in 1999?

  12. Re:Ubuntu has already won by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think Novell would beg to differ. SLED 10 is very nice, IMO. (Yes, I've tried Ubuntu).

    --
    Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
  13. I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu by Yahma · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This will probably get modded down as flamebait, but honestly I prefer SUSE over Mandriva (Mandrake). I have tried Mandrake many times over the past few years, and even joined their "Mandrake Club" a few years back when they were on the brink of Bankruptcy to help them out; however, I have always felt that their Distro was never QA'ed as well as SUSE or Redhat for that matter. When you fire up the latest SUSE, you tell you have a professionally QA'ed product, as everything works out of the box. With Mandriva on the other hand, everything looks great on paper. They always have some of the latest packages, and include alot of the new technology; however, there are always a few things that dont work well with my system after I install it. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've even had trouble installing a new release of Mandriva.

    Now I have nothing against Mandriva, and I like urmpi, but I think I may pass on this release, or try it out on a Virtual machine first before getting rid of my SUSE and Fedora boxes.... Now there's a thought..

    Yahma
    Browse the web safely, use Firefox and an Anonymous Web Proxy to avoid spyware and viruses.
    1. Re:I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      I found the exact opposite with SUSE. I recently tried SUSE 10.1, and after a new install, it wouldn't even update itself. And I couldn't even get the 3D drivers working with all I tried, and in Mandriva they just work by default. It looked really nice and polished, so much so that I really tried to get everything working, but there was just so many problems with things "Just Not Working" that I switched back to Mandriva. Now Mandriva has the 3D desktop too, and I have no reason to use SUSE.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu by tljlb · · Score: 1

      I have to agree. We ran Mandrake/Mandriva almost exclusively for five years and moved to SUSE simply because of QA problems, at times problems a team of brain-damaged monkeys couldn't have missed. Of course, now that SUSE has Zen, I REALLY miss urpmi. Still wouldn't move back though. At least SUSE works reliably.

    3. Re:I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      From http://en.opensuse.org/Download:

      BEFORE YOU INSTALL READ THIS:

      The package manager in SUSE 10.1 is regrettably broken on most systems.

      I wouldn't be bragging about QA on a distro that ships with a broken package manager (sort of an integral part of the OS).

    4. Re:I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu by tokul · · Score: 1
      When you fire up the latest SUSE, ...

      suse has own quirks. In 10.1 zen_updater is resource hog and causes long timeouts in package manager. 9.3 bundled OpenOffice2 when it was not yet production stable. It took several updates to stabilize it. I think they have turned on OpenOffice font substitutions in some 8.x version. Substitutions work correctly only in Latin1 environments.

    5. Re:I prefer SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu by ReinoutS · · Score: 1

      Mandriva Linux 2007 is the first Mandriva release developed on a 1-year release cycle, which means it has received lots of QA. Having followed the release process quite closely (as close as you can get as a non-employee), I have no doubts about recommending it for anyone to try.

  14. Re:Ubuntu has already won by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

    I agree with the sibling. URPMI (and the graphical interface to it) make Mandriva the best newbie distro there is. I don't like messing around with any unnecessary stuff, so even though I'm no a newbie I still use it. Also, search for EasyURPMI and PLF. add those to you list of sources and you can get just about any application without having to worry about dependancies or compiling things. I've tried ubuntu, and I actually find it much harder to use than Mandriva.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  15. No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of use. by IpSo_ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In my opinion Mandriva still takes the cake as far as distro ease of use is concerned. The installer is dead simple (yet has an advanced mode) but the most important part is once you get it installed, it has the most complete set of utilities to configure and maintain your system which are accessible from a single "control panel". Everything from one click network printer discovery, to setting up TV cards/scanners, to firewall configuration.

    Sure some of the other distros are just starting to catch up now, they usually have a hodge-podge of utilties that work similar to the Mandriva ones, but few have a consistent interface and you usually need to know what they are called before you know what to click on, they aren't all located in one easy to find place. If you want a distro your mom can install and use, this is about as close as it comes currently.

    Here is the list of just some of the custom utilties Mandriva (Mandrake) offers for configuring your system:

    lsnetdrake,menudrake,drakbug,mandrakegalaxy.real,d rakconf,drakhelp,localedrake,drakoo,draklocale,man drakegalaxy,packdrake,userdrake,lspcidrake,diskdra ke,mousedrake,drakkeyboard,drakhelp_inst,drakconne ct,drakconsole,drakupdate_fstab,drakTermServ,drakn et_monitor,drakscanner,drakedm,drakids,draklog,dra knfs,drakx11,draksec,drakups,drakxtv,drakfirstboot ,drakconf.real,drakbackup,drakauth,drakboot,drakcl ub,drakconf,drakdisk,drakfont,drakperm,drakroam,dr akuser,drakautoinst,drakgw,keyboarddrake,drakonlin e,drakfirewall,draksplash,drakhardware,draksambash are,scannerdrake,drakxservices,logdrake,adduserdra ke,drakclock,drakhosts,harddrake2,drakmouse,drakpr oxy,draksound,drakxconf,userdrake,XFdrake,printerd rake,drakbug_report,drakprinter

    --
    Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
  16. Re:Ubuntu has already won by l3v1 · · Score: 1

    why didn't Debian win sometime in 1999

    Certainly not because of apt. I fully agree with you on the rest.

    Mandrake/riva has been a very friendly (I didn't write user-friendly on purpose) distro for much more years than Ubuntu has lived and it still is a very very nice distro. No reason to mock it, and certainly no fanboy ubuntuism can lower its merits.
     

    --
    I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
  17. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Knara · · Score: 1

    Though I haven't fiddled extensively with it, Ubuntu absolutely bugs me when it comes to doing "advanced" user tasks (like, oh I dunno, modifying GRUB or something from an X GUI front-end). SUSE 10.1 was a lot better for being easy on the maintenance side, while letting me easily find things in traditional places. Sounds like Mandriva might be similar, and XGL is a goodie I've kinda wanted to try.

  18. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Where do I start?

    - No choice of the locale at install time (ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8).
    - Installer won't let you leave a partition alone, they must all be assigned a mount point.
    - Won't install on an external hard drive out-of-the-box.
    - GRUB won't install anywhere but the master boot record of the first drive.
    - No rescue mode on the live CD even though the option is documented in the Fn.
    - No official kernel patched with the vastly superior suspend2.

  19. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thanks for your support.

    Seriously, isn't [your favorite distro here] basically the "winner" of the "desktop Linux distro" wars?

    Opinons are like pie holes, everyone has one.

  20. Mandriva Rant by 15973 · · Score: 1

    Remember when Mandrake 9 had bragging rights for its multimedia support? You could actually do music editing - audio and even midi - and Mandrake was your distro. Then remember when it merged with Connectiva, and we lost multimedia, and even 3D? Then remember what happened after that? I don't, 'cause I switched. I really loved Mandrake 9.x, and when they get back to their strengths I might even switch back, but until then, it's pretty much like the "player roster" comment above... all fluff, no stuff. Can anyone tell me what Mandrake specializes in now? What's their strength? Slackware is for hardcore folks, Suse is for business, Red Hat is for... uhh... Well, K/Ubuntu is the supposed to be the new user-friendly, so what's Mandriva's niche?

    1. Re:Mandriva Rant by AdamWill · · Score: 1

      Er, what? Merging with Conectiva didn't change anything at all about MDV's multimedia support. We didn't take anything out in that line, at least on purpose. What are you missing? And, um, we never removed anything to do with 3D support. Might have been some bugs in 2005 or 2006, but that's bugs, not intentional changes...

    2. Re:Mandriva Rant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Officially Mandriva is for beginners.

      I think Mandriva ist more user friendly than Ubuntu, while being more configurable than... well... Ubuntu. Or Fedora. Suse, I don't know. What I want to say is: What people brag about - like Ubuntu being "user friendly", which it isn't - is seldom fact.

      And that music stuff is still there, though not in the main repositories.

    3. Re:Mandriva Rant by AdamWill · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No. Mandriva Linux Discovery is for beginners. Mandriva Linux Powerpack is for experienced users. Mandriva Linux Powerpack+ is for SOHO users. Mandriva Linux Free is for just about everyone. =) We've never claimed to be a distro aimed specifically at beginners. We try and make the distro work for everyone. If we were all about beginners we probably wouldn't have an enterprise-aimed tool for setting up multiple redundant firewall machines, a comprehensive set of LAMP server packages, configuration tools for web, file, ftp, ldap, dns etc servers, and all the other stuff we do that beginners would run screaming from...=)

    4. Re:Mandriva Rant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah..Redhat uh..

      Yeah, I'm really going to put "Mandriva" whatever on a $15,000 Proliant and MSA Storage Array setup.

      Think I'll stick with Redhat Enterprise thanks..

    5. Re:Mandriva Rant by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      Mandriva's niche is also supposed to be user friendliness. What? you can't have 2 distros supporting the same niche?

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    6. Re:Mandriva Rant by philwx · · Score: 1

      Slackware is for hardcore folks, Suse is for business, Red Hat is for... uhh... Well, K/Ubuntu is the supposed to be the new user-friendly, so what's Mandriva's niche?

      Looks like they are competing for the user-friendly niche. God bless competition.

    7. Re:Mandriva Rant by ReinoutS · · Score: 1

      Mandriva has a Corporate Server offering with support contracts and all. I haven't tried it myself but wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

  21. Re:Ubuntu has already won by lordofthechia · · Score: 1

    You really consider uprmi superior to synaptic? I mainly use Mandriva 2006 at home, but from what I've used of synaptic I loved it. It was faster and allowed you to remove, install, and upgrade in the same window unlike the gui version of urpmi (where you have to open a version suited to *only* that one function).

    Most importantly, synaptic has the option to re-install a package without much fuss, I have not found this functionality in (the gui version of) urpmi. I was seriously considering switching to Kubuntu for this reason plus the availability of more recent packages (though I've recently discovered the mde repositories for Mandriva).

    I'm wondering what would I be missing, other than the shiny Mandriva Control Center with an Ubuntu Migration?

    --
    Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
  22. Re:Ubuntu has already won by AdamWill · · Score: 2, Informative

    The new rpmdrake in 2007 is a combined interface - install / remove are in the same application again.

  23. Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u by opkool · · Score: 4, Insightful

    +1

    Plus, there is the **other** configuration utility included in Mandriva that everybody forgets:

    vi

    Yes, you can use vi to configure your Mandriva and be happy.

    That's why I like Mandriva, choice:

    If I'm lazy or I want to show off, I use the Mandriva Control Center.
    If I want to configure something fast, screen + vi

    I wonder if those who call Mandriva a n00b distro have ever try it to use Mandriva as a serious distro. I do.

    Peace!

  24. what about updates? by roror · · Score: 1

    Do you get the security updates and updates to the softwares with the free version?

    1. Re:what about updates? by AdamWill · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes. Always have, always will. Run MandrivaUpdate, there they are. We sell Online, but that's an update _notification_ service - it gives you the little panel applet that alerts you when updates are available (and, optionally, can install them automatically). It's just a little convenience.

  25. Re:Ubuntu has already won by lordofthechia · · Score: 1

    no re-install? Reason I ask is I've had some packages flake out on me and a simple re-install would fix it though even with the old urpmi, manually removing and re-installing was never an option with some packaged (due to the dependecies spreading deep into KDE). Before anybody says that packages should not "flake out", ever had a HDD sector go bad?

    I may have to try the live CD then. Mainly I want to test the new rpm drake and more importantly I want to see if my soundcards digital out is supported by default (Fedora Core 4 picked it up by default! In Mandriva 2005,2006 I couldn't get it to work for the life of me - even following the ALSA website instructions).

    --
    Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
  26. PPC Version? by SmileeTiger · · Score: 1

    Is there or will there be a PPC version?

    I can't seem to find one for this or the previous version :(

    1. Re:PPC Version? by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      I think they stopped doing PPC releases at version 9. And now with all the Macs being Intel machines, I can't forsee anybody supporting PowerPC. Unless you go to a PPC specific distro like YellowDog, I don't think you're going to find a lot of distros that support PPC.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:PPC Version? by AdamWill · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are no official PPC releases any more. The PPC port still exists and is maintained by volunteers (principally Danny Tholen, actually). They haven't had the resources to do a stable release since, I think, 10.1 or 2005, but Cooker is still kept mostly up to date and works pretty well. If you really want to run Mandriva on PPC, go with current Cooker. Frankly, though, I'd recommend a dedicated distro like Yellow Dog unless you specifically want Mandriva, because you're comfortable with it or all your other machines run on it or something.

  27. Re:Ubuntu has already won by _|()|\| · · Score: 1

    Ubuntu looks really nice, but I'm still using SUSE, because AMD64 Debian eschews LSB and FHS, making it difficult to run 32-bit software.

  28. what realy bugs me is nfs mounted home folder by sasoon · · Score: 1

    Mandriva - great for home usage, everything works smoothly. The moment you install it at the office, where your home folder is nfs mounted - pletora of things stops working. For example Amarok. Strange KDE bugs show their ugly faces on nfs mounted home.

    1. Re:what realy bugs me is nfs mounted home folder by cafucu · · Score: 1

      sshfs can fix a plethora of things, not sure 'bout this one though.

      --
      :%s:work:/.:g
    2. Re:what realy bugs me is nfs mounted home folder by Mr.+Hankey · · Score: 1

      Make sure you have file locking configured correctly. If you see the nolock option in /etc/mtab (it's implicit with some options) or if you don't have the NFS lock daemon running, you won't be able to run apps which require file locking.

      --
      GPL: Free as in will
    3. Re:what realy bugs me is nfs mounted home folder by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And Ubuntu edgy in 3 weeks ;)

  29. French Polynesian?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    The distro features a new theme named Ia Ora ("hello" in French Polynesian).
    Sorry for asking, but WTF is "French Polynesian"?!

    "la Ora" doesn't sound anything like "bonjour" or "allo". If anything, "la Ora" sounds spanish or something. But not french.

    1. Re:French Polynesian?! by AdamWill · · Score: 1

      It's the dialect of French they speak in French Polynesia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Polynesia . Dialects are distinct derivatives of other languages, including some different items of vocabulary, rules of grammar etc.

    2. Re:French Polynesian?! by styrotech · · Score: 1

      It's not a dialect of French. It's the polynesian language spoken in French Polynesia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahitian_language ), similar to other polynesian languages eg "hello" is "kia ora" in Maori, "kia orana" in the Cook Islands etc

  30. Web site slow . . .download links below by jonesy16 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since the site is slow to respond, here are the download links for the 3CD version for i586 and x86_64, these are bit torrents . . .

    i586
    ------
    http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free- 2007-CD.i586.torrent

    x86_64
    ------
    http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free- 2007-CD.x86_64.torrent

    dual architecture DVD
    ----------------------
    http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free- 2007-DVD.torrent

  31. Re:Ubuntu has already won by kfg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, isn't Ubuntu basically the "winner" of the "desktop Linux distro" wars?

    No.

    I just can't think of a reason to use anything *but* Ubuntu on the desktop.

    The Linux way might well be summed up as "To Each His Own."

    KFG

  32. Questions for those who've used it by jiawen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's what I'd like to know:

    • How close does it get to solving the dependency hell problem? This is probably my biggest single problem with Mandriva.
    • How's Menudrake? That's one of my other big headaches with Mandriva. How easily can you modify the main menu now?
    • Where can I find a complete list of packages included? I have some very specific wants that the Mandriva website doesn't discuss.
    • Are the problems with SCIM resolved? A lot of people just basically unplugged it, but I have to use it because I use Chinese input a lot. Several applications simply wouldn't start because of problems with SCIM, leading to hacks that ended up plopping core dumps on my desktop every time I started them.
    • How does the new Cedega thing work? Is it just a one-month subscription, or a one-time version of the software or something? It seems like it has to be restricted somehow.
    1. Re:Questions for those who've used it by AdamWill · · Score: 1

      You're going to have to be more specific about 'the dependency hell problem'. MDV has a dependency resolving package manager (urpmi / rpmdrake) and has for years, so what exactly do you mean by 'dependency hell'? Menudrake doesn't exist any more. 2007 uses the freedesktop.org XDG standard for menus, so any XDG-compliant menu editor can be used. We include kmenuedit and alacarte, KDE and GNOME XDG menu editors respectively, though alacarte doesn't actually work as released due to upstream bugs. This will be fixed soon with a post-release update (it's currently in testing). Package lists are up somewhere, I'm just checking where... SCIM, again, I'll need some specifics to check. There was a long time problem with Acrobat and SCIM which is fixed in this release. I don't know of any other problems, if you let me know what apps you've had trouble with in the past, I'll check them. Not sure about Cedega, sorry...

    2. Re:Questions for those who've used it by N7DR · · Score: 1
      How close does it get to solving the dependency hell problem? This is probably my biggest single problem with Mandriva.

      I don't have an answer, but I agree that that is one of the two problems that finally got to the point where I switched from Mandriva to Kubuntu a couple of months ago. Compared to Mandriva, Kubuntu is a bit... weird :-) But that's probably just because I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva since 2000. I'll try out 2007, but it will have to have improved vastly in three areas for me to consider going back.

      1. The dependency problem. When I tell packages to install, I expect them to... install, not give me some cryptic message that says that it can't be installed.
      2. The utterly glacial (non-existent, really) rate at which packages are updated. The Mdv philosophy appears to be: upgrade packages with security updates, but for regular packages that are simply adding features or fixing bugs, don't do an update. This is a royal pain for those of us running 64 bit dual-core CPUs, because often the newer packages fix a lot of 64-bit or threading bugs
      3. The mess that happens when you try to run a 64-bit OS and need some 32-bit programs. It isn't really fair to call this out as a separate problem (which is why I referred to two problems above), because I'm pretty sure it's really a specific instance of #1. Kubuntu in general doesn't seem to have problem #1; OTOH, Kubuntu seems, if anything, to be worse than Mandriva when it comes to running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system.

    3. Re:Questions for those who've used it by AdamWill · · Score: 1
    4. Re:Questions for those who've used it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The dependency problem. When I tell packages to install, I expect them to... install, not give me some cryptic message that says that it can't be installed.

      Then use urpmi. urpmi does solve dependencies as well as apt-get.

    5. Re:Questions for those who've used it by jiawen · · Score: 1

      By "dependency hell", I mean the following things:

      • URPMI doesn't just always download all the packages needed for a given app. This may mean that Mandriva just hasn't released the packages for the app I want, but regardless, it's a big pain.
      • As N7DR said, Mandriva doesn't seem to update packages for new and spiffy things, only for security reasons. This can be a big pain; getting Gnome 2.16 running, for example, pretty much requires upgrading the entire Mandriva system, because even things like Garnome don't resolve packages dependencies.
      • Very often when I try to resolve a dependency issue myself by downloading packages, I find that 1) I have to spend an hour downloading something, then finding out what its dependencies are, then downloading the dependencies of that package, etc. etc., and 2) I usually get to the end and realize that the whole nasty chain is dependent on some package that is simply unfindable.

      In general, I've found that URPMI (and its nasty resource-hogging GUI friend RPMdrake) don't resolve dependencies as well as Apt-type things. I don't know if this is a function of the distros behind them not updating their package lists as well, or software problems, or what, but regardless, it's the biggest pain for me in using Mandriva.

      It's good to see MenuDrake go. I'm very interested in trying alacarte once it works.

      Thank you for the package list. That answered many of my questions.

      As for SCIM, there has been a line of very important apps that simply refuse to open due to some kind of conflict with SCIM. I've ended up having to add this stuff to their startup scripts:

      scim -f x11 -c simple -ns socket -d
      export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
      export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
      export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim

      That allows the apps to open, but when they do, they drop a nice big core dump on my desktop. Affected apps so far: Firefox, Thunderbird and XaraLX. I don't have the problem when I install Firefox through URPMI, but if I allow Firefox to update itself, the problem always exists.

      Anyway, thanks for all the help!

    6. Re:Questions for those who've used it by jiawen · · Score: 1

      About dependency problems: Well put!

    7. Re:Questions for those who've used it by timbo234 · · Score: 1

      Actually urpmi/rpmdrake always downloads (or prompts for the CD) for package dependencies - all the repositories are self-contained. What probably happened is that you got the 3CD download version and so you only got a 3CD (~2GB) chunk of the main repository, which as of 2006 was over 4GB total. The solution is to goto easyurpmi.zarb.org and setup the full repos, I think that as of 2007 Mandriva will have some automatic thing in the Control Centre to do what easyurpmi does, but we'll see (downloading the ISO now :)).

      --
      Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
    8. Re:Questions for those who've used it by AdamWill · · Score: 1

      "URPMI doesn't just always download all the packages needed for a given app. This may mean that Mandriva just hasn't released the packages for the app I want, but regardless, it's a big pain."

      Sorry, I still don't quite understand this one :). If you're saying we don't package everything in the world, yes, that's true, but neither does anyone else. urpmi will always install all the packages the package you ask for depends on.

      "As N7DR said, Mandriva doesn't seem to update packages for new and spiffy things, only for security reasons. This can be a big pain; getting Gnome 2.16 running, for example, pretty much requires upgrading the entire Mandriva system, because even things like Garnome don't resolve packages dependencies."

      Yes. This is true. It's a policy decision, though, and it has nothing to do with 'dependency hell'. We don't backport every new release of any bit of software to the current stable version, a) because it would tend to cause instabilities and b) because it's a hell of a lot of work that we'd rather spend working on the next version. Packagers are free to choose to do backports, which in 2007 will be hosted in the /main/backports and /contrib/backports media, but we don't have any policy requiring maintainers to update their packages.

      "Very often when I try to resolve a dependency issue myself by downloading packages, I find that 1) I have to spend an hour downloading something, then finding out what its dependencies are, then downloading the dependencies of that package, etc. etc., and 2) I usually get to the end and realize that the whole nasty chain is dependent on some package that is simply unfindable."

      That's the classic definition of dependency hell, yeah. It's impossible for a distro to 'solve', though. If you wind up in a position where you're manually downloading packages, this is always going to happen. You shouldn't wind up in this situation very often, though (I never do). If you do, either you're doing something wrong, or you're doing something so advanced / odd / different that maybe MDV isn't right for you.

      I'm not sure of everything your scim script does, but I know the last line tells the app you're about to run (at least, assuming it's a GTK app) to use xim instead of scim, so I'm not sure you actually _need_ the other lines. Anyways, my main machine (the one I'm typing this on) has SCIM configured (Japanese input) and I can use Firefox and Thunderbird fine. Where can I get XaraLX to test it?

    9. Re:Questions for those who've used it by jiawen · · Score: 1

      Nope, I've used easyurpmi many times and currently have all my sources well set up. I still get problems.

    10. Re:Questions for those who've used it by timbo234 · · Score: 1

      On which packages? I've never had problems, except if mirrors go down, and the repos are self-contained for dependencies.

      --
      Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
    11. Re:Questions for those who've used it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where can I get XaraLX to test it?

      http://www.xaraxtreme.org/download/

      - Peder

  33. Re:Ubuntu has already won by papaia · · Score: 1

    I love CLI and its capabilities of scripting, etc... in this regard urpmi/urpmf/urpmq are the best tools I have ever worked with.

    --
    == With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
  34. Re:Ubuntu has already won by FellowConspirator · · Score: 1

    I would agree that Ubuntu is tops for popularity these days, but "winner"? Perhaps you haven't seen Mandrake. Apt and Synaptic are quite nice, but URPMI is no slouch (not to mention, if you prefer Synaptic, it's included in Mandrake too but is based on apt4rpm).

    Mandrake has the advantage of third-party commercial support, more so for Novell/SLED. Mandrake also has very good external repositories (such as the Penguin Liberation Front). Mandrake also has an edge over Ubuntu in GUI config management and better KDE support than Kubuntu.

    Mandrake deserves some grief for SQA lapses, but seems to be reforming quite well. In my opinion, having dealt with both, Mandrake = SLED > Ubuntu, but they are REALLY close. Close to the point that they are separated by what quirks each has left.

  35. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I would go with Mandriva if it didn't have such a stupid name. Till they change, I'm sticking with Ubuntu ;)

  36. Yes, But Will It Configure Your Touchpad? by saudadelinux · · Score: 1

    I've had to fight with Mandriva installs since 9.1 to get my touchpad (barely) working. My machine worked more cleanlu two versions back, than it does now. *Fight*, I tell you. Not to mention the broken Kat and gam_server problems (act like malware on Windows, eating up scads memory and CPU time), badly incomplete documentation installed (for many K-applications) problems with Kiosk installs (crap like Mindawn, a paid music subscription service I'll never use with dependencies on the other stuff in the bundle), the harddrive jerking about for any operation, etc. These are all problems I (and others) have had with 2006. Next time I switch or upgrade, I'm going to Kubuntu.

    --
    I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
    1. Re:Yes, But Will It Configure Your Touchpad? by OriginalArlen · · Score: 1
      Mandriva 2006.1 on an IBM Thinkpad here, the touchpad was correcty id'd during installation.

      My pet peeves with Mandriva are:

      • the amazing disappearing update sources;
      • trying to fix the intel wifi drivers I managed to break it so thoroughly it complains "intewl 2200 card not found, will be started later" at boot time. Oh, and the network hotplugging doesn't have profiles; I had to write a little shell script to turn DHCP on & off, and add the correct IP, mask & gateway. Oh and every so often the PPTP config goes down at the remote end, the client doesn't notice (though DNS breaks and henc sod does everythng else) and, if you don't shut the client down in the right order with teh appropriate incantations it somehow crashes and takes X with it. Very frustrating, and I've had to get back into the ^s habit for the first time since using Windows 9x. However, agree with PP - almost everyhing is very slick, consistent and reasonably intuitive to use.

        Oh yeah, and I've tried to give them money (by joining that stupid "mandrake club" thing) no less than THREE TIMES, but their ecommerce application refused to take my credit card (which was accepted everywhere else without probs.)

      --

      Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
  37. When it works. by pavon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My experiance with setting up hardware using the Mandrake control panel a couple years ago, was that when it worked it was easy as cake, but if it didn't you were worse off then having nothing. For example, I was attempting to setup a hauppauge TV tuner card, which I knew was supported in linux. The rest of the install so far had been a snap and it recognized all my hardware with no problems. So I run the TV tuner card setup from the control panel, it pops up a dialog box saying it is setting up my card then the dialog box closes. No success or error indication, just closes. I try to use the tuner and get nothing. So I open up the TV tuner script to see what was going on. All it did was issue a bunch of shell commands, without checking the return value, without verifying that anything worked, or providing any feedback to the user - just shoot out a bunch of command and hope it works. Because I had no idea how far it got in the script before failing I had no idea what state my system or config files were in. I looked at other configuration scripts and found some (although not all) of them to be just as bad.

    I was not impressed. Configuration utilites should always verify that the changes they make work, and if not revert the system to the state it was in before they were run. They should always inform the user of the success/failure of the operation, and preferably provide enough information to let the user know how to procede - Run such and such program to test your new hardware, this is not a supported card, unexpected error, etc. Hopefully, this has been improved upon since I last used Mandriva.

  38. Links to torrents for CDs with proprietary drivers by pirnaver · · Score: 1

    GNOME Version

    • mandriva-one-2007-gnome1.iso: Dutch, English, Gaelic (Irish), German, Icelandic, Italian, Low Saxon, Sardinian, Welsh

    • mandriva-one-2007-gnome2.iso: Breton, Catalan, English, French, Galician, Portuguese, Portuguese Brazil, Spanish, Walon

    • mandriva-one-2007-gnome3.iso:Afrikaans, Arabic, Azeri (Latin), Bengali, English, Farsi (Iranian), Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Kurdish, Malay, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Tamil, Uzbek (cyrillic), Vietnamese

    • mandriva-one-2007-gnome4.iso:Danish, English, Esperanto, Faroese, Finnish (Suomi), Greek, Norwegian Bokmaal, Norwegian Nynorsk, Swedish

    • mandriva-one-2007-gnome5.iso:Bulgarian, Croatian, English, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian

    • mandriva-one-2007-gnome6.iso: Belarussian, Bosnian, Czech, English, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maltese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Yiddish

    KDE Version

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde1.iso: Breton, Dutch, English, Euskara (Basque), French, German, Icelandic, Occitan, Walon

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde2.iso:Danish, English, Gaelic (Irish), Italian, Norwegian Bokmaal, Norwegian Nynorsk, Sardinian, Welsh

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde3.iso:Catalan, English, Faroese, Finnish (Suomi), Galician, Low Saxon, Portuguese, Portuguese Brazil, Saami, Spanish, Swedish

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde4.iso:Bengali, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, English, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Maori, Mongolian, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde5.iso:Afrikaans, Amharic, English, Farsi (Iranian), Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kurdish, Laotian, Marathi, Tajik, Uzbek (cyrillic), Xhosa

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde6.iso:Croatian, English, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maltese, Polish, Serbian Cyrillic, Slovak, Ukrainian, Yiddish

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde7.iso:Arabic, Azeri (Latin), Belarussian, Bosnian, Czech, English, Esperanto, Hebrew, Russian, Turkish

    • mandriva-one-2007-kde8.iso:Bulgarian, English, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian

  39. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Burz · · Score: 2, Informative

    Gotta agree with that. SuSE is much nicer.

    Ubuntu is too minimalistic in its 'control panel' options. There's too many things you cannot do without nursing those activities from the CLI. Ubuntu has no security features recommended on laptops: WPA, VPN, firewall, encrypted partitions, etc. Even home folders are not set as private. You must configure them all from the CLI or at best with afterthought add-ons like Firestarter.

    The Ubuntu installer is complete amatuer-hour (no, really, it looks like a script that was whipped up in one hour): Instead of asking, it makes nasty assumptions like clock=UTC, and that your UBS/Firewire drives are to be mounted from fstab on bootup (when those drives are unplugged, your system *doesn't* bootup). Video card detection is often fumbled with common models like Radeon 7000.

    I wish Canonical well with Ubuntu, but I'd say they'd better add a lot more standard features with a revamped installer in the next release (Edgy) if they want to maintain their standing.

    Mandriva, SuSE, Xandros are all much better for normal PC use IMO. They always have been better, and even Xandros (was Corel) goes back to 1999.

  40. the real error... by QuaintRealist · · Score: 1

    Slamming linux and the kernel developers immediately before your release, and having it posted on distrowatch. Nice going, guys.

    http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20061002

    --
    Using plain ol' text since 1968
  41. Yeah, that was bad by darthservo · · Score: 1
    Yeah, that was somewhat of a problem. Package a broken updater in the release - should have been caught before posting it publicly as a final release. A big "Doh!" for the SuSE team.

    I'm all for SuSE over the other distros, don't get me wrong. I'm running it on my laptop and enjoy the new wireless utilities (with 10.1 it's now about 10 times easier). However, a release this broken really made me sad. Even though I was able to fix it by looking through online documentation from other frustrated users, I couldn't recommend that my friends/family give this release a try. So, I've been telling them that 10.2 should be a good release. Although, we'll see how the ReiserFS > Ext3 switch goes with the next release.

    --

    Prove it.

  42. Does Bronze == Standard??? by terraformer · · Score: 1
    Does Bronze == Standard???

    Also, when you try to upgrade your membership, it sends you to the download page where you have no access because your membership level is too low. When you click the link to renew/upgrade you go back to the download page... Rinse, repeat. Great Q/A on the club site.

    --
    Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
  43. Laugh it up by Kadin2048 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Make fun all you want, but I've said multiple times that the way Apple does peripheral hardware ought to be a model for Linux and any other non-Windows OS.

    Back before I just threw in the towel and started drilling holes in my walls, I would have killed a man for a "Linux 802.11 Card." When you want a wireless card for your Mac, you go into a store, and you buy it. Note that I said "it," not "one." Because there's only one. (Okay, at some points there have been multiple, i.e. Airport vs. Airport Extreme, but most computers could only take one or the other.) Yeah, it costs more, but there's no messing around with anything.

    I've wondered if maybe some Linux User's Group wanted to do this as a fund-raiser: do a bulk-purchase of some Linux-compatible peripheral (say a WL card or TV tuner) in OEM packaging, and then wrap it up with the appropriate drivers and sell it over the web at a 50-60% markup. I think you'd move product -- too often do you get recommendations for a product that works well, only to find that it's been discontinued or only sold in some other country, or it's nearly impossible to tell which products use it. (This was my experience finding Prism-based WL cards.)

    Laugh all you want, but "choice" isn't always good, particularly when it means just having a high signal/noise ratio. Having one and only one hardware configuration available is better than having a thousand hardware configurations available, if only one or two of them works perfectly. In the first case, you have a 100% chance of getting the 'good' config, in the latter, you might as well buy Lotto tickets.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    1. Re:Laugh it up by LordWoody · · Score: 1

      As someone said previously in the conversation about software media, it is a war of choice. With multiple selections you get a mix of price, features and performance. But the costs is potential install issues that vary between peripherals of the same type. Besides, very few vendors make hardware specifically for Linux.

      That said, a LUG could not afford to purchase hardware in bulk and hope they have enough customers to buy all of it over a short period of time. Hardware changes (improves) too rapidly and most people want to buy the best unit they can when they do choose to purchase. Even regular (sell the Windows users) computer stores keep very little inventory. The price (value) of hardware on the shelf deteriorates too rapidly. You have to buy in *massive* bulk to get the initial wholesale price so low that you can sell 'retail' above your purchase price for longer period of time and still cut a profit if you intend for your hardware to have a shelf life.

      The price you pay to run a free (libre), flexible, stable and powerful operating system that is not "main stream" is that you have to work a little harder to buy your hardware and may need to know a little mare that "Start -> Run -> d:\setup.exe".

      --
      Never meddle in the affairs of dragons,
      for you are crunchy and good with catsup.
    2. Re:Laugh it up by lordofthechia · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Maybe manufacturers could be convinced to submit their hardware for linux testing and award them a logo they could attach (or imprint) on their product to demonstrate Linux compatibility... Just a though and sure most may not care but it could be a start.

      Or we could draft up a generic letter to some manufacturers statings something along the lines of:

      "Your (insert product here) has met or exceeded criteria to be considered ready for linux thanks to (community/oem drivers). As such please feel free to attach this logo to your packaging for (said product) as a means for your Linux using customers to identify this useful feature!"

      Thoughts?

      --
      Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
    3. Re:Laugh it up by Mad_Rain · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've wondered if maybe some Linux User's Group wanted to do this as a fund-raiser: do a bulk-purchase of some Linux-compatible peripheral (say a WL card or TV tuner) in OEM packaging, and then wrap it up with the appropriate drivers and sell it over the web at a 50-60% markup.

      In case you haven't heard, there is a HDTV tuner card made specifically for linux, to receive Over-The-Air hdtv broadcasts, and analogue cable channels. I believe that as of kernel 2.6.12, driver modules are included with the kernel. Find or start your own LUG, and there you go. :-)

      --
      "What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
    4. Re:Laugh it up by LordWoody · · Score: 1

      I actually have hardware that is 'promised' (no certification program I am aware of) to run on Linux. All my Keyspan USB hardware (USB to serial adaptor) comes with the penguin right on the box (next to the Windows Logo and the MacOS X logo) as did my USB to IDE adaptor (Newer Technology USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter). Somewhere I have some network gear with our buddy Tux on the box too.

      Some vendors do care enough to show it.

      --
      Never meddle in the affairs of dragons,
      for you are crunchy and good with catsup.
  44. Re:Ubuntu has already won by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ``And if apt was the winner of the Linux desktop 'wars', why didn't Debian win sometime in 1999?''

    Plenty of things could be mentioned here.

      - Debian was doing a lot less marketing than certain other distros
      - People were still in the mindset that Linux == Red Hat
      - Many people refused to use Debian, because it had no graphical installer
      - Debian stable tends to be far away from cutting edge, and "unstable" sounds scary
      - Actually, _didn't_ Debian win around 1999? Do you have distro popularity statistics for that time?

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  45. Re:Ubuntu has already won by CoonAss56 · · Score: 1

    emerge ..... does better than either one. Don't have to worry about flaky mirrors (has Mandriva ever figured that out?), or a multitude of dependent packages that I don't want to install, but have to because of poor linkage. What ever distro is out here, I like to have control over what programs I want to have installed, and not to have a bunch of dead hard drive space filled with junk I'll never use but have to have installed due to piss-poor package management

    --
    Won't Bow.....Don't Know How
  46. Re:Ubuntu has already won by technoid_ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I second that. While at Ohio Linux Fest this weekend I was lucky enough to attend Ted Haeger's talk on "Desktop Innovation at Novell". I am excited about Linux on the desktop again. I already use Linux as my desktop OS, but it just seemed kinda blah until seeing Ted's presentation. The work that Novell is putting into SLED and openSUSE is really cool, and they are giving back to the community at the same time (beagle and f-spot for example). While Ubuntu is nice, don't count Novell out when it comes to desktop linux.

    For more info check out Ted's blog http://reverendted.wordpress.com/ and his podcast http://www.novell.com/openaudio/.

    Disclaimer: I do not have any association to Novell or Ted, other than he is a kewl guy to talk to and knows his stuff.

    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
  47. Re:Ubuntu has already won by buraianto · · Score: 1

    and not to have a bunch of dead hard drive space filled with junk I'll never use but have to have installed due to piss-poor package management

    You mean like all the source and intermediate build files in your emerge directory?

  48. Re:Ubuntu has already won by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1

    Try emerge. Once you go emerge you don't go back. I wish there were more CLI tools like emerge.

    --
    Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
  49. Music contest results? by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

    Anyone know what happened with the contest of login/logout sounds for Mandriva 2007? I'd hate to download the entire ISO just to see who won...

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  50. I know, wrong league, but... by Neolith1982 · · Score: 1
    First of all, I'm using Gentoo on my Desktop, but nonetheless I have some words to the so-called "newbie-Distros" (SuSE, fedora, Mandriva, (K-,X- )Ubuntu, etc.)
    • The administrative tools are MUCH to slow (To update my System the users interaction with the System is emerge --sync && emerge --update world on a root console. This tooks about 2-5 seconds. To fire up Yast, urpmi or synaptic, choosing System update etc., it takes several minutes...)
    • You don't have access to real cutting edge packages. You have to stay behind with Kernel 2.6.xx while I can go on to Kernel 2.6.xx+x, just as an example
    • You have to do it the way, the maintainers want it. If you ever tried to go through the packages SuSE offers you while it's installing in a quick and efficient way, you know what I mean. So you could as well stuck to M$.
    • The system itself is hidden from the users, so many people could misread KDE (or Gnome,...) for Linux.
    • Most newbie distros are too bloated, and therefor damn slow. Another example: My 700Mhz Laptop with Gentoo needs about 20 seconds to start up, load KDE(!) and be ready to work. The AMD Athlon 2800 PC from my

    So far the bad sides, now the good sides
    • The System is easy to understand, no matter what you use
    • The system still have better benchmarking results the M$ Windohs
    • The releasecycles are short enough, to be more or less up-to-date


    So, what do I want to say with this?
    first: Using Linux is still better than using M$
    second You have to be sensible with comparisons (here Gentoo newbie Distros, or earlier in the discussion SuSE Fedora Ubuntu Mandriva).

    All in all one newbiedistro is as good as the other. Which one you want to use is up to your oppinion. But, from my point of view, Ubuntu is the most modern and cleanest one from all. Quite easy to install, good to maintain and so on. SuSE has the best graphical(!) administration tool. Fedora is closest to cutting edge. Mandriva is a good compromise between some of them.

    another question asked was, if linux is ready for the Desktop. Decide yourself, but if not, then this is only partial the fault of the Kernel developers. It is also the fault of distromaintainers, that are unable to design tere distros in a reasonable way.

    Now the most important question: what OS/distro you should use: DECIDE YOURSELF. Linux grants you this right, and its fans should do so, too.
    --
    How shall I know what I think before I read what I wrote?
    1. Re:I know, wrong league, but... by AdamWill · · Score: 1

      "The administrative tools are MUCH to slow (To update my System the users interaction with the System is emerge --sync && emerge --update world on a root console. This tooks about 2-5 seconds. To fire up Yast, urpmi or synaptic, choosing System update etc., it takes several minutes...)"

      urpmi --auto-update

      is the equivalent command on Mandriva. That's several characters shorter and thus more efficient. =)

      "You don't have access to real cutting edge packages. You have to stay behind with Kernel 2.6.xx while I can go on to Kernel 2.6.xx+x, just as an example"

      This is because you're running a development branch. Run the development branch of any 'newbie distro' - Mandriva Cooker, for instance - and you'll get your cutting edge packages.

    2. Re:I know, wrong league, but... by wes33 · · Score: 1
      My 700Mhz Laptop with Gentoo needs about 20 seconds to start up, load KDE(!) and be ready to work.
      do you have a howto somewhere explaining how you attain this frankly completely unbelievable figure (my 1.1 ghz laptop takes 10 seconds or so just to get to grub prompt and 10 seconds to boot the kernel and start KDE is too Paul Bunyan for me)
    3. Re:I know, wrong league, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes you forget to mention that "emerge --sync && emerge --update world" would then take up to 2 days to finish compiling the system- and more than likely fail at some point during this. Even just emerge --sync takes some 10-15 mins... If u really did acheive 20 second start up, then u forget to mention u did a gentoo stage 3 (or maybe even 1) install- and this process not only took days, but also required quite alot of user knowledge about gentoo and your specific system.
      Dont get me wrong i dont use Mandriva, Suse, Fedora or Ubuntu, but all distros have there weaknesses.

    4. Re:I know, wrong league, but... by Neolith1982 · · Score: 1

      Easy...
      we measured till the grub boot prompt, because we wanted to know, how fast our linux is, not the speed of our bios. second compile your Kernel as minimalistic as possible, but with all drivers possible compiled in. the use initng in stead of the standard init scripts, and voila, speeeeeeeeeeeeeeed!

      --
      How shall I know what I think before I read what I wrote?
    5. Re:I know, wrong league, but... by wes33 · · Score: 1

      well, it's worth a try (I was confused when you said the 20 seconds was for the laptop to start up, not for gentoo to start up) - I'm still skeptical but then my laptop has a real dog of harddrive

  51. Re:Ubuntu has already won by teslar · · Score: 1
    why didn't Debian win sometime in 1999?
    But it did, you see, it did. Come on, you must remember the flame wars between the supporters of the de-facto distribution debian and those who went for this new distro that liked to compile everything on install and loved its flags, what's it called again... gentoo, that's right, on this very site. I used to be a debian fanboy, I loved sid, but I finally switched to Ubuntu because under debian, only about half the hardware in my laptop worked out-of-the-box. Under Ubuntu, everything worked first time around. And that was it. Sure, I don't like the Ubuntu way of not having a root account, I still 'sudo su' because frankly, when I need root, it's not just for one command and all that, but debian had it all and it lost it all... Ubuntu just came along and did everything better.
  52. price for vista in 2-3 years? like at the release by AlgorithMan · · Score: 1

    vista in 2-3 years? it will cost as much as on the day it is released... look at the prices for ANY windows version, none of them has changed since their release date... thats MS policy...

    --
    The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
  53. Re:Ubuntu has already won by __aawbkb6799 · · Score: 1

    Agreed. portage has all the features that're being discussed here (and more) with an out-of-the-box-intuitive command line interface.

  54. Re:Ubuntu has already won by mislam · · Score: 2, Informative

    No Suse is. Atleast in my books. Suse 10.1 installed out of the box on my Dell dimension 9150 without any tweaking. Before Suse I tried to install Ubuntu and could not get the graphics card to recognize nor the wifi will work.

  55. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Hmm, let me know how Ubuntu is doing with its easy 3D desktop configuration wizard that allows to pick either AIGLX or Xgl depending on what your hardware supports"

    If it was any good I wouldn't be even aware of the necessity of the choice.

  56. Re:Ubuntu has already won by xoran99 · · Score: 1
    I still 'sudo su' because frankly, when I need root, it's not just for one command and all that
    The command "sudo -s" invokes a root shell.
    --

    Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)

  57. Re:Ubuntu has already won by leadsling · · Score: 1

    UHHHHHHHH,,,,,, NO!!! I have TRIED to use Ubuntu on several systems and something always rises up to bite me in the rear. Mandriva remains the most stable and best hardware detecting Linux out there. I work with computers from PII 200 and up. If I have 256 MB, I don't hesitate. It's Mandriva.

  58. Windows XB by tepples · · Score: 1
    what OS works 100% of the time on 100% of the platforms it supports?

    Windows XB.

  59. No it has not. by davmoo · · Score: 1

    I'll tell you the reason why Ubuntu is not, in fact "the winner", and why many people still use Mandriva.

    Because on my hardware (three desktop machines, two laptops), Mandriva works out of the box. Ubuntu won't even install a bootable system on *any* of them, much less allow me to accomplish actual work. And apparently I'm not the only one. I'm also an "early seeder" for Mandriva, and the drag on my dedicated server has not been *less* than 2 megaBYTES/second since the release announcement this morning.

    Yes, I could probably tinker with Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) and make it work. But I didn't have to tinker with Windows XP for it to install correctly on any of that hardware, why should I expect any less from a Linux distribution? (Hint: Don't say "because Linux is free" because I'm a Mandriva Club silver member, which means I actually put my money where my mouth is and pay cash for my Linux.)

    --
    I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
  60. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Dark_Schneider971 · · Score: 1

    - No choice of the locale at install time (ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8).
    When choosing the country, by clikcing on "More language" UTF-8 is activated

    - Installer won't let you leave a partition alone, they must all be assigned a mount point.
    And so what ? assigning a mount point is not a problem

    - GRUB won't install anywhere but the master boot record of the first drive.
    1st, Mandriva is using LILO ...
    2nd in the sumarry screen you can choose the bootloader location

    - No official kernel patched with the vastly superior suspend2.
    But there's community kernel in contrib media ( kernel-multimedia ) with suspend2 support. you're are free to install it. It contains also others bleeding edges patches.

    --
    Mandriva : parce que nous le valons bien ! Close the World, Open the Net
  61. No Games?? by HouseOfMisterE · · Score: 1

    I downloaded mandriva-one-2007-gnome2.iso and it doesn't seem to have any games? What kind of distro is this? I'm not expecting something like Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, but a card game or the like would have been nice.

    1. Re:No Games?? by ErroneousBee · · Score: 1

      Try typing 'urpmi pysol' as root.

      You might need to go to easyurpmi first to set up the online repositories.

      --
      **TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
    2. Re:No Games?? by tehcyder · · Score: 1
      Try typing 'urpmi pysol' as root.

      You might need to go to easyurpmi first to set up the online repositories.

      Yup, it's definitely the year of the Linux desktop!
      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    3. Re:No Games?? by HouseOfMisterE · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the reply. I had tried the software installer utility, but had forgotten that I needed to add additional package repositories. After adding a "distribution source," I have the option to add games from a fairly extensive list.

    4. Re:No Games?? by ReinoutS · · Score: 1

      Now you need to be fair here... The Mandriva graphical software installer can set up those online repositories for you with just a few mouse clicks. Easyurpmi is mostly useful for the people who prefer the command line.

  62. No compiling? You're on crack! by Ice+Wewe · · Score: 1
    CastrTroy spewed:

    But that's the way some of us like it. Why should I have to download and compile some .tar.gz files rather than just opening up the GUI, selecting the packages I want, and install. No need to worry about dependancies or weird compile errors.

    That's not true at all. I'm running Ubuntu right now because I got sick and tired of trying to compile Nvidia drivers because Mandriva didn't include them with the kernel. Now all I have to do is go to a GUI and install the files, no more compiling and pulling my hair out trying to get the stupid thing to compile against a broken kernel source, which urpmi installed. Near the end I was compiling half the stuff on my Mandriva (2006) system simply because it was newer than the repo's stuff, and more importantly, it worked.

    1. Re:No compiling? You're on crack! by Dark_Schneider971 · · Score: 1

      Of course the Free edition of Mandriva doesn't include nvidia as it includes only FREE software.
      Now the PowerPack or Club edition included precompiled nvidia drivers.
      Now you have One CD that include precompiled nvidia/ati drivers.

      --
      Mandriva : parce que nous le valons bien ! Close the World, Open the Net
  63. Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u by foreverdisillusioned · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm glad it worked out for you, but I'm unconvinced that your experience is commonplace. Three (or was it four?) years ago, I tried to find a Linux distro that worked for me. I was fairly technically proficient, but I had no Unix experience and I didn't have the patience to spend more than a day (12~ hours) getting the basics to work. Red Hat (this was pre-FC) was first on my list--the installer inexplicably froze. Knoppix gave me all kinds of crap about my graphics card. I went down the list, including SuSe, Gentoo (with my expert best friend's guidance), Debian and Mandriva (or Mandrake, as it was then known), and every single one of them gave me major problems. Half of them wouldn't even make it through an entire install, and the rest refused to recognize a vital piece of hardware. Each time, I'd spend a most of the day screwing around on Google and IRC trying to get the sound card or the net connection to work, and then finally give up and move on to the next popular distro I could find--I did this for a week or two before finally giving up on Linux entirely. I wasn't just using a single problem box, btw--I tried installing them on my desktop, the family desktop, and my laptop and had the same horrible results.

    A couple years pass, then lo and behold I hear about this new distro called Ubuntu. I fire it up, and EVERYTHING JUST FREAKING WORKS. Well, almost everything. I couldn't use my mouse 4 and 5 buttons nor disable tapclick on my laptop's touchpad nor get 3d acceleration to work with games like Tuxracer, but I was willing to live with minor crap like that until I could work out a solution--the important thing was, my computer was not horribly crippled--it FUNCTIONAL right out of the box, and so I had could afford to tinker with the details whenever I got around to them.

    This is, of course, completely anecdotal but I've heard very similar stories from tons of other Ubuntu converts. I'm sure that distros like FC and MEPIS and Mandriva are AWESOME when they work properly; I'm sure that, when they actually WORKED out of the box, they offered a wonderful assortment of handy configuration GUIs and were just as functional as Ubuntu, but I would hazzard a guess that they simply were not as reliably functional out of the box, no tinkering and troubleshooting required. And I'm sure there are Ubuntu horror stories as well, but I think that the difference is in the probabilities--Ubuntu simply had a much better chance of actually WORKING for the non-expert user.

    And given the open source nature of Linux, I'm sure that the other distros are catching up rapidly. Recently I've tried a few others, and they seemed to work nearly flawlessly, so perhaps Ubuntu doesn't have anything other than momentum going for it now. But really, in the OS world, that's all you need--just look at Windows, for fuck's sake.

    So yeah, I'm sure Mandriva is great and all, but it had it's chance with me already, and it failed miserably. Why should I switch when I've already got a distro as complete and polished as Ubuntu 6.06? I'm not being confrontational here; it's a genuine question--what can Mandriva give me that Ubuntu can't?

  64. nic/samba by GeorgeS069 · · Score: 1

    Did they get the "bugs" out of the networking/samba support?
    Last time I tried mandrake it was a mess for my gigabit nic cards....extremely slow and I tried everything I could to fix it!
    I finally gave up after a month! and switched to debian...worked perfect right away
    and when I say slow I mean S......L.......O.......W I couldn't even play an mp3 over the LAN
    It's a basic sk98lin type nic card..nothing fancy or wierd
    asked for help in all the "club" forums...nobody had a clue....cancelled my subscription after the debian install
    I still wonder what I actualy paid for cause there was no real support for any problem I had

    --
    I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
    1. Re:nic/samba by AdamWill · · Score: 1

      You didn't pay for support. The Mandriva Club is not about support (although Club members do help each other out as much as they can). It doesn't say ANYWHERE when you sign up for the Club that you're signing up for a support contract. So if you signed up for the Club to get support, you made the wrong move. You should have signed up for support incidents instead.

    2. Re:nic/samba by GeorgeS069 · · Score: 1

      Still doesn't explain why we couldn't get the nic working properly. I did fix it eventually though....wanna know how?

      --
      I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
  65. Re:Ubuntu has already won by GeorgeS069 · · Score: 1

    SMB support my ass....see my post above...what good is "support" if you can barely use the SMB mounted shares? FTP access was ridiculously slow also so it wasn't a SMB problem

    --
    I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
  66. Re:Ubuntu has already won by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Actually, I've been a Mandrake/driva user for years. Now and again, because of various problems I have with it, I try out other distros (I have the current Ubuntu as an alternate boot-up).


    I always come back to it (sole main distro really integrating Windowmaker, and Control Center). That said, I can safely state that apt/synaptic win hands down against urpmi/rpmdrake as of MDV2006.


    Wait and see for 2007

  67. XBOX 100.0% stable? by gd2shoe · · Score: 1

    Hardly.

    (But close. Same thing happened with the first one)

    --
    I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
  68. Props to pcHDTV by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

    Yeah actually I'm considering purchasing one. (It's going to be either the HDTV-5500 or a DVICO FusionHDTV5, I started off looking at the latter but after discovering pcHDTV, I am leaning towards the former.) Need to get one before one of the Broadcast Flag bills sneaks through.

    Actually I think the pcHDTV products are a good example of how a company can successfully produce and market hardware to the niche (Linux) market; it's a little bizarre that nobody has been able to do the same thing with wireless cards, or wasn't able to back when there were fewer of them on the market and early-adopters play a bigger role.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  69. Re:Ubuntu has already won by batkiwi · · Score: 1

    What does emerge do that apt-get and urpmi don't?

  70. Get the Live CD - *now* by lordofthechia · · Score: 1

    Holy crap, I just downloaded the Live CD (not the "free" one - the one with the nVidia drivers) - you have to look further down on the download page, and I just booted into it. Wow is all I gotta say, I have Mandriva 2006 installed atm and I'm definitely gonna upgrade. My 2 of my main gripes in the older version of Mandriva have been taken care of. Namely I got sound mixing working by default (like I had in Fedora Core 4), and the new RPM drake now has install/remove on the same window (no re-install option that I see atm though). Plus the eye-candy is pretty nice too. Granted wobbly windows are really unecessary, but the (not sure what to call it... whatever you use to alt-tab between programs) is pretty damn nice and useful. Plus a quick check on the cedega forums shows that people are able to get Cedega and xgl to play nicely together so It looks like it wont get turned off by default on my system. Man, I was this close to switching to Kubuntu (had already let my Mandriva membership lapse).

    --
    Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
  71. Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You can use whatever you want. But it would be very illogical to blame the mandriva of 2007 for the mistakes of the mandrake of 2002. Ubuntu is not only great because it is ubuntu. It is also great since linux did make some progress the last few years. I'm convinced that on the whole, there is not much difference in hardware support between distro's. Ofcourse, you can have horrible problems on Mandriva with a particular laptop (which is probably a result of a broken bios for which this distro happens to have not included some horrible workaround) but the same thing can happen on Ubuntu.

    So in the end, don't judge a distro for the fact that it doesn't work on your hardware. Now if you use 2007 and find it not to your liking, well, then try something else.

  72. Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u by Mr.+Hankey · · Score: 1

    I do as well. I've been using it pretty much since its first release. It has the same basic layout as Redhat, uses a similar PAM configuration with pam-stack - unlike SuSE the last time I fought with it, and takes most Redhat RPMs without too much tooling around. Source RPMs tend to compile easily as well. The installer tends to do a better job at setting up hardware, and the dkms support is a pleasant surprise for keeping up with drivers that need to be compiled for each new kernel. I haven't had any problems installing software into its own subdirectory under, say, /usr/local when I want to build something myself either.

    I also like the way urpmi works. I typically update to newer OS releases by downloading a DVD image release, pointing urpmi to it, and updating with --auto-select. Redhat's up2date isn't as bad as it was previously, but I like pushing things out with parallel urpmi commands and not being forced to pay for continued updates. I'd also rather use distributions that do not require an annoying product/registration key which can be easily lost. I will pay more to get software that doesn't need one if necessary.

    --
    GPL: Free as in will
  73. Linux is Linux, Regardless of Distro by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I don't really get into the distro wars, because lets be honest. Linux is Linux regardless of distro. If you really know your Linux, it doesn't matter what distro you run. It's all the same code, it's all the same applications.

    That aside, I constantly try out the top distros, and Mandriva seems to work the best out of the box. For example:

    In Mandriva, DVD/Movie players work. (Kaffeine, Totem, Mplayer, Xine) If you want to play encrypted DVD's, all you have to do is compile and install libdvdcss. From download to install, libdvdcss takes, at most, five minutes. SUSE's DVD players won't out of the box with libdvdcss. Ubuntu only seems to play open source codecs out of the box.

    If you buy Mandriva, the 3D video drivers work at install. If you buy SUSE, you have to download the drivers after install. Then they still wouldn't work. This happened on both my 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

    Mandriva comes with so many apps, you can try them all out without wasting a ton of time downloading and compiling. My personal experience has been that if you want to spend more time getting things down, and less time installing/configing up you computer, Mandriva is the what you want. If you want to install all your apps and drivers individually by hand, you can just run that other operating system from the Northwest! ;-)

  74. Re:Ubuntu has already won by rtechie · · Score: 1

    If there was a "winner" in desktop Linux distributions that "winner" would definitely be Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply because that is the distribution which has the deepest penetration on the CORPORATE desktop, which is what really matters.

    Personally I use Gentoo Linux almost exclusively, but I use Linux mostly on a lot of weird hardware and embedded systems.

  75. Re:Ubuntu has already won by GnarlyNome · · Score: 1

    urpmi +easy urpmi equals " It couldn't get any easier."

    --
    Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
  76. Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u by foreverdisillusioned · · Score: 1

    It's more like Mandrake of late 2003 (the more I think about it, the more I'm sure it was only 3 years ago) vs. Ubuntu of early 2005 (I tried Hoary as soon as it came out.) That's only 1.5 years' difference.

    And I'm not blaming Mandriva for its mistakes from 3 years ago; I'm just asking why I should give it a second chance with Ubuntu as stable and easy to use as it is--what can it offer me that Ubuntu can't?

    I was also addressing all those MEPIS/FC/Mandriva fans who are annoyed at the popularity of Ubuntu and can't see why it's more popular than their easy-to-use distro of choice. I'm aware that plenty of people have had problems with Ubuntu, but from my experience (with three different boxes, mind you) and observations, I think a greater percentage had success with it than with the alternatives.

  77. Re:Ubuntu has already won by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1

    Have a decent, usable search function. Not have those useless "upgrade" and "dist-upgrade" features--the Gentoo method of having every updated system be the latest version was an innovation that should have been thought of sooner. Color-code the text, which allows me to easily tell what things are. This sounds trivial but once you actually use it you miss the extra information. There's a reason we have syntax highlighting.

    --
    Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
  78. Re:Ubuntu has already won by ErroneousBee · · Score: 1

    the Gentoo method of having every updated system be the latest version was an innovation that should have been thought of sooner.

    Thats how my gentoo install got so broken so quickly, that I hadent even finished configuring before updates were starting to break the system.

    Having said that, Mandriva is a long way from perfect (e.g. they seem to have rushed through the QA again, I barly had time to install the beta before RC2 was out.

    My current picks are Ubuntu for the ultimate newbie (Web/Mail/Office) user, Mandriva for newbies those that will want to install and configure samba or other simple services, anything but Gentoo for experienced users, and Gentoo for people I hate.

    --
    **TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
  79. Re:Ubuntu has already won by CoonAss56 · · Score: 1

    Which I can easily clean out vs. having programs forever.

    --
    Won't Bow.....Don't Know How
  80. Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u by opkool · · Score: 1

    ?Only 1.5 years ago?

    In Linux this is an eternety.

    Seriously.

    Ubuntu is basically Debian with less packages, a different desktop theme and lots of free CDs being shipped around.

    Back then, you did try Debian, it did not work. If Ubuntu existed back then, 100% sure it would not work.

    Ubuntu, via marketing, is capitalizing on users like you, who tried Linux before Linux was able to work with all your hardware and now it y'all think it is only Ubuntu's work who make it possible.

    Dude, Linux is Linux is Linux.

    All Linux distros run Linux kernel (doh!) which supports the same hardware. The differences are niceties like how to pre-configure hardware, sftware, control pannels, wizards, and support.

    Now, try Mandriva 2007 and judge apples to apples.

    Because you are judging a Ford T against a Toyota Tundra 2007. Try a Ford pickup 2007 to compare to Tundra 2007.

    Peace

  81. No OS can prevent a hardware failure by tepples · · Score: 1

    If you're referring to the dirty disc errors on the original Xbox, what did you expect? Did you expect Microsoft to enclose the Xbox discs in a caddy? No operating system can prevent a hardware failure.

  82. Re:Ubuntu has already won by GnuAge · · Score: 1

    PIIs start at 233 MHz, n'cest pas?

  83. Re:Ubuntu has already won by opkool · · Score: 1

    WilliamSChips (793741) said: Have a decent, usable search function.

    Have you ever heard of urpmi tools? Looks like not.

    * urpmq foobar
      returns list of packages with name foobar
    * urpmq -y foo
      returns list of packages with name foo, foo*, *foo and *foo*
    * urpmf foobar
      gets back with a list of packages that include files named *foobar*

    More on WikiPedia

    On the GUI you have a nice "search" box.

    Peace!

  84. Re:Ubuntu has already won by teslar · · Score: 1

    Sorry for the late reply... I didn't know that. It's interesting though, because it is different from sudo su... sudo su specifically logs you in as root, sudo -s doesn't seem to do that... you can tell because the .bashrc in the root home folder is not executed if you do sudo -s... need to read up on the difference :)

  85. Re:Ubuntu has already won by leadsling · · Score: 1

    Duhhh! ;) Point is that Ubuntu doesn't have the hardware recognition that Mandriva has.

  86. Re:Ubuntu has already won by wolf369T · · Score: 0

    I've tried them all. In this case, Mandriva (2006), Ubuntu and SuSE. SuSE may be nice, but it's awfully slow on my PC, even slower than XP (an old 1100 MHz Duron with 256 SDRAM). So, there's no catch. Ubuntu was nice, but I'll give Mandriva 2007 a try. Hopefully, KDE will be at least as fast as on Slackware (till now, the fastest Linux who runned my PC), after all their optimizations. Kubuntu is nice, but, I don't know why, it doesn't stick with me.