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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).
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.
first post
It's just like Mandriva 2006 only it has a new player roster...
This guy's the limit!
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
A new Slackware and a new Mandriva! What a time to be alive!
Badass Resumes
Seriously, isn't Ubuntu basically the "winner" of the "desktop Linux distro" wars?
It's just so much better than anything else, mostly because of apt/Synaptic. Plus, it has momentum, so the repositories have lots of new/exotic packages that most other distros don't. And, even better, they keeep the distro as a whole very up-to-date.
I just can't think of a reason to use anything *but* Ubuntu on the desktop. Well, if you're talking about Linux destkops, anyway.
I dunno if this new oral theme will fly with my gf...
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
... it has a new, French Polynesian, "Hello World" theme!
If only it were "Hello Kitty" I dould download it at once for my niece.
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.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
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.
*runs*
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..
YahmaBrowse the web safely, use Firefox and an Anonymous Web Proxy to avoid spyware and viruses.
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.
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
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,
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
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
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!
Do you get the security updates and updates to the softwares with the free version?
Is there or will there be a PPC version?
:(
I can't seem to find one for this or the previous version
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.
"la Ora" doesn't sound anything like "bonjour" or "allo". If anything, "la Ora" sounds spanish or something. But not french.
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 . . .
- 2007-CD.i586.torrent
- 2007-CD.x86_64.torrent
- 2007-DVD.torrent
i586
------
http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free
x86_64
------
http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free
dual architecture DVD
----------------------
http://qa.mandriva.com/torrent/2007/mandriva-free
Here's what I'd like to know:
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
BSD fanatics? I've best. Individuals BSDI i5 also dead, another folder. 20 irc.secsup.org or to predict *BSD's
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."
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.
So far the bad sides, now the good sides
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?
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
Windows XB.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
?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
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.