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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.
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
The reason is urpmi.
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
... 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
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?
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.
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.
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).
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
The new rpmdrake in 2007 is a combined interface - install / remove are in the same application again.
+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!
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...=)
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
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
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
Here's what I'd like to know:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
``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.
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
> 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.
http://savingiceland.org
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.
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?