Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring Released

AdamWill writes "Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Download the hybrid live / install One or the purely free / open source software Free. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring includes the latest software (KDE 3.5.6, GNOME 2.18, Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0) and several major new features: Metisse, the most innovative accelerated 3D desktop technology; open source telephony with WengoPhone; Google desktop applications including Picasa and Earth; updates and improvements to many of the Mandriva configuration tools, and the brand new drakvirt for configuring virtualization; significantly improved hardware support, including greatly improved graphics card detection and support for several common laptop memory card readers; and a brand new desktop theme. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring is available in the full range of editions, including the freely downloadable One and Free, as well as the commercial Discovery, Powerpack and Powerpack+. For more information see the Spring product page and the Wiki page, where you can find download and installation instructions, the Release Tour, the Release Notes and the Errata."

Comments

adverts

[Turn-X Alphonse]

This reads way too much like an advert, can we please stop letting PR people whore shit on slashdot?

(I run Ubuntu, I do know what Linux is and how it is related to Slashdot's theme. I just think these soulless marketing style articles are boring and could be done better.)

Re:adverts

[goombah99]

Let's write our own adds. Post below why you think Mandriva is good. What's its forte. What sets it apart. Why would I choose this distro? Be sure to post a soundbite too. for example "Ubuntu: it's the desktop linux for people who aren't experts". Or Debian "Steady and depandable, and an awesome package (manager)". etc.. Damn Small " Small and fast, in and out quickly".

Re:adverts

[MisterCookie]

Like Ubuntu's any better in not spamming adverts? Take a look at digg.com, if it has the word ubuntu in the title, it makes frontpage.

Re:adverts

[zippthorne]

Actually.. Mandrake used to be the "desktop linux for people who aren't experts." I remember buying my first copy of it in Best Buy about 7 years ago. Came with a good deal of documentation, and worked pretty well right outta the box. I think it was somewhat of a Red Hat fork at the time (it used RPM, and claimed to use DEB too IIRC, but I don't remember trying anything but RPM.) During the time when Red Hat was a bear to download (at my university connection, it would've taken me weeks to get the ISO) the next version of Mandrake was a quick 2-hour d/l away.

Anyway, I've always found Mandrake easy to configure (with their drake- graphical utilities). In some ways it was easier than Ubuntu. It certainly had a friendlier (though not easier) install process. Drakedisk was the most intuitive, stable, and asthetically pleasing graphical partition manager I've used. It was far better than Ubuntu's offering in that area.

The thing that Ubuntu did better than mandrake enough to make me switch though was package management. Mandrake had OK management, actually, good management for the pay-version, but the free version had to either hack something together to use their freely accessable but intended for-pay package servers or hunt down updates for every package manually.

Re:adverts

[Frosty Piss]

This one was submitted *BY* Mandriva => awilliamson@mandriva.com

Re:adverts

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I don't read digg, now do I care what happens there. But even so I did not claim Ubuntu was better, was just pointing out I run Linux so it's not some noob whining from his XP box how Linux sucks etc.

Re:adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

You tell 'em, and make sure /. doesn't report as news the release of new versions of any other Linux distributions while your at it, i don't care if Hefty Heffalump or Slutty Salamander have dozens of new features nor do i wish to know when they becomes available for download or what those dozens of new features might be.

If i want to know about new releases of mandrake i use my powers of telepathy to pick up the news directly from the mind of their release manager.

Keep this crap off slashdot, leave room for serious news like Post-It note art!

Re:adverts

[dayid]

Damn, and here for a second I thought I was reading distrowatch....

Re:adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

You still sound like a whining noob though, some people are interested in new releases of linux, that's why they read /.

Re:adverts

[ssintercept]

i too spent 30 bucks at best buy for mandrake 7.2...it was great. came with a huge manual and three discs. its graphical install was good and it actually made me alot more confident and competent with my PC and now i use pc-bsd and damn small (still have a winders box too). i have tried many other flavors since but i remember mandrake and smile.

Re:adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent summary. I might add that this is an excellent distribution to give to a family member - the configuration menus are not *too* overwhelming. It's an easy competitor to opensuse 10.2 in the automatic patch management realm, but to be honest I haven't used this current release so I can't speak to the stability of their patch process. Security updates were easily setup and non-intrusive.

The application menu was *horrid*, I hated how everything was laid out. This is the best example I could find quickly of their menus - not that great - but I didn't look that hard. But really, that's the worst thing I could say about it. USB devices always detected out of the box, and using other (out of the US) servers to bring in DVD and other 'proprietary' codecs, it was a perfect desktop system.

Re:adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware: Get 'er done Linux. Go ahead, break it.

Re:adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I usually don't consider the news about new distro/program releases here as advertisements, but this time I only got to 1/3 of the description until I had to stop reading because it just felt so much as advertising. And when I enter the comments section, what do you know, the first post is about this being advertising...

Re:adverts

[escherian]

Mandriva is based on RPM -> RPM is basically dead -> all people using RPM distros are using APT (Debian) derived package managers. We need to have a common Linux base on Debian (completely free OS) and stop pushing at all levels proprietary and commercial distributions, they have the money to do this and they don't need our help. Please stop this PR (and we all doubt it is free, in fact we are sure someone here - maybe not the poor /. writer - are getting payed). There are over 150 Debian-derived distros out there: write about them...

Re:adverts

[AdamWill]

RPM is not 'basically dead'. Mandriva Linux does not use an APT derived package manager. It uses urpmi and rpmdrake, developed in house at Mandriva. Mandriva Linux Free and the GNOME version of Mandriva Linux One are composed of 100% free / open source software and are entirely free to download. We have been producing the Free edition of Mandriva Linux since 1998 and it has always consisted of 100% free / open source software. The KDE version of Mandriva Linux One is free to download but does contain some proprietary drivers for the convenience of those who use them (NVIDIA, ATI, Centrino wireless etc).

Re:adverts

[escherian]

1) RPM IT IS 'basically dead'. Take a look at: https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-maint/2 007-March/thread.html nobody is contributing to a RPM site launched with a big fanfare from Redhat. Even your former founder went APT when decided to go alone. "RPM Hell is a common way of referring to it". RPM doesn't allow concurrent version of libraries in a simple way and we can go on with arguments like this ones for a long time. Also if Redhat and Mandriva and Suse are using it, that doesn't mean it's a good system. Most Fedora people use APT and so do many Mandriva and Opensuse users. Their number is increasing. 2) I'm not talking about freeness of Mandriva. I had a very good time when French parliament decided to go with Ubuntu. That's freedom. 3) If you don't switch to Debian base soon you'll die soon. Time will prove it. Switch, soon. 4) RPM distributions are bad for Linux because commercial software producers are doing packages in this format and that's not for a technical reason but only for commercial agreements. We need autopackage-style for commercial software and APT based for free ones. Thats all folks, everybody can judge by them self...

Re:adverts

[AdamWill]

Well I don't know what you mean by free, then. If you're suggesting Slashdot is taking money to run stories, or something, then no: I submitted this story to Slashdot via the normal submission channels this afternoon. A few hours later, it went up. Nothing else took place whatsoever.

I've met exactly one person in five years using apt on Mandriva. A few more using smart, but still not many.

Otherwise, well - basically, we beg to differ. As you say, time will tell who's right.

Re:adverts

[Library Spoff]

You run ubuntu?
Mark is that you?

Re:adverts

[RobertLTux]

Umm if you had even the slightest sliver of a clue you would know exactly what the posting chain was

(Adam = Club Monkey was most likely given a PR written thing to post so he posted it)

everybody do yourself a favour and check the MD5 sums of your roms there are 2 sets running about and RTFD before you do your install and when in doubt ask on the mandriva Club forums (have a box of banannas handy if you have Borken Your Boxen)

Re:adverts

[scotch]

The level of confusion in your head is truly is mind-boggling. Fedora users that use apt (and many use yum, too) are also using rpm underneath.

Why don't you take a few breaths before pronouncing the death of rpm?

Re:adverts

[BokLM]

Mandrake had OK management, actually, good management for the pay-version, but the free version had to either hack something together to use their freely accessable but intended for-pay package servers or hunt down updates for every package manually.

Then you probably don't know http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

Re:adverts

[Andrei D]

You run ubuntu? Mark is that you? Nah. It's me, Eric

Re:adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

Who does that, morons? You get infomation that's neither complete, comprehensive or even regular. You just get sporadic "X distro has a new version". Go to distrowatch if you want that sort of information.

Re:adverts

[AdamWill]

actually I have a PR hat too. I get to write stuff like this. Aren't I lucky.

Re:adverts

[zippthorne]

I had indeed heard of it. That was the hack. It's a third party site to set up your repository list. It's ok if you trust third parties to do that sort of thing, (it output shell commands when I used it, so you could inspect those) but it's another thing you have to do.

Ubuntu has Synaptic. Just click the check-boxes for whatever repositories you want. Even the suspect ones. I do wish they had finer control though: I'd like some kind of assurance I'm not going to accidentally pick up a multiverse update for a package that's in base, or the ability to ignore specific updates for packages I've compiled from source.

Re:adverts

[triso]

Well I don't know what you mean by free, then. If you're suggesting Slashdot is taking money to run stories, or something, then no: I submitted this story to Slashdot via the normal submission channels this afternoon. A few hours later, it went up. Nothing else took place whatsoever.... A lot can happen in a few hours. Have you checked your furniture lately? Sometimes they send aliens to replace all of your furniture with exact duplicates. Beware!

Re:adverts

[AdamWill]

You can use the Mandriva configuration tools to set up remote repositories. See: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Insta lling_and_removing_software#Making_more_applicatio ns_available

Re:adverts

[Master of Transhuman]

Well, to be fair, when last I used Mandriva - 2006 version - the only "hack" you had to do was go to a Web site, select your repositories, then cut and past the command line the Web site generated for you into a terminal and hit return.

Dumb that it had to be done that way, but it worked fine. No matter what the legalities of what repositories, Mandriva should have a way to configure the repositories without having to go anywhere outside of Mandriva.

Once the repositories were set, package management was about as easy as it is in the Kubuntu I use now. Synaptic works pretty well. While Adept isn't great, it works fairly well for updates.

Mandriva in general I think is a better distro for newbies than Ubuntu or Kubuntu. While the greater range of installed packages might be overwhelming for some newbies, I think this doesn't overshadow the general better design of Mandriva. I dislike (X)buntu's blurring of root and normal user for one thing, and I think they also have poorer testing of their stuff due to less manpower than Mandriva. I also dislike the dumbing down of the system management tools.

At the moment I'm hanging in with Kubuntu since I don't really want to take the time to switch back to Mandriva. The only reason I switched from it was that I was dumb enough to do a full upgrade of Mandriva 2006 to 2007 shortly after 2007 was released. Naturally, the upgrade broke the system - and with a few hundred MB of upgrade, how do you tell what broke it? I should have waited several months for the bugs to be fixed and then done a clean install. Since I'd heard good things about Ubuntu, I decided to try Kubuntu. After various stupid tricks, I decided it was adequate but not great. It works okay for me day to day, aside from a problem with the wallpaper changer that occasionally kills my desktop when it encounters a corrupt image file.

Re:adverts

[buchanmilne]

"RPM Hell is a common way of referring to it". RPM doesn't allow concurrent version of libraries in a simple way and we can go on with arguments like this ones for a long time.

This is not a problem with rpm, it is only the way it is used. Mandriva has allowed multiple library versions installed in parallel since about 8.1 (due to the library packaging policy).

Also if Redhat and Mandriva and Suse are using it, that doesn't mean it's a good system. Most Fedora people use APT and so do many Mandriva and Opensuse users.

Those users of apt are still using rpm. apt for rpm is less maintained than rpm is, so you're arguing against yourself here.

RPM distributions are bad for Linux because commercial software producers are doing packages in this format and that's not for a technical reason but only for commercial agreements.

You haven't provided one statement that compares the technical differences between rpm and dpkg. Compare apt to urpmi or yum or smart, compare rpm to dpkg, and the rpm format to the deb format.

The only standard for third-party software under Linux (LSB) specifies RPM. So, RPM distributions have no effect, get the LSB to change rather than trolling about rpm -based distributions.

You seem to be the typical clueless debian apt vs rpm (which is an invalid argument) troll ...

Re:adverts

[buchanmilne]

The only reason I switched from it was that I was dumb enough to do a full upgrade of Mandriva 2006 to 2007 shortly after 2007 was released.

It's not dumb to do an upgrade ... it is supported. However, you do need to read the errata, especially the section on installation for the new release to know about the potential problems.

Remember that a lot of users (those who run cooker) do upgrades (via urpmi) daily or weekly ...

Why?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

How many desktop distros does the planet need? I can see the need for a few, each customised for a niche with something like Ubuntu probably scooping the lion's share of x86 desktops. Gentoo is for kids who play with matches. Debian for hippies. We need a few distros (well they're not really distros) to cover embedded and a few more for non-x86 hardware (PowerPC etc). How long can the community keep so many distros going?

It seems like an awful waste of talent. Perhaps focusing on fewer distro might get things moving along faster. I'm sure all that infighting and dilution of effort keeps MS smiling.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a bit ironic that you say that, because Mandriva is a consolidation of Mandrake and Conectiva.

Re:Why?

[AvitarX]

If they are funding projects like Metisse I think we need more.

Re:Why?

[Osty]

It is a bit ironic that you say that, because Mandriva is a consolidation of Mandrake and Conectiva.

Both of which were forks of Redhat, leaving us with two distros where initially there was one.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat is effectively dead to anyone who doesn't want to pay for a Linux distro. Fedora sucks. I haven't tried "Mandirva" since it stopped being Mandrake, but it was quite good back then. So really, I count one usable distro out of the whole mess.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you've contributed to open source development, kindly shut the fuck up. You have no idea what you're blathering about.

Re:Why?

[solanum]

Firstly because this is open source and free (as in speech) software*, so people can do whatever they like with it. If I want to release my own Linux distribution it's up to me, I don't need anyone else's permission.

Secondly, I personally rate Mandriva way above Ubuntu, I've used Mandriva for about three times as long as Ubuntu has even existed. After all the hype I did ditch Mandriva for Ubuntu for a while, but it was so frustrating that I switched back. The installer for Mandriva is second to none (whereas Ubuntu wouldn't even let me install grub to anywhere other than the MBR - yeah, I found out later there is another version of Ubuntu that would - yet another download). Also, the admin tools for Mandriva were better and there were more of them and finally, when I tried it Kubuntu was a very poor second cousin to the base Ubuntu (I wanted KDE) and there were all sorts of problems with it. Dunno whether that has changed since they said they would improve KDE support.

*Yeah, I know Mandriva push their commercial versions, but you don't have to buy 'em and all the software is available elsewhere, e.g. PLF.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many desktop distros does the planet need? I can see the need for a few, each customised for a niche with something like Ubuntu probably scooping the lion's share of x86 desktops. But Mandriva eez French! Zer eez no Linux like a French Linux. Mandriva is slim, fashionable, and drinks good wine.

Re:Why?

[Rukie]

My computer had some troubles recently, turned to be a bad bios (did a firmwapre upgrade and solved the problem) but because I use gentoo and it takes a little longer to install, (had ruined my information in attempting to fix the comp :-D) I installed Kubuntu. Less than 4 hours later, I formatted the harddrive and started to reinstall Gentoo. I couldn't stand the slugishness of KDE with Ubuntu. I looked at the package management system, and it didn't seem to have too much (maybe I wasn't looking around enough?) I wanted some office stuff, but I also wanted enemy territory true combat. It seemed like everything in Kubuntu's package management system was a part of KDE. It upgraded everything real nicely once it was installed, but I couldn't stand the long boot time. To me, I love Gentoo's ebuild system. Portage works so well with over 10,000? or is it 8,000? packages at my fingertips. Emerge xfce4 and I'm set lol. I haven't the chance to try out Mandriva/Mandrake, but with this Metisse thing I might have to check it out. (I've been using E17 a lot recently as well.) In my limited experience, I learned so much more about linux from gentoo's installer and it prepared me to handle most any situation. (Support is amazing!) Suse installs amazingly easy, but that was when I didn't know anything about linux. Once it was up I didn't even know how to install programs hehehe. If Kubuntu has a better package management system than I think it does, then its probably better than Suse for that. Slackware can be a little confusing to install as well. ClarkConnect, (not sure what thats based on, uses RPM's, so redhat?) installs easily but is for pure gateway/firewall use. Again, I think I might find a... 7th harddrive and install Mandriva :-D

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

Mandriva is a legitimate zero cost commercially supported desktop Linux distribution. There is only one other distribution in that category: Ubuntu. Having a bunch of distros in the same niche would be redundant, but having two is a good thing. Mandriva is definatly one of the major players, and they have been for a very long time.

Re:Why?

[Falladir]

Debian is also good for servers. Depending on your level of experience, it can be easier to administer than Gentoo or FreeBSD, and it's definitely quicker to install. The minimal-install footprint is smaller too, I think (I heard ~200 MB in the new release).

Re:Why?

[AdamWill]

Sounds like an excellent question to ask all those other distros who *haven't* been around since 1998. :)

Re:Why?

[dragonturtle69]

About 6 billion distributions would be nice, one for each person on Earth. Change the kernel, change the desktop environment, customize (not just the GUI or settings) your applications as you see fit, and add or remove whatever you wish from the stock distribution. That is why I truly enjoy using Linux. I know that there is some nit picking to be made about what is a "distribution", but I am sure everyone understands what I mean.

To illustrate what I mean:

I wish Mandriva well, and hope that they no longer make the same decisions that led to me formatting that partition. When JRE became a for cost plugin, I left. I have no problem paying for software, but don't charge me to use what someone else is providing for free. There were workarounds, but they left the browser and plugins outside the standard update path. Ubuntu is a nice distribution, along with Kbuntu and friends, but the lack of a root account felt very odd. Maybe I did not give it enough time. I know that, again, there are workarounds. But if I have to work around my OS, why am I using it? At work, its all about Windows. Workarounds make some sense there, since I am being paid. Speaking generally of all OS's, why would I pay for an OS for private use, then work to make it do what I wish, how I wish? Suse and Slackware are my current distributions, with Slackware taking me back to where I started with Linux, ZIPSlack. Knoppix, DSL, and Slax have all played a role with my bootable CD distribution needs. Each of these has strengths and weaknesses. Being able to choose is a strength of OSS and Linux, and why I promote them. If something doesn't work the way that you wish, change it or change your distribution.

Each change was mine to make. I controlled what happened on my PC's and how. If I felt a workaround was either too much work or would break something later, I moved to another that met my needs more closely. Limiting distributions would limit choice.

How many distributions? However many we decide to make!

Re:Why?

[Zantetsuken]

While I'm still in the stage of trying out distro's and primarily boot to WinXP Pro (games), I recently went from Fedora Core 6 (my CIS *nix courses use Fedora based books) to Debian Etch, the package management seems much nicer than FC. While I've heard that Gentoo's method of building from source lets you leave parts of programs out and can cut down on dependencies - Debian (and .deb based distro's) seems to be able to select unneeded dependencies when you remove packages. Since my primary machine for toying with *nix is my 60GB Laptop drive, with only a 10GB partition for whatever distro I'm going through, it helps save space...

Re:Why?

[postmortem]

One would be enough, especially for somethingwith so low market share. If zealots could all work together, surely we wouldn't have RPM/DEB/APT-GET/TAR mess

Re:Why?

[AdamWill]

From the Release Notes: "Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring is the first Mandriva Linux release to have a non-free section in the public repositories. This section, alongside the longstanding main and contrib sections, contains non-free drivers, firmware and some software, including the proprietary NVIDIA and ATI graphics card drivers, firmware for Intel Centrino wireless cards, Java runtime environments 5.0 and 6.0, and more."

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

As many as those willing to keep creating/maintaining'em. You know, it's the "free market" in the true sense. No one's forcing you to work on them. It's brilliant that Linux distro market is the so vigorous, trying to one-up each other. True, it makes app developer life such a pain, though, but stagnant water go sour.

Re:Why?

[Bitmanhome]

How many desktop distros does the planet need?

Pretty much one per person. It's hard to roll a distro though, so we tend to share many of them.

There's only 12 versions being released here so it doesn't help much percentage-wise, but it's a step in the right direction.

Re:Why?

[misanthrope101]

How many basketball players or pianists does the world need? How many kinds of toothpaste? How many models of athletic shoe do we need, for the love of God? There isn't a central job giver-outer that tells people what to do with their time.

With something as interesting and configurable as GNU/Linux, many people are going to tinker and come to the conclusion that the distros out there don't meet their needs, and some of them are going to develop distros that DO meet their needs, and share them. Some of these will be one-man shops, and some will have large communities form around them. People do what they find interesting and rewarding in some way. Why should that be different than all the rest of human existence?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zer eez no Linux like a French Linux. Mandriva is slim, fashionable, and drinks good wine. How does one drink an emulator?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

> How does one drink an emulator?

Actually, Wine is not an emulator.

Hmmm. I'm sure I've heard that before somewhere...

Re:Why?

[ozmanjusri]

RedHat is effectively dead to anyone who doesn't want to pay for a Linux distro.

Really? Has Netcraft confirmed this?

El SombreroRojo es muerto. Viva CentOS!

Re:Why?

[hey!]

How many desktop distros does the planet need?

How many ways are there to partition the universe of users into sets, such that the members of each set have more in common with each other than they have with users outside the set?

Re:Why?

[Knuckles]

About 6 billion distributions would be nice, one for each person on Earth. Change the kernel, change the desktop environment, customize (not just the GUI or settings) your applications as you see fit, and add or remove whatever you wish from the stock distribution.

I'm going to found a company that is dedicated to supporting a desktop environment that is different for every user. I will be rich!

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandriva is a legitimate zero cost commercially supported desktop Linux distribution. There is only one other distribution in that category: Ubuntu. Having a bunch of distros in the same niche would be redundant, but having two is a good thing. Mandriva is definatly one of the major players, and they have been for a very long time. What about Mepis, Pioneer, OpenSuse, and CentOS?

Re:Why?

[jZnat]

How many ways are there to partition the universe of users into sets, such that the members of each set have more in common with each other than they have with users outside the set? I don't know how many, but I do know that the result is a subset of all the Linux distros out there. ;)

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

Mepis and Pioneer are minor players. There are a lot of minor players, and many of them fall in the "having a bunch of players in the same niche is redundant" category. I'm not going to try to judge individual minor distros, but I will say that for most users a major distro is probably a better choice.

OpenSuSE (like Fedora) is a "demo version" of SuSE Linux. I see no reason to consider it separately from SuSE Linux - it doesn't stand alone the way something like Debian does, and it doesn't allow seamless transitions between payed commercial support and community support the way Ubuntu does.

CentOS is really interesting. It's a reaction to the fact that some applications are targetted at Red Hat Enterprise Server - and it's 100% appropriate for running those applications in cases where Red Hat paid support is not needed. It's still only interesting as an alternative to RHES, and so I see no advantage to considering it as a separate distribution.

Re:Why?

[JamesGecko]

You apt-get DEBs on Debian. You use Alien to convert RPMs to DEBs. TARs can be untarred and easily converted into whatever you want. So, we have high interoperability, but noone cares because most people just grab their packages from their distro's massive repos. I'm not seeing a problem here.

Metisse seems like a novelty.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried out this Mandriva release. And I have to say, Metisse seems like nothing but a novelty. It lets you do some flashy things with your application, but really doesn't offer much beyond that. After about 30 minutes of trying out its various features, all I could really say was "Meh."

Way back when, when X11 window managers started offering virtual desktops, you could find your productivity increasing immediately. It was such a simple idea, yet so powerful. You'd think that we'd find the same with something like Metisse. But that just isn't the case. It really doesn't increase productivity, and instead consumes a great deal of system resources.

It was interesting to play with it for a little while. But since it doesn't bring anything useful to the table, I don't think I'll continue to use it.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[zsau]

I played with Metisse a couple of months ago in a beta of Mandriva. It's mostly novelty, but it has some features that I have been wanting for ever.

Zooming out to view all virtual desktops like a fullscreen pagerhas much more value (to me) than a cube—it's essentially Exposé for virtual desktops, except it's actually useful because you always know where everything's going to be.

The ability to rearrange tools in windows so that what you want is where you want it is something I've wanted for ever, although in practice it seems a little too cumbersome to want to do very often.

Various nifty features like being able to partially grey out windows that aren't in focus sounds like it's useless, but if you use focus-follows-mouse it can increase your productivity especially on high resolution screens. Shadows likewise.

Unlike Beryl and Compiz, Metisse actually seems to be based around the idea of increasing productivity.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[Coryoth]

Unlike Beryl and Compiz, Metisse actually seems to be based around the idea of increasing productivity. That's nice to know, because that's not the impression I got from their demonstration videos which feature "folding windows", tilting windows at weird angles in 3D, and a weird sort of mirror reflection effect. That's nice to show off what the engine can do, but in principle all the other fancy 3D managers can do those too -- what really interests me is, as you discuss, actually using all that power to add productivity. I agree that the pager looks nice (although the other effects in that video are a little underwhelming in the productivity stakes). The shading effects shown here could be used nicely to gray out unfocussed windows which, I agree, might be nice (as long as it isn't carried too far). Still, I'm waiting for people to get bored with the gee whiz effects and the more useful things to start to shake themselves out.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Metisse open source, or proprietary?

Does it require a graphics card, the way that Beryl seems to (and thus causes Linux to crash on my laptop, a thing which ought not to happen)

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[zsau]

Metisse is free software, of course.

It will use your graphics card acceleration if it can; it ran very nicely for me on my new laptop using modern 32-accelerated Intel integrated graphics. I also tried it on my old laptop which has very old Intel integrated graphics using the i810 driver (nothing like the modern stuff!) and it ran very nicely considering. But on an old desktop with a 32 MB NVidia graphics card with very simple 32 acceleration (I assume it used the proprietry drivers on the Mandriva live cd), it ran like a dog. So for sufficiently old computers it might be desireable to turn acceleration off.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[zsau]

Some of the effects they show in the demonstration videos are actually useful in contexts we're not used to. If you have a tabletop computer with a large screen and people are sitting around it, window rotation could be very practical. (One of the demo videos shows exactly that.)

Some of the weird tilting effects by themselves are completely useless, but if you start dragging text to copy it from a non-topmost window, a window partial obscuring it automatically tilts away so you can see what you're copying. This feels like it'd be one of those features that once you get used to it, it's indispensible. I only tried it for two or three days, so I can't really get

So yeah ... Metisse is both "look at what we can do!" and "these ideas of ours have practical application": A guided search. Beryl and Compiz both seem to be "look at what we can do!": If you shoot enough arrows, one will hit bullseye.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[zsau]

Some of the weird tilting effects by themselves are completely useless, but if you start dragging text to copy it from a non-topmost window, a window partial obscuring it automatically tilts away so you can see what you're copying. This feels like it'd be one of those features that once you get used to it, it's indispensible. I only tried it for two or three days, so I can't really get

Finishing sentences is overrated when you're hungry at want lunch. I was just going to say I'd only tried it for two or three days, so I didn't really get comfortable enough with it.

As to my final paragraph, it's worth noting that Metisse is a project of HCI researchers working at a University, and Beryl and Compiz are just regular free software projects.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[Knuckles]

that's not the impression I got from their demonstration videos

I found very useful-looking stuff here, like this.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'd like to see is a "compositing manager meets VNC" manager, so I can sit at my PC and have a desktop on the server available as a virtual desktop on my PC, not as a desktop inside a window on a desktop.

Re:Metisse seems like a novelty.

[RobertLTux]

all of these 3d desktops do one simple thing

AeroGlass on two thirds of the hardware

Why announce this over the other distros?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got to admit that Linux is for nerds, I love it. But why is this more interesting then say Sabayon? Leave it to distrowatch, or tell me if some new distro is doing something newsworthy.

Google Earth is compelling?

[Gothmolly]

I mean, cool for Google to make it OSS, but does the availability of Google Earth mean anything from a practical perspective?

Re:Google Earth is compelling?

[Frosty Piss]

I mean, cool for Google to make it OSS, but does the availability of Google Earth mean anything from a practical perspective?

Well... If you troll Google Earth over the San Fernando Valley (home of the American porn industry), you can spy in on all the outdoor porn shoots.

Re:Google Earth is compelling?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not open source!

Re:Google Earth is compelling?

[LordSnooty]

Sure, if I'm about to drive an unfamiliar route, I can fire up GE and check out all the waypoints & landmarks on the route. Much better than a map when you can see the orchard or the huge building just before your turn-off.

my dream...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm starting to agree. I've been using Linux since 1995, trying out new distros over the years have been fun, enjoyable, entertaining, and most of all a major learning experience. But now I just want the damn thing to work, the software to work, the hardware to work, etc. And for the most part I do get things working, but imagine all the resources (time, money talent) that are being diverted to thousands (ok, if not thousands then at least hundreds) of different distributions, imagine all those resources being used on just a handful of distributions, imagine what would get done and how far and quickly things would advance.

I understand, projects like Linux (the kernel), KDE, GNU tools, etc are separate. I'm not talking about merging all the open source projects, I'm just talking about all the redundant putting together of all the projects (aka distributions).

Also I know different "flavors" would need to be established, a server edition, business edition, entertainment edition, etc; but they all could be based off the same "core" distribution.

I know it's been talked about, even attempted, but it's my little dream of what "could be" if people in the Linux community came together to work on the big picture.

Re:my dream...

[Coryoth]

I'm not talking about merging all the open source projects, I'm just talking about all the redundant putting together of all the projects (aka distributions). This will inevitably happen as "Linux" slowly gets more mainstream and greater desktop market share. What do I mean? Well it isn't going to be "Linux" as the amorphous mass of distirbutions that mainstream users will come to know, but rather a very small handful of distributions. As market share expands it will be that very small handful that will be gaining in audience, while all the other distributions will continue to be the small niche items that they are. Right now, because everything is relatively niche, the difference between "mainstream" and "niche" distributions is not that apparent. Once Linux becomes less of niche desktop OS (and that will happen, just very slowly) the difference will become more clear.

Re:my dream...

[Master of Transhuman]

Yeah, and if everybody came together, we'd all love each other and there'd be ponies...

Get a clue. It's not going to happen.

Unless of course YOU want to PAY ALL these people a decent salary to work on YOUR distro.

Which is what Shuttleworth is trying, basically.

And I doubt he's going to succeed in anything less than another ten years or so, if then, because even he doesn't have the money to pay everybody with an idea to work for him.

As someone once said, "Most of the smart people in the IT industry do NOT work at Microsoft."

Here's why:

[armanox]

We have Red Hat and Ubuntu for people who want it easy.
We have Debian for those who like a little effort.
We have Linux From Scratch for those who belong in an assylum, or doing obscure platforms
We have Gentoo for all of our cross platform needs (SGI Octane anyone)?
And we have Slackware for those who want to have some help starting up and then do the rest themselves. (Nicer Gentoo).

Re:Here's why:

[Chandon Seldon]

Simple desktop distros: Ubuntu and Mandriva.
Enterprise-priced server support: Red Hat and SuSE.
Community supported for techies: Debian and Gentoo.
Localized in Chinese: Red Flag.

I wouldn't really consider any of the other distros to be "major" (ignoring non general-purpose PC platforms).

Re:Here's why:

[Jesus_666]

And we have Slackware for those who want to have some help starting up and then do the rest themselves. (Nicer Gentoo).

I found it to be the other way around, but that's probably a way of which kind of help you prefer.

I'd put it like this:
Professional Linux - RHEL, CentOS, SLES, Debian stable
Testbed platforms for professional Linux - Fedora, SUSE, Debian unstable
Easy Linux - Ubuntu, Mandriva (SUSE is not included because YaST tends to complicate things at some point)
Linux for technies - Gentoo, Slackware
Linux for small boxes - Damn Small and the like
Try-before-you-install Linux - Knoppix, Ubuntu and other Live-CDs
Emergency Linux - most Live-CDs
Specialist Linux that fills a small niche well enough that other distros can't replace it - countless small distros

Some of these distros do pretty unique things - for example Gentoo is great for people who know exactly what they want since they can easily compile out program functionality they don't need. That'spretty unique and many people don't need it, but for those who do Gentoo is much superior to the alternatives. The same goes for Debian (for systems where stability is paramount), Ubuntu (for Linux newbies), Damn Small (for embedded systems where 200 MiB of base packages are unacceptable) etc.

Re:Here's why:

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good list that nicely sums up the major players in context, but I would add Slackware to the "community supported for techies" category.

Re:Here's why:

[Mr.Ned]

"Enterprise-priced server support: Red Hat and SuSE.
Community supported for techies: Debian and Gentoo."

Pidgeonholing Debian into a "community supported" group just isn't accurate - remember the article a few months back about HP attributing $25 million/year in sales to their support for Debian? http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 661481

Re:Here's why:

[Chandon Seldon]

Slackware is extremely popular among Slackware users, but I'm not sure that there's really any reason for a new user to adopt Slackware.

What advantage does Slackware really have over one of FreeBSD, Debian, or Gentoo?

Re:Here's why:

[Master of Transhuman]

Well, "techies" tend to work in IT positions for companies, so those companies end up running Debian as servers and even desktops.

But you simply can't include Debian as an enterprise, commercially supported distro in the same way as Red Hat Enterprise and Suse. $25 million for HP is a drop in the bucket in that regard.

An article I found sales the following:

HP had $600 million in Linux-based server sales in the fourth quarter of 2006 alone, which would suggest that, if the multiples are the same, HP's Linux-related business (including open source software riding on top of it and the services to implement it and support it) is now probably closer to $9 billion to $10 billion a year. That makes Linux and open source software about a tenth of HP's overall business--very roughly speaking...

Last summer, HP was the first of the top-tier systems providers to offer support on Debian Linux--in particular, on the "Sarge" Debian 3.1 release, which came out in June 2005. And while this is not a big revenue generator for HP, it shows that the company is interested in moving beyond the relatively easy task of offering commercial Linux from Red Hat and Novell and into the relatively uncharted waters of Debian Linux.

"There has been quite a bit of demand for Debian lately," explains Small. Since announcing Debian support last August, the Debian support, which is done by HP's own techies, has driven about $25 million in systems sales--primarily in Europe. He says that Debian is particularly popular in Germany, Spain, and South Africa. "A lot of customers develop applications in Debian, but then they have to go through the hassle of deploying on Red Hat or SUSE Linux because these are the Linuxes with enterprise-class support."

hey - mandrake is great!

[Anonymous Coward]

i used mandrake, what, ten years ago? got a lot of use from it processing photos.
edit / cropping. excellent!!! on a 386 compaq laptop, did a lot at the time.

the french think it through and keep it real.

more excellent linux. yes i know it is confusing, anything but the Borg!

tAKE Care. good luck.

A soft spot...

[shoegoo]

Mandriva (err Mandrake) will always have a soft spot in my heart as my first distro (I think it was 8.0 or 8.1 in the end of 2001). Anyway, it was a fine distro back then and I felt that URPMI never got the credit it deserved. Sure their repositories did not have nearly as many packages as Debian's, but with the official repos coupled with Texstar's, I was always happy. Although I haven't tried Mandriva in years (though I still use the partitioning tool on the install CDs fairly often), the features, screenshots, and community surrounding the distro make it look like it is still a very viable choice for a desktop beginner distro.

/me heads to the Mandriva User Board for nostalgic purposes...

Re:Yawn

[Rukie]

Well what is this with "Metisse"? I haven't heard of it before. I've seen Beryl with XGL/AIGLX and the really cool E17 window themes. Is Metisse a window manager thats picking up some steam here or what?

I like Mandriva and all, but ...

[TihSon]

I have been a loyal Mandriva user since 8.2, and although I will admit to having had a few flings with various other distros (Suse10.x, (K)Ubuntu) I am still using Mandriva in both my home systems. That said, after reviewing the videos of Mattisse et all I am forced to ask myself ... so what?

I have been seriously considering making the switch to the Isle of Man distro, KDE version, but I have so far delayed for fears my Linux mojo isn't strong enough. When I see what I would consider somewhat ... *ahem* ... lame features like the upside down mirror demo though, well, what can I say?

I like 2007 well enough, but these updates seem somewhat disconnected from what a regular guy like myself would want ... namely a nice desktop in an open architecture.

Torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

Direct link to the torrents (from OSNews.com story)

http://torrent.mandriva.com/public/

why? practice. multiculture.

[ushering05401]

All of the distros out there.. pet projects, in-house optimized kernels, serious attempts at desktop penetration - these things are allowing experimentation across a wide range of individuals with a wide range of interests and skill sets.

When several true desktop competitors emerge there will be the richest ecosystem of skilled laborers to draw from that has ever existed in the tech industry. Most importantly, they will not only contribute to what those major competitors are attemptig to achieve, but they will hopefully have tried different methods of achieving similar things, thus allowing Linux to harness the power of multiculture against their monoculture competitors.

Currently consolidation would simply mean uneccesary specialization by people who are more inclined to experimentation.. or trying their hand at directing efforts as they only can in a smaller scope development effort.

Believe me, if Linux possessed all the applications necessary to appease people who are used to other operating environments I would be decrying the number of distros as well. Fact is (and we are only hurt through denying this) we still lack some key components and players that are ubiquitous in the proprietary markets and 'vital' to the satisfaction of most users.

Anyhow, here's to a bright future for open source.

Regards.

real productivity gain...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can only be attained when you know on which virtual desktop you want to go and go there in a fraction of a second using a keyboard shortcut. If you have to look at a pager then click on it, you're wasting time... I'm not criticizing the "oh shiny" pagers/3D desktops etc. but I'm simply saying that if productivity is a concern, then you better organize your virtual desktops in a way that makes sense for you, that you can remember easily, and to which you can switch in no time by using the keyboard (without looking at it of course, otherwise you're also wasting time and you'd be better to take touch-typing lessons).

Re:real productivity gain...

[Knuckles]

Except that there are classes of users (non-expert) who are overwhelmed by current pagers (click somewhere and all your windows seem to be gone), but would nevertheless benefit from multiple workspaces. The Metisse approach, or something similar, has the potential to communicate to those users what actually happens. This is very valuable from a usability POV.

Re:Yet but..

[Architect_sasyr]

That all depends on your opinion of the distro and your definition of the word ;)

Don't be afraid to try Kubuntu; I did. Here's how:

[KWTm]

I, too, started out with Mandrake; it was v8.1 that I bought from Wal-Mart. Thank goodness for Mandrake's amazing hardware detection (for its time) that made it so easy to install. I stuck with Mandrake till v10.0-official, but, like another poster said, its package repositories made it hard for me to upgrade: I had to reinstall with each new version because I kept having errors when I just upgraded incrementally. Finally, Kubuntu grew to the point where it overtook Mandrake, and I made the leap. I continue to be satisfied with Kubuntu, even though I'm still using the Long-Term Support version, 6.06; in two days, I will be two versions behind and happily satisfied not running the latest and greatest. As you can tell, I'm not the type to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. New versions of software packages are available even for distro versions like 6.06 that are not the newest, so don't worry about upgrading the entire distro just to get the latest Firefox.

When you switch over from Mandrake, put your /home directory (and whatever other data you want) on a separate partition, then carve out a new partition to install Kubuntu. (You can use QTParted or something similar.) I made my Kubuntu partition about 3 GB, but lately it has been getting tight, so you might want to assign 4GB to Kubuntu; this includes log messages in /var/log, downloaded Ubuntu packages in /var/cache/apt, and programs in /bin + /usr/bin + /usr/local/bin + /sbin etc. Leave your Mandriva partition alone in case you need to dual-boot back into it (shrink it to about 3GB or something); Kubuntu will let GRUB recognize the Mandriva partition as bootable Linux.

Kubuntu assigns user numbers from 1000 up, but Mandrake uses 500 and up. When I migrated to Kubuntu, I found that all my /home directory files were owned by User #501, but Kubuntu wouldn't recognize any human user with that number. I wrote the following script that you can use to modify Kubuntu to create and recognize user 501:

#!/bin/sh
# Debian uses adduser as a front-end to useradd, so use that to add users

sudo cp /etc/adduser.conf /etc/adduser.conf.0~
# Now, edit /etc/adduser.conf so that LAST_SYSTEM_UID=499 and FIRST_UID=500
sudo bash -c 'sed -e "s/FIRST_UID=1000/FIRST_UID=500/" /etc/adduser.conf.s1'
sudo bash -c 'sed -e "s/LAST_SYSTEM_UID=999/LAST_SYSTEM_UID=499/" /etc/adduser.conf.s2'
sudo bash -c 'rm /etc/adduser.conf && mv /etc/adduser.conf.s2 /etc/adduser.conf'

sudo adduser --uid 501 my_username
sudo usermod -G "adm,admin,audio,cdrom,dialout,dip,floppy,lpadmin, plugdev,scanner,users,video" my_username

To use: first, while still in Mandriva, check what your UID is in the /etc/passwd file. It's probably somewhere 500 to 510 or so. Then, when Kubuntu asks you to create your first username during installation, use something temporary that you won't use again, like temp_admin. Then log in as temp_admin and run the above script. It will modify /etc/adduser.conf to set the max system account number to be 499, freeing 500 and up to be used for human users, just like the way it is in Mandrake. Then it will create an account called my_username (substitute with your permanent account name that you want to use, the one you're currently using in Mandrake; and substitute 501 with whatever user id# you were using in Mandrake) and enroll you in the various groups necessary to make you a sudo-able admin. Re-login as my_username, and you're good to go. Mount your home directory, and you'll have all your data files back.

Best of luck!

I'm still on Mandriva

[rmm4pi8]

Mandrake 8.1 was my first Linux distro, and it's just kept getting better since then, with perhaps the two low spots of 10.0 and 2006.0, both of which very unstable for me--I think the former correllated to bankrupty and the latter to the round of mergers. 2006.0 actually drove me to try Kubuntu (I'm solidly in the KDE camp) which I found very lacking from the perspective of a Mandriva user--difficult to uninstall packages I didn't want (because of the way Kubuntu is really just a package which lists all of the KDE packages as dependencies...), with less good wireless configuration support, a less good partition manager, less good multimedia support, etc.

I am now a full time Linux admin, and while I typically use either RHEL/CentOS or Debian on the server, the few Linux workstations in my company are all running Mandriva. The partitioning tool and hardware support are just the best of any distribution I've tried, and with a quick trip to easyurpmi to set up the external repositories, the userland is the best out there as well. I find PLF way easier to use than all the tricks required to get media codecs and such on Ubuntu.

And I still like it enough that even though I do Linux administration for a living, I still offer free Mandriva email support, which perhaps 10 of you have taken me up on, some of you frequently. Seriously...have a problem, I'll help you out if I can. Nothing against the other distros, but despite its reputation as being for beginners, I haven't found anything about it that's less friendly to experienced admins (for instance, the drak tools don't overwrite hand-edited config files the way SuSE's YaST does). Can anyone tell me what has started the 'less good for experts' tagline, other than that experts don't like to be seen using the distro that all the new users are trying out?

Re:I'm still on Mandriva

[tuckerteeth]

I gotta agree, I've tried several other distros and despite sticking with them long enough to work out what I needed to do to get the setup I desired, they were no way as easy to install, configure and use. All our machines at home run Mandriva 2007 and even the non-technical family members find the distro very stable and user-friendly. I'll be updating to Spring.

Re:I'm still on Mandriva

[Nuffsaid]

it's just kept getting better since then, with perhaps the two low spots of 10.0 and 2006.0, both of which very unstable for me

Ouch, bad luck! Those were the only versions I tried! Maybe that's why Kubuntu is now both on my home and my work PC.

Re:I'm still on Mandriva

[GreggBz]

I haven't found anything about it that's less friendly to experienced admins (for instance, the drak tools don't overwrite hand-edited config files the way SuSE's YaST does). Can anyone tell me what has started the 'less good for experts' tagline, other than that experts don't like to be seen using the distro that all the new users are trying out?

I use it at work also. And no, there are no arbitrary restrictions on functionality, and nothing stupid like what you mention with YaST. It's still very much like the RHEL we use on the production servers. The package manager kinda stinks though, as least compared to yum or, more specifically, apt-get. I think Mandrake still has the best installer, but it's leading margin is diminishing.

I'm not quite sure what started the "not for experts" tag. Really, it has all the power of any other Linux distro and my mouse has 5 buttons losers, FIVE, that's p0w3r!

Re:I'm still on Mandriva

[CmdrGravy]

I too have used Mandrake from around 1999 - 2000 because at the time it was the only distribution I could find which would recognise my graphics card and I could get a graphical desktop to work on.

In those past 7 years I've been really pleased with Mandrake/Mandriva because the config tools are generally fairly comprehensive so you can mess about altering things manually to learn how they work and then once you've really screwed everything up let drakconf fix it for you. It's certainly good for learners but also is powerful enough for anyone I think.

Some of their releases work much better than other ones, the last one 2007.0 Free is, in my opinion, one of the worst ones I've seen with a lot of annoyances where things just don't quite work. This has been the case with a number of their releases and it's really frustrating that they don't take the time to really get everything working solidly like it should. That being said some of their other releases have worked like that.

I recently bought a new PC and tried to install Mandriva on it but it basically just wouldn't have it so I installed Fedora 6 on it instead which feels a lot more solid than Mandriva 2007 did. I'm toying with the idea of installing that on my old PC too but maybe I'll wait and try the new Mandriva release first.

Re:I'm still on Mandriva

[rmm4pi8]

Yeah, urpmi sure isn't apt-get, though I have high hopes for smart as that tool continues to mature. I found that the real power of apt-get though is the Debian repositories themselves, which are massively comprehensive and don't have hardly any broken packages in testing or stable, even if you pin to newer versions of some packages (eg, to get the newest Postgres, which is way better than the 7.x series). My experience with apt-get on Ubuntu was a lot less exciting, as I just kept running into broken packages or over-extensive dependencies that dragged in stuff I didn't want.

Re:I'm still on Mandriva

[rmm4pi8]

Interesting, I tried Fedora Core 6 on a PC at work and gave up after one too many broken packages. As for Mandriva 2007.x, I think it's actually the most stable yet, but only in the One (live cd + installer) editions--I've had bad luck with Free, and nothing to do with multimedia codecs or whatever--it just seems to have little quirks that they don't bother ironing out. Also, if you try to turn on the 3d-desktop stuff with an ATI or Intel card, it barfs pretty unrecoverably, in my experience.

So if anyone from Mandriva is reading this--perhaps give some way to recover from choosing the wrong X.org options on install, and maybe focus on a narrower line of releases so that you can do better QA? But I still think they're way ahead of Kubuntu.

Re:I'm still on Mandriva

[Master of Transhuman]

See, now, here we have another example.

The above two posts are about Mandriva not doing adequate testing.

Folk, this is now true about ALL of the distros. There appear to be no exceptions. I've seem this problem with Kubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora - you name it.

The simple fact is that Linux and all its attendent packages is now TOO COMPLEX for even the commercial Linux companies to adequately test their releases. Too much stuff - especially stuff that will affect new users like installation failings and package management screwups - is falling through the cracks.

I don't know whether this is because they simply don't have enough manpower, or whether they are relying too much on upstream testing from the OSS developers, or whether they are concentrating too much on "eye candy" like Compiz and virtualization stuff like Xen to spend time on their installation and package management processes, but it is definitely becoming a serious issue that needs to be recognized and addressed by ALL the distros.

There was an article today on another site about "The Workaround Trap" in which the author declared that one problem is that when people are confronted with a problem, they prefer to suggest "workarounds" rather than FIXING THE PROBLEM. I think this is becoming ubiquitous in Linux and that approach is going to hurt in the long run. You can't make a mistake, then make more mistakes trying to "work around" the first mistake.

This sort of mindset is endemic in the entire IT industry - and it's just one reason why "nothing works and nobody cares."

Re:Why? why not

[ssintercept]

why do we need differing flavors of pop, or more than one car maker, or shampoo? how about if we had one political party? i could go on forever...but why?

Re:Don't be afraid to try Kubuntu; I did. Here's h

[ET_Fleshy]

You could also just `sudo chown {username}:{usergroup} -R /home` to fix the issue w/o all the fuss...

easyurpmi?

[robbo]

You've never heard of easy urpmi? I just update the mirror and run 'urpmi.update -a'. I've had smooth upgrades all the way from Mandrake 9.2 to Mdv 2007.

Re:easyurpmi?

[xtracto]

d run 'urpmi.update -a'. I'

I dont understand what do you mean by "run 'urpmi.dupa -a '.I

On ubuntu I click on Accessories, then click on Synaptic package manager, then enter my password and click on Select All Upgrades and click OK!

Were do you run those obscure commands? on Firefox? I tried it and I only got to a google search page without any results...

Re:easyurpmi?

[The Slashdot Guy]

That's the way he chooses to handle it, there is a graphical package manager in Mandriva for you pointy-clicky types.

Re:easyurpmi?

[broeman]

cute...

you know how to click on the link in his message, right? Graphical interfaces can be user-friendly, but so can a simple command in a terminal window. The page shows what to update, and you just have to copy/paste it into a terminal, if you are so frightened about it.

I more like metadistros like Gentoo Linux, which I chose after I got tired of dependency hell in Mandrake (also that I had to use Penguin Liberation Front to get mplayer and such) a couple of years ago. That is probably much better today, but I'll stick to Gentoo for now :)

Re:easyurpmi?

[robbo]

What is this 'click' you speak of? Is that some kind of gopher client? I typed 'man click' but nothing came up...

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

Dependency issues? urpmi should resolve all dependencies for you. You can even untar everything from source including dependencies into a directory and run the urpmi on the director and it will pick up on the config script and should compile and install everything including the depends.

It has been a while since I've had to do that though. Most everything is either already provided by urpmi or the install directions that come with the applications are sufficient to getting everything going without hassle. I did find that installing the devel packages helped with a lot of the need to install something else as a dependency in the future though.

And yes, urmpi can be used to keep everything upto date from a graphical interface in the control center. The Easyurpmi site gives alternative accesses and access to stuff Mandrake cannot legally distribute or isn't free enough for them.

The person who started the mandrake years ago was terminated a while back and they went form being easy to use to somewhere in between. their site lacks focus on the free side and their download pack tries to his the source code and such. Am i the only on who doesn't like the mandriva name switch along with the direction they are going after their buyout of that Brazilian distro? Anyway, it is still a good distro but I'm not as pleased with it as I once was. I'm into centos now for most of my needs and knoppix for a lot instant needs. I still have a box with mandrake-mandriva on it and keep one updated with the current version. It is my desktop of choice but I haven't been able to spend much time on it lately.

Re:easyurpmi?

[AdamWill]

Sorry, what do you mean by 'hiding source code'?

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

You used to be able to download the source files for everything from the download site. Now all they link to is mirrors for the ISOs. You have to goto a mirror and then navigate up several directories to find the source repositories to do a old school build or net install.

This is frustrating because I like the FTP installs and have some hardware that needs a few changes to the drivers before they are compiled. It seems easier to start from scratch and build the kernel and all after downloading the source tree with the driver in it then to disable the driver in the kernel and insert the working version of the driver as a mod.

either way, from the Mandrake/Mandriva site, it will only show links to the ISOs for download. It is annoying and didn't happen until after they got rid of Gaël Duval was removed from his position at Mandriva.

Re:easyurpmi?

[AdamWill]

Well we're trying to keep things simple and easy and having network install stuff on the download page isn't really the way to achieve that. It's not hiding anything, just not exposing overly complex stuff on what's meant to be a simple page.

The 'installing Mandriva' page on the wiki - http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Installing_Mandri va_Linux - has full instructions on doing a network install (among other types). It's linked from most of the release PR.

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

Eh.. We two things. First, a link to that link would be nice on the download page. although it is informative, it isn't comprehensive and still sports the same problem of hiding the source trees. And this links to problem 2

There still isn't anything showing were the source files are kept. If i hadn't been using Madrake since version 8.0 and doing source installs i never would have known how to find them. All the information Mandriva gives is to find the ISO, and on some wikki page, how to do an alternative install if you are able to find files other then the ISOs. This isn't simple at all. This is insanely confusing. You cannot burn an ISO and share it to make the necessary source directories to install in that way. Any one not in the know probably couldn't find them if they needed too.

I have sent off emails in the past on this and got some canned responce with no adjustments. Actually the reply didn't looked canned but the meet of what it said was they were going to forward it to someone else and nothing ever happened. And truthfully, I have stopped renewing my subscriptions to the club and I have several companies I work with who were silver members or better. This support just isn't there. I have asked and asked for a simple link to some source repositories and your posting a link to some wikki article that still doesn't have the links is the closest anyone has ever come in it.

A simple link to the source directories on the other servers is all I'm asking for. It doesn't even need to be on the same page, there could be a separate page with the source mirrors and some note about advanced users looking to do advanced installs instead of trying your best to hide the damn files in the name of keeping it easy.

From my side, it appears that you don't get the advertising revenue from the alternative installs or something and are trying to hide the files so everyone will go with the ISO and regular install routine. I don't care about the advertisements, they are still there on a net install but I do care about the access to source files and the ability to modify some files and install from scratch.

Re:easyurpmi?

[JackieBrown]

Sometimes the commandline is faster.

Also, if an upgrade breaks forcing you to type some "arcane" apt or dpkg lines, it sounds like you would be screwed.

The nice thing about Debian/Ubuntu/Madriva/and so on is that there are multiple ways to upgrade and fix systems. The most versatile are the command line commands because you're not dependent on a GUI and you have more override options.

Re:easyurpmi?

[AdamWill]

Why do people always seem to assume the worst possible motive for everything?

As you say, all the advertising is present no matter what type of install you do, so what possible reason do you have to assume some kind of penny-pinching malice as the 'reason' we're 'hiding' the files? I just don't get it at all.

If you're really asking for a list of mirrors:

http://api.mandriva.com/mirrors/basic.2007.1.i586. list

it's really not that hard to find one. Easy URPMI, smart URPMI, http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/CookerMirrors , there's loads. I've never run into anyone else who has as much trouble as you claim to finding a mirror.

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

What other motive is there? What other reasons could there be for hiding the source repository for an open-source product? Maybe they only get ad revenue from the ISOs because thats the only way they can count the installs? I don't know. but what I do know is that there is a concerted effort to hide these files from normal users like me.

And "it's really not that hard to find one" is a cop out. Doesn't the GPL say you have to make them available in the same place you made the GPLed work available? I am sumdumass but I think this clause says specifically that

"If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering
access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent
access to copy the source code from the same place counts as
distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not
compelled to copy the source along with the object code." Do I need to link to a current version of the GPLv2 so that it make sense? I believe it also says readily available too. This seems contrary to the "if you hunt hard enough you will find it" approach that mandriva has taken.

And BTW, those links are a joke. How long would it take someone who hasn't paid for club access to find them? And the cooker is the development sources for the next distro. Hardly suitable for everyday common usage. But in any fact of the matter, it isn't the 2007 release nor the 2006 release nor the 2005 release. And as long as we are on that, Why are the updates for mandriva canceled and no longer available when you get beyond two release cycles instead of the three years like the GPL implies with the written offer section? Or are we pulling some technicality and claiming it only applies to the written offer.

And the one link is just a text file containing information about the repositories. But it isn't designed for someone to go looking and find it. It is nothing short of some other utility your passing off as having the information. This hardly qualifies in my opinion.

Now lets be clear, I'm not saying they should develop for three years but the updates they release 6 months ago should be available for three years. The 2005 community edition doesn't have any updates available to the general public. and in the past I have had to write to them about not being able to find the updates for releases less then 3 years old. I'm even going to question whether they have the updates available to the people who have spent the money for the club memberships and have access to all the hidden search-able areas. I had the club memberships. I got them for the support for several companies I used Mandrake in. And after doing some current searching, It appears that the updates to the official releases only are available now. This wasn't the case One year ago.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you are Adam Williamson of the mandrake fame. If I am correct, this isn't the first time you have heard these arguments. I have talked about them on #mandrake on IRC freenode before and I have posted some questions about them in the club forums. The answer always seems to be, if you look hard enough you can find it or well why should we give keep the stuff available after we moved on to different projects. Both of these seem to run contrary to the Spirit and letter of the GPL. And No, I don't know for sure if the replies I got were from an official mandrake/mandriva team member. But I got the replies on official sources to address problems and complaints.

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

I screw up on a quote. Here is how it should have looked.

What other motive is there? What other reasons could there be for hiding the source repository for an open-source product? Maybe they only get ad revenue from the ISOs because thats the only way they can count the installs? I don't know. but what I do know is that there is a concerted effort to hide these files from normal users like me.

And "it's really not that hard to find one" is a cop out. Doesn't the GPL say you have to make them available in the same place you made the GPLed work available? I am sumdumass but I think this clause says specifically that

"If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering
access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent
access to copy the source code from the same place counts as
distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not
compelled to copy the source along with the object code."

Do I need to link to a current version of the GPLv2 so that it make sense? I believe it also says readily available too. This seems contrary to the "if you hunt hard enough you will find it" approach that mandriva has taken.

And BTW, those links are a joke. How long would it take someone who hasn't paid for club access to find them? And the cooker is the development sources for the next distro. Hardly suitable for everyday common usage. But in any fact of the matter, it isn't the 2007 release nor the 2006 release nor the 2005 release. And as long as we are on that, Why are the updates for mandriva canceled and no longer available when you get beyond two release cycles instead of the three years like the GPL implies with the written offer section? Or are we pulling some technicality and claiming it only applies to the written offer.

And the one link is just a text file containing information about the repositories. But it isn't designed for someone to go looking and find it. It is nothing short of some other utility your passing off as having the information. This hardly qualifies in my opinion.

Now lets be clear, I'm not saying they should develop for three years but the updates they release 6 months ago should be available for three years. The 2005 community edition doesn't have any updates available to the general public. and in the past I have had to write to them about not being able to find the updates for releases less then 3 years old. I'm even going to question whether they have the updates available to the people who have spent the money for the club memberships and have access to all the hidden search-able areas. I had the club memberships. I got them for the support for several companies I used Mandrake in. And after doing some current searching, It appears that the updates to the official releases only are available now. This wasn't the case One year ago.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you are Adam Williamson of the mandrake fame. If I am correct, this isn't the first time you have heard these arguments. I have talked about them on #mandrake on IRC freenode before and I have posted some questions about them in the club forums. The answer always seems to be, if you look hard enough you can find it or well why should we give keep the stuff available after we moved on to different projects. Both of these seem to run contrary to the Spirit and letter of the GPL. And No, I don't know for sure if the replies I got were from an official mandrake/mandriva team member. But I got the replies on official sources to address problems and complaints.

Re:easyurpmi?

[AdamWill]

For a start, you don't understand what 'source' is. The binary RPMs that make up the distribution you get on ISOs are not 'source', and that's what you're moaning about. The 'source' is all this stuff:

ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Man drivaLinux/official/2007.1/SRPMS/main/release/

How long would it take someone who hasn't paid for Club access to find them?

Well, for a start, I don't see what paying for Club access has to do with anything. 'A mirror list' is not among the privileges of Club membership. So I don't know where you get that argument from. Second, when you Google for 'Mandriva Mirrors', the CookerMirrors page on the wiki is result #4, the 2007.0 mirror list on api.mandriva.com is #10, and the Club mirror finder (which works for non-Club members) is #6. So the answer to that would be 'not very long', I think.

The GPL has precisely nothing at all to do with the provision of security updates. That's clearly an absurd argument. You can release a product under GPL (or any other software license) and never update it. Notwithstanding, mirrors that carry the /old tree where old releases go to die have all the old updates available. http://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/mandriva/old/updates / has updates back to 7.2. (In case you're wondering, I found that by Googling for mandriva-old : it was the first result).

You are also badly misreading it in terms of where the source code is to be made available. The paragraph you quote is not compelling the source to be made available in the same place as the binaries. It's saying that if you, say, sell a GPL-covered product as a time-limited download, then it's OK to provide the source in the same place; you don't have to make it available permanently as a non-time-limited download, and if the buyer doesn't download the source at the same time as they download the binaries, hard cheese. In other words, it's entirely irrelevant to the situation we are discussing.

I'm sorry, but it's getting to the point where it's hard to assume good faith on your part. And your understanding of the GPL is clearly sorely lacking.

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

Well, those aren't exactly source files as in how the GPL describe source (The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it)but yes, your right. I'm looking for the binary RPMs that make up the distribution and I am looking for the source files too.

Well, for a start, I don't see what paying for Club access has to do with anything. 'A mirror list' is not among the privileges of Club membership. So I don't know where you get that argument from

I got the idea from mandriva doing everything possible to shove the paid stuff in your face along with not being a club member for two years. I stopped being a club member when the website changed and all the good stuff was hidden from site. When I was a club member, I knew were everything on the site I needed was. Once the changes started happening, I started having to login to get things because it was constantly being removed from general access. There goes that idea.

Second, when you Google for 'Mandriva Mirrors', the CookerMirrors page on the wiki is result #4, the 2007.0 mirror list on api.mandriva.com is #10, and the Club mirror finder (which works for non-Club members) is #6. So the answer to that would be 'not very long', I think.

I shouldn't have to google from something that should be in plain site on the companies website. Why is it that mandrake/mandriva is attempting to make it hard for people to get anything without signing up for the club services? Why is everything a challenge in finding docs and support at the damn website and you are demonstrating that we have to use Google to get access to this secrete information? The GPL says the source needs to be in the same place or accessible from were the binary is distributed.

You are also badly misreading it in terms of where the source code is to be made available. The paragraph you quote is not compelling the source to be made available in the same place as the binaries. It's saying that if you, say, sell a GPL-covered product as a time-limited download, then it's OK to provide the source in the same place; you don't have to make it available permanently as a non-time-limited download, and if the buyer doesn't download the source at the same time as they download the binaries, hard cheese. In other words, it's entirely irrelevant to the situation we are discussing.

You know, I had this elaborate reply set up with references to all the sections in the GPL were I was going to point out were I was correct. Instead I decided to erase it and just simply link to a couple of items in the FSF faq section describing how the GPL is to be viewed. If you are in disagreement with it, then I suggest you ask them why I can get that opinion I have of the GPL and who the asshole is that echoed that opinion in writing the faqs.

I will say one thing first though. What that quote says is that IF you distribute the program by download the source requirements can be satisfied with offering the source there instead of the standard written offer. And because the written offer says it needs to be available for three years, I'm suggesting that the Updates that were made to a "GPL"ed piece of software are "GPL"ed too and the 3 years apply to the source for those updates. I'm not aware that mandriva provides the source for the corresponding updates in any way other then downloading them. If I can write and get the corresponding source files for all updates to 10.1 or 2005LE up to the end of life for the product for the cost of copying it and distributing it, please let me know. But as far as I can tell, the only offers for source is the standard source cd's if you write in or by the power pack editions. Non of these cover the updates that were offered by mandriva.

This faq item here says you need to link to the source in the same location as the b

Re:easyurpmi?

[AdamWill]

SRPMs for the updates are available on the mirrors just like the binary packages.

http://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/mandriva/old/updates /7.2/SRPMS/

there's the SRPMS for the 7.2 updates. That release is six and a half years old.

I am entirely sure that any FSF representative, lawyer or reasonable person would consider our source availability to be beyond adequate and well into 'generous'. All the Mandriva public mirrors carry the source code for every package. What more can you realistically ask for? You seem to be just making trouble for the sake of making trouble.

Re:easyurpmi?

[sumdumass]

I'm not making trouble. The only reason it was brought up is because you keep questioning why I am upset with Mandriva and then try to tell me that I'm full of it.

The Source needs to be linked to from the same page as the binaries where your initially distributing them. This is acording to the GPL not me. I even links to the GPLs FAQ sheet that discusses it. Somewhere in the download page that directs people to the downloads there need to be an easily seen link to get to the sources.

I don't know why asking for a damn link is such a hard thing to consider. It isn't as if I'm asking for your wife or anything. It is just a damn link to the source in the preferred form for making modifications to. And I want a link to the updates or a way to get them for three years after you produce them like the GPL says. It doesn't even matter if I have to have them copied to a CD and mailed to me. The last time I tried to get them, it was for 9.2 and 2005LE was current I think. I was told i was out of luck by mandriva and all the people I could find on the club forums and IRC channels. I was told it is old and outdated andI shouldn't be using the software, I should just update.

This placed me into a real bind that made creating a mirror server to match one already in production a bitch. I needed to change some hardware out and I needed to determine if there were any problems first. Instead of something that should have taken roughly a day to setup, I had to pull a bunch of software to a newer system and deal with all the incompatibilities. I then ended up having to test the new hardware and then bring the old system that was functioning perfectly fine up to date. This changed a weekend project into a entire week ordeal and there was no reason for it. Non what so ever at all. The updates should have been available and the source should have been available.

Go ahead and fight me on this saying I don't know what I'm talking about. I will continue tell people about my grievance and how it happened and why I don't think mandria is a worth while company/distro. You have made me decide to go ahead and move on from mandriva with this conversation. If that was your intent, you succeeded and just goes to show to everyone how well mandriva treats it's users.

Ubuntu is screwed.

[kahrytan]

  If more distros like Mandriva include compositing window managers then Ubuntu is royally boned. And it is time for Gnome and KDE to start including some of Beryl, Compiz or Metisse's features into their window managers.

It is the next step in Linux distro evolution.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[Dionysus]

With Feisty.
To install beryl in Kubuntu: aptitude install beryl-kubuntu
To install beryl in Ubuntu: aptitude install beryl-ubuntu

To start beryl, type beryl-manager in a terminal.

That's it.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[Anonymous Coward]

  It's to bad Beryl sucks. It is too bloated. And the manager is too complicated. The developers screwed up on Beryl. They added to much useless junk and lack the ability to make it user-friendly to boot.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[Asmandeus]

OK troll, I'll bite.

It's to bad Beryl sucks. How does it suck?

It is too bloated. How is it bloated?

And the manager is too complicated. What? It has everything clearly labeled and sorted into different perfectly sensible sections.

The developers screwed up on Beryl. They added to much useless junk and lack the ability to make it user-friendly to boot. OK, now I'm positive you've never used Beryl. Which I can pretty much say to just about anyone that tries to criticize Beryl/Compiz/whatever about it's visuals harming productivity and such. You people realize you can turn off (or on) pretty much anything you want? You could just keep on the "expose" feature if you wanted.

What they've brought to the Linux desktop is a great thing. Anyone who tries to say otherwise needs to do themselves a favor and actually try it before speaking up.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[Knuckles]

To install beryl in Ubuntu: aptitude install beryl-ubuntu. To start beryl, type beryl-manager in a terminal.

Except if you have a vid card w/o good 3D drivers. Either you are SOL, or, if you have an ATi, have to jump through hoops to get Xgl working instead of AIGLX. And after you have set it up, it still has many, MANY usability issues. It's nice stuff, but years from being polished enough for the masses.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[Knuckles]

How does it suck?

Its integration into the desktop environment sucks. A million things stop working. E.g., I lost the option to middle-click and drag in Nautilus, since this suddenly rotates the cube

How is it bloated?

Look at the freaking Beryl settings manager.

What? It has everything clearly labeled and sorted into different perfectly sensible sections.

Oh, I see, you have never worked with the majority of users -- non-experts. Get back to me when you have experience with them. Hint: as long as changing a setting in the settings manager breaks UI integration without warning, it is not ready.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[logixoul]

And it is time for Gnome and KDE to start including some of Beryl, Compiz or Metisse's features into their window managers. kwin 4 will be a compositing WM. The actual effects will depend on others joining in now that the foundations are laid. The kwin maintainer blogs about it now and then.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[kahrytan]

Beryl is not integrated into Gnome/KDE. And it breaks Gnome themes. Beryl should use Gnome/KDE?XFCE Themes and not it's own.

If you look at the settings manager, There is way to many choices. I turned on one effect and it crashed the system. In the end, it corrupted the partition when I tried to reboot.

And I HAVE USED BERYL. I had to reinstall Ubuntu to get rid of the piece of crap. I don't reinstall it ever again. Settings manager has TO MANY settings. Newbies require less to setup, not more.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[AdamWill]

Since several versions ago, Beryl can use GNOME and KDE themes, via the Heliodor and Aquamarine window decorators respectively. They are GNOME and KDE native decorators for Beryl which use the desktop-defined window themes and other settings. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring sets the appropriate one up automatically when Beryl is chosen.

Re:Ubuntu is screwed.

[Knuckles]

Just want to add, for the benefit of anyone pursuing Beryl on Ubuntu with an ATi card, that the beryl packages in feisty do not support running on Xgl, you need to get the Ubuntu packages from the beryl homepage.

No: what if you dual-boot back into Mandriva?

[KWTm]

You could also just `sudo chown {username}:{usergroup} -R /home` to fix the issue w/o all the fuss... Not if you want to continue dual-booting into Mandrake. If you chown it, then Mandrake will no longer recognize the files as belonging to the original user. Then you'd have to fuss with Mandriva's user account.

Re:No: what if you dual-boot back into Mandriva?

[TihSon]

I will be setting up an entirely new system, and I have never been one to dual boot for long. If I do decide to switch, my HD setup ... Mandriva with Ubuntu or Ubuntu alone ... will tell me which method I will use.

Thank you both for the impromptu Linux knowledge increase! :-)

Re:No: what if you dual-boot back into Mandriva?

[trenien]

My regular distro is Mandriva, but I do have a partition available that allows me to test other distros every now and then.

When I do that, I want it to be thorough, so playing around for a couple of hours isn't enough. I have to test things out for a few days, which mean I can't not have access to all my files/mails and so on. Of course /home is separate partition.

What I do is make sure to create a user and a group with the same names and numbers as those in Mandriva (either during install or afterward, depending on what the install process allows).

For those who can't be bothered to read the man page (and don't have access to advanced enough graphical tools), the options --uid and --gid to adduser allow you to pick the id numbers.

I'm sick of Linux

[tsa]

I've been using Linux for ten years now and I get more and more disappointed by it. Ten years ago there weren't many user-friendly distros out and I started with Slackware. I'm still very happy my friend dragged me into using that because I am now a savvy *nix amateur. But! During the last ten years I kept hearing that, yes, Linux is now really almost ready for the desktop, and world domination is just around the corner. I tried some other distros over the years (Suse, Redhat), but I kept coming back to Slackware. About a year ago I changed to Ubuntu because I didn't like all the configuration I had to do after every Slackware upgrade anymore. 'Ubuntu works out of the box!' the website assured me. After install I spent hours getting X to work right. It only wanted to run in 1024x768 @ 60 Hz. Thanks to my experience with Slackware and my backups I could edit xorg.conf to fix that. Now I have a working install, but Ubuntu is so slow that it's a pain to use. And I haven't been able to watch a movie on it yet. Configuring Gnome was a pain, and there isn't much documentation on how to start on the Ubuntu website either. I find the whole Ubuntu experience very disappointing. The only thing that keeps me from changing to a Mac completely (I have a MacBook Pro which I love) is the lack of choice in hardware. Changing to Windows is of course no option; I never understood why that OS is used so much. So I keep using Linux, but I almost never use my main machine as anything other than a file server anymore. Linux is very good at that, no matter which distro you use.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[lbbros]

So much for ranting, but "there isn't enough documentation" is FUD. There are at least two resources, the official documentation page (help.ubuntu.com) and the community wiki (wiki.ubuntu.com).

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Vintermann]

Perhaps you could try... oh, I don't know, Mandriva?

I use it, wouldn't switch to a mac for the world. They don't even have the keys where they should be!

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[DigitAl56K]

Changing to Windows is of course no option; I never understood why that OS is used so much.

Perhaps for all the reasons you just mentioned: You don't have to spend hours getting the window manager to work right. It doesn't want to run in only 1024x768@60hz. You don't need to manually edit an xorg.conf, or have the experience required to do so. You can watch movies on it very easily. Configuring the shell isn't a pain. There is plenty of choice in hardware.

Remind me again why Windows is no option?

Side note: No, fan boys, this is not an open invitation for you to critique every little problem with Windows. Or every big one ;) We all know it's not perfect.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Vskye]

I've also been using Linux forever, since the pre-1.0 days. As you said, as a server it is rock solid, but as a normal desktop computer it is somewhat less forgiving. On the other hand, I've been using kubuntu for the past couple years and it works well for me, and have had only a few issues with upgrading to LCD and a new nvidia card, and even that wasn't bad, since I'm familiar with xorg.conf. (a normal joe user would have gave up though) Another funny comparison is that I bought a iMac this year, what sold me was the bash prompt. ;) Works good enough that the kids now use the linux box, and I retired the old pentium 120MHz Gateway, and use the iMac for my normal dev / all around system.
 
Issues that I consider non-forgiving to the new Linux average computer user would be:
Watching dvd movies. (or burning)
Tv card support still sucks for auto detection.
Lack of drivers for new video cards.
Lack of games compared to the Windows world.
 
Now, granted we can fault lack of open specs, etc to some of these issues, but to the normal computer user they just don't care. Shit should just work.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[JonJ]

Shit should just work.
Currently, no operating system does this as of today(Not OS X either.). But GNU/Linux is the closest one.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[lattyware]

Because I really don't feel like spending hundreds of pounds on what I can get, better, for free. That goes for both the OS and the software. For me, Linux works way better than windows ever did.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[tsa]

All the things you mention I have on the Mac. Plus, no spyware, malware etc thanks to a fantastic OS that is not defective by design.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[tsa]

That's interesting, you have the same Linux 'career' as I have. For me the bash prompt was also a selling point for OS X. I bought an old iMac G3 and put OS 10.3 (I guess it was) on it. After some fiddling around with that thing I bought an iBook. If you could easily upgrade the videocard in an iMac I would have bought one last year. I play a lot of adventure games, and although they're not really heavy on the graphics card they get more demanding all the time. Now I have a windows/Linux box that I use as a game machine / fileserver.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[WaZiX]

You've been using linux for 10 years and it took you hours to fix your xorg.conf?

How hard is it to add a couple of "widthxheight" in a text file? Or even easier: to run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg so you can add them by just selecting the resolution (and giving your monitor refresh rates at the same time).

Oh, and by the way, if you had fired up an IRC client and connected to #ubuntu, it would have probably taken you 5 minutes tops.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[WaZiX]

Funny, the only OS I have ever had problems with to set resolution is windows. For some reason I just couldn't find a way to get my resolution back to 1280x800 after updating my drivers. Oh and installing an external monitor with 1440x900 was also an incredible pain...

Come to think of it, having an easily editable xorg.conf makes things MUCH easier, no need to mess with installing monitors, then making the OS somehow recognize what monitor it is, just edit a couple of lines (and xorg.conf is one of the most understandable config files out there), and you are set.

Oh and try installing windows that didn't come with your computer, it will take you MUCH longer to set it up to your needs. A clean windows XP install goes like this: Install WIndows (3 reboots?), install every single driver (1 reboot/driver, so something like 5 reboots), install every application you need, install every application you don't need but you have to install in order to give the bugger a livespan greater then a week, enjoy?

Windows takes far LONGER to set up, and is much MUCH more of a hassle.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[pandrijeczko]

Perhaps for all the reasons you just mentioned: You don't have to spend hours getting the window manager to work right. It doesn't want to run in only 1024x768@60hz. You don't need to manually edit an xorg.conf, or have the experience required to do so. You can watch movies on it very easily. Configuring the shell isn't a pain. There is plenty of choice in hardware.

From the outset, I'm not going to in any way deny that Linux isn't ready for the "Joe Bloke" user and my personal feeling is that it never will be - unless "Joe Bloke" is prepared to put some work into learning how to configure text files and read man pages. If he's not prepared to do that then he shouldn't touch Linux.

However, with that said, none of the reasons you've given are "showstoppers".

Configuring xorg.conf can be a pain the first time around but there are plenty of people offering help with doing it on the Web. And once you've got Xorg working correctly, just make sure you keep a copy of the working xorg.conf to go back to if subsequent changes you make stop it working - that's just common sense.

As for desktop functionality, there's no problem with it. Aside from the small range of native commercial games on Linux, OpenOffice works pretty much "out of the box" and gives a very good compatibility with MS Office documents if, like most people, you're just writing a few letters, creating a few simple presentations and a simple spreadsheet for finances and the like.

For movie players, xine and mplayer again work easily, provided, like in Windows, you have the right codecs installed.

Configuring the shell? Yep, you've got to change a few text files sometimes but this is far outweighed by the power the shell gives you once you start creating pipelines and simple scripts.

I should also say that I use Windows XP and I do quite like it (though not in preference to Linux). But with that said, I have to spend a long time configuring XP to get it to work the way I want it to - the default GUI is the most appalling piece of bloatware I have ever had the displeasure of using, much better is the classic Windows 2000 interface. Additionally, all the redundant CPU-consuming features like menu fading all need to be turned off and then, when you've installed the applications you like, you have to spend time configuring filetypes to make sure that the app you want to use opens the file. (And this is something you continually have to watch as you install new apps.)

Then there are tools like registry cleaners, spyware and virus apps, all of which need to be run and updated regularly and none of which are needed on Linux.

Put this all together with the fact that I use Gentoo Linux, which takes a long time to initially set up and tweak, but once it's done, it's just a case of using an "emerge" command to automatically install what software you want, I would say that overall I spend more time keeping Windows clean and working than I do Linux.

PCs and operating systems are *ALWAYS* about having to spend some time getting the best out of them. If you're "Joe Bloke" who just wants to surf the web, play a few games and download a few pictures, then you can buy yourself a pre-installed Windows PC that will do all of that the moment that you power it on - but unless you're prepared to spend some time administering Windows, then in a year's time you'd better be prepared to reinstall Windows or, if you're ultra-lazy, just buy a new PC.

This whole argument is "horses for courses" and entirely subjective. I know many people who use Windows XP and are happy with it enough to never want to consider trying Linux - and good luck to them.

But if you're really into running a PC "your way", then nothing beats the power and configurability of a Linux system - if nothing else, you've countless desktop environments to choose from and, once a few dependencies have been sorted out, you can run just about any application in any shell or GUI that you like.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Graftweed]

Well, if you use your "main machine" only as a file server, then it isn't really your main machine anymore, is it? :)

I'm in a situation similar to yours. I've also used Slackware for as long as I've been using Linux and even though I've used all sorts of other distros, including SUSE at work, I keep coming back to it. I also use OS X heavily since my laptop is a Mac and I run pretty much the same set of tools there as I do in Slackware.

If you're comparing OS X to Linux in terms of desktop use (i.e. users who don't know, and don't want to know, what's going on under the hood) then obviously OS X wins hands down. Linux is slowly improving and I believe it will eventually reach the point where you mostly won't have to worry about that, but it will never be as good as OS X since the real added value Apple brings to their machines is that they also control the hardware OS X runs on.

If Linux only had to be installed in a very small set of hardware configurations I believe it would catch up to OS X very quickly.

I like OS X, I really do, but I'd never trade the flexibility a Linux machine provides me with for a little bit more ease of use. Not to mention you can have one up and running dirt cheap, but that's another matter.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[tsa]

Well, if you use your "main machine" only as a file server, then it isn't really your main machine anymore, is it? :)

Nope, you're right. Besides, the MacBook Pro is by far the fastest computer I've ever had. Much faster than the game machine / fileserver. But before the MBP I used the iMac G3 I had to type my stories and books in. Giving away that thing was a bad mistake. I'm now working on my next book, on the MBP. Typing on a laptop sucks even more than I had imagined. I could of course use my Ubuntu machine, but the room it sits in is almost always cold, and for some reason vim keeps crashing on that machine. I guess I will have to move the machine and put Slackware back on it. Problems problems :-)

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[xtracto]

How hard is it to add a couple of "widthxheight" in a text file?

As hard as it was to type xcopy a:\dir c:\docs /E /V /C On MSDOS, and how changing that for *click* Edit/copy, *right-click* paste in windows made it easier.

It is easy when you know that adding *wdhtxlhegt=23131" in the *xrghdpg.xcfngh* file under the "/etc/xconklfg" folder is going to solve your problems. But you see, the problem is how the heck do you get to know how to do that... For some things it might be easy to know the commands with google, but for others you've got to google AND browser through hundreds of useless Linux-zealot posts^W^WHelp Forums.

As an example, do you know it is possible to rotate the image on your screen 90 degrees with X11?, I just did it on Windows by Installing a neat program called iRotate, and now I just need to press CTRL+ALT+LEFT or CTRL+ALT+RIGHT... as easy as that. On Linux? sure it comes with the utility installed bbuuuuuut:

xrandr -o left

What the fuck is xrandr??? and isnt there a nice config setting in the Dekstop Configuration window in any distro?

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Graftweed]

Exactly the opposite for me, I have a Powerbook G4 and consider its keyboard among the best I've ever used (Thinkpads are also nice).

As for the room being cold, there's an easy solution for that:

1. Turn on the Macbook Pro in there
2. Open a terminal
3. Run "openssl speed"
4. Enjoy your new tropical climate ;)

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[swillden]

Typing on a laptop sucks even more than I had imagined.

So plug a full-sized keyboard into it!

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[advid.net]

I've been using Linux for ten years now also: from Linux Mandrake v5 (1998).

I'm still regularly frustrated by some problems that come again and again with each release, it is tiring, yes. But I'm not sick with it yet. Really good job have been done, some features are wonderful (drak-* and package management is 98% operational), uptime is good, custom adjustments unbeatable.

And as you said it "Linux is now really almost ready for the desktop, and world domination is just around the corner", so keep the faith and hope!

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Milton Waddams]

And I haven't been able to watch a movie on it yet.

Use easyubuntu (I think it's a package in multiverse, failing that google it). It works pretty well to get stuff like flash plugin and multimedia stuff working. Also, the Ubuntu Guide is pretty good as far as documentation goes.

A few weeks ago my windows install here in work crapped itself and I thought I might as well give Ubuntu a go. It's great! Much faster and I've my system set up exactly the way I want it to. Having said that though, if I had the choice, I'd use a Mac. That's what I use at home...

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Nimey]

What's your hardware (CPU, RAM, video card, monitor) on that Ubuntu box? Mostly curious.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[tsa]

1300 MHz Duron, 512 MB, GeForce 5600 FX videocard. It should be fast enough, but it's sluggish, especially booting it takes a long time. The machine works good as a file server so I'm not in a hurry to tweak it or reinstall it. It's just annoying that Windows on the same box feels nimbler. I don't like windows but I need it for games.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Drakin020]

Changing to Windows is of course no option; I never understood why that OS is used so much.

Because it works. All the issues you were explaining in your post? Yeah...no issues over here (Runs windows XP in a 2003/2000 Server environment)

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Drakin020]

Uh...it doesn't sound like it? Hell you can't even watch movies and you say it works way better?

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[WaZiX]

so, opening a text file, scrolling down and editing a text file, is hard? I mean the guy apparently has been using linux for _10_ years! And if you need help and can't find it easily, just drop by an IRC channel (as I said), people answer those types of questions all the time. Linux by design lets you change manually your config files, and guess what, it makes things, much MUCH more easier and transparent. Just because you've been dumbed out to the point of extreme laziness doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to follow your pity example.

And I have absolutely no need to "rotate my screen 90 degrees".

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[TheModelEskimo]

Maybe somebody's already told you this, but that system is going to run GNOME very slowly. If you want a rich desktop experience that should be faster, try installing Kubuntu (just apt-get it) and see if you like it. I have an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1.5GB RAM and an FX5500, and GNOME is annoyingly slow, so I use Kubuntu. It's much faster, very close to pre-installed-Windows responsiveness levels. But I like KDE so it's no biggie.

If you want a fast desktop experience, I'd recommend something like XFCE. Should speed things up quite a bit, maybe even faster than Windows. But I know what you mean when you say that the GNOME responsiveness is not on par with Windows on the same machine. It's really too bad.

Strange that you can't get movies to play either...that usually works without a hitch.

OT: how are you liking Lulu.com?

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is a great thing that Linux Distributions allow you to configure it manually, this hasn't been necessary for a long time: most things can be done automatically (at least that is the case with Mandriva). I think your problem is that you are too much used to Slackware as to get used to a new system - the same problem every Windows user faces when trying to migrate to Linux, and which I also face whenever I try out another distribution except Mandriva, which I am used to.

But Ubuntu actually is crap, you'd really do much better staying with Slackware or at most going to Debian. Ubuntu is limiting the user way too much in the name of usability, so that power users get less and less accomplished while non-power users still have the same problems as before.

By the way, that "Linux is almost ready for the Desktop"-meme is bullshit: Our experience with Windows easily tells us that it isn't the OS which has to be ready for the user, but the user who has to be ready for the OS. This means that the user has to be willing to learn about the system he uses and to pay someone to do for him what he isn't willing to learn. This has been reached long ago with Windows, but there simply is too much of the "I know everything, therefore if something doesn't work as I expect, it is broken"-attitude as for it to happen with Linux. This actually is only a problem with the minds of the people, completely detached from the actual merits of one system above the other, but as we all should know actual qualities never matter, only what people are made believe.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[muszek]

I've been using Linux for ten years now also: from Linux Mandrake v5 (1998)

I, for one, welcome our new time-travelling overlords! Could you please tell us if 2007 was the year of Linux on the desktop?

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[tsa]

Thanks for the info. You're not the first who recommended xfce to me. I should really look into it, since I'm not a big fan of KDE.

OT: Lulu is quite OK. It's easy to get your book published there. The only pity is that the shipping price to Europe makes my books so expensive. Mail me if you want some advice from an experienced Lulu publisher :-) It's easier to mail back and forth than to use this forum and lose karma because we get modded OT all the time :-)

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[jZnat]

Just to let you know: if you're used to using Bash 3.x (I use 3.2 for example), Mac OS X uses bash 2.05. Tab completion, colours, and other goodies don't work so well in Bash 2. Therefore, if you want to experience the full Bash, uh, experience, then make sure to download it (along with Xcode in order to compile it).

If you don't mind the differences between the two versions, then you probably shouldn't waste your time with an updated Bash. Since I already had Xcode installed, and I already know how to compile programs from source, it was a snap.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[jZnat]

xrandr is a frontend to the RandR (Resize and Rotate) X11 extension. There are plenty of applets for it (I know KDE has one called krandr included in kdebase), although I know that it would be nearly impossible for anyone not familiar with X to know the name of the tool. A simple search for "resize rotate screen linux" gives a top result for xrandr's man page on Google, so I'd hope that most people know how to use search engines to see if anything solves their problem.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[lbbros]

Except you can't run OSX on non Apple hardware, and you're forced to buy HW that's much more expensive than current market prices. Sorry, that will always keep me away from Macs.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

But! During the last ten years I kept hearing that, yes, Linux is now really almost ready for the desktop, and world domination is just around the corner

Yes, I can understand how that could be annoying. But cheer up. Everything is now different. In fact, I think one could say that Linux is now really almost ready for the desktop, and world domination is just around the corner.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[petrus4]

I tried some other distros over the years

There's your mistake. To quote the Old Testament...
"Remember your first love."

Although I must admit that apostasy is something that I also have been guilty of in this case as well. Slackware was my first distribution, and although I've tried numerous others including Linux From Scratch, (and have an installation of Ubuntu on my system as we speak) there's just always been something intangible missing. To paraphrase another deeply corny saying, "Once you've had Slack, you never go back." ;)

I need to reinstall it myself, but this is also a good opportunity to repeat my usual message to Linux newcomers:-

1) Use Slack as your first distro for probably a year or so
2) Build Linux From Scratch twice at minimum
3) You will then be entirely qualified to download Ubuntu or whatever other "user friendly" distro in existence with a clear conscience, and even better, you'll know how to fix it when it breaks.

Re:I'm sick of Linux

[lattyware]

I can watch movies. I can do everything I could under windows except play a million games. The only game I did play was UT2004, which actually has a linux port, so It does work better for me,

Re:Don't be afraid to try Kubuntu; I did. Here's h

[TihSon]

Thank you for the script. I will keep it in my system setup files for the day I decide to take the leap.

Spring released?

[Buchenskjoll]

So mandriva is spring released? Am I the only thinking that huge springs launching mandriva discs into the atmosphere, to spread it around the globe, is a poor alternative to the present system of downloading distros over the internet?

Metisse

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell? I remember setting up Metisse and using it back in '04-05. I completely thought it was dead in the water, there was never any updates for it... But this is great news! I remember being very disheartened that such a great project was going nowhere.

Thank you, Mandriva, for jump starting an almost stale project!

Thunderbird 2.0

[franksands]

When was this released? Or did they already developed their own version of The Time Machine?

Re:Thunderbird 2.0

[AdamWill]

it's the latest beta.

Re:Yawn

[Knuckles]

Well what is this with "Metisse"?

Heard of Google? ;) Look here

Re:still sucking them dicks?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem lost. The Apple section is 5 links up.
You're welcome.

I hope they've fixed it

[Anonymous Coward]

The first Mandriva 2007 one edition was a complete mess in my opinion.

I'm sorry, why are we using gnome? hmmm , maybe I'll look in the man pages .. oops they're missing.

Ok so I had better turn autologin off. Ahh I see. The option is control panel. Hmm doesnt seem to do anything. ahh cause its not for gnome. hmm better look at the man pages .... oh dear.

Mandriva 10.1 -> 2006 were very good I think trying to get the eye candy in 2007 took focus away from the important things.

My Resolution: fdisk, mke2fs, mount, tar, chroot, emerge ;)

Re:I hope they've fixed it

[AdamWill]

man pages are back in One in 2007.1.

but, um, if you didn't want GNOME, why did you download the *GNOME* One version? The One versions are always labelled.

Re:I hope they've fixed it

[Anonymous Coward]

It was bundled with my magazine ;)

Mirror root disk during install

[GoramFrackinWacko]

It looks to me like there is still no provision for mirroring the root disk at install time. Bleck!

Re:Mirror root disk during install

[colin_s_guthrie]

If you mean setting up RAID on the root disk then it is indeed possible. I've done it several times.

Re:Mirror root disk during install

[GoramFrackinWacko]

What I mean is being able to set it up at installation time from within the default installer partitioning tool, not manually post installation.

Re:Mirror root disk during install

[buchanmilne]

This has been possible for ages (I definitely used it on 8.1 and 8.2). You may need a separate /boot for this though.

Re:Mirror root disk during install

[GoramFrackinWacko]

I'd sure like to see an example of this somewhere, do you have a link? When I installed Mandriva Winter '06 it used one of the (x)parted partitioners, and I could find no provision for setting up RAID in there.

Re:Mirror root disk during install

[AdamWill]

MDV doesn't use *parted as the installer partitioner, never has. It uses diskdrake, our own in-house tool, which may look kinda like gparted from some angles, I guess.

Re:Mirror root disk during install

[GoramFrackinWacko]

Ah, I stand corrected. Can you set up RAID with it?

A new bug in KCalc ?

[advid.net]

I, for one, welcome our new arithmetic overlords! Could you please tell us how many years there is starting from 1998 to 2007, both included ?

test beds != demo version

[wilec]

"OpenSuSE (like Fedora) is a "demo version" of SuSE Linux."

That's not quite so, what openSuse and Fedora Core are could best be defined as community supported development projects, ie: test beds. That they are not distributed with legally complicated things like full media support does not set them apart from the d/l version's of Mandriva or any version of Ubuntu or Debian that I am aware of. As for the stand alone issue, the case of code migration between licensed copy/ paid support support versions and free versions should be a good compromise between rapid development and stability. Though I do have to say Novell has managed to muddy this up quite a bit. I don't really know about how the seamless migration issue with Ubuntu because I would not use such paid support myself. I can see where some would see such either defining the free versions as demos or even for the cynical types as a bait and switch setup.

I do know that I have used free d/l versions of both Suse and Fedora for quite some time now and never considered either as "demos". I always considered them to be base versions that I could, with a little elbow grease, add features to that could not be included in the distro due to legal patent/licensing issues. Of as in the case of the copy of Suse 9.0 I bought I could get most of that stuff included on the install media and go a bit lighter on the elbow grease. But as long as one has a fast internet connection one has only to add the repositories, update and install whatever they want. As one who only recently got quasi-broadband (satellite) access I do understand the plight of people on dial-up, for these folks a full licensed version of a distro like Mandriva, Suse or Redhat might very well payoff as might a update by disc subscription.

All in all I have usually found free versions of Suse and now openSuse to be the most polished initial install and the most stable overall. There are not very of the top 20 distro's that I have not installed at one time or the other. Slackware has always been the most stable initially but by the time I got it nearly as usable Suse it was not usually as stable and was still missing a lot of handy tools. I have usually had a tough time with Debian for some reason or the other. Fedora stability and usability has been spotty at best and no where near Suse level. Mandrake/Mandriva has been typically feature rich, but at least 5% of the stuff usually just did not work and I more often than not I had stability issues with the distro. With Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, I have to say they were all pretty simple and clean installs that seemed to be stable initially, but I was left wondering "wheres the beef", as they are missing the GUI admin tools you would find on Suse or Mandrake. This lack of GUI admin tools in fact is a pretty common issue with most other distros. I guess it is apparent that I kinda prefer Suse, actually openSuse now, as I do not see myself buying into SLED. I can agree with your point about differentiation issues with opeSuse and Fedora, from the perspective that I hope Novell don't muck openSuse all up with MS code contamination or distro isolation from GPLv3 incompatibilities. For now openSuse still works best for me, tomorrow we will see. I am still pleased as punch to see the huge number of distros evolving in parallel. I see this as a healthy thing. Ahh variety, ain't it wonderful!

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew