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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."
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.
If they are funding projects like Metisse I think we need more.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Both of which were forks of Redhat, leaving us with two distros where initially there was one.
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.
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.
Look out!
I mean, cool for Google to make it OSS, but does the availability of Google Earth mean anything from a practical perspective?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
This one was submitted *BY* Mandriva => awilliamson@mandriva.com
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
I like muppets.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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...
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?
Support the source, Open Source! An entire site developed with OSS
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.
Look out!
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.
In B.C., our fascism is green.
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.)
... 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.
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
Look out!
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
Support the source, Open Source! An entire site developed with OSS
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.
Damn, and here for a second I thought I was reading distrowatch....
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.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
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).
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).
Sounds like an excellent question to ask all those other distros who *haven't* been around since 1998. :)
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!
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
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...
That all depends on your opinion of the distro and your definition of the word ;)
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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
When you switch over from Mandrake, put your
Kubuntu assigns user numbers from 1000 up, but Mandrake uses 500 and up. When I migrated to Kubuntu, I found that all my
To use: first, while still in Mandriva, check what your UID is in the
Best of luck!
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
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?
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
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.
Look out!
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?
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
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."
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.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
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.
You could also just `sudo chown {username}:{usergroup} -R /home` to fix the issue w/o all the fuss...
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.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
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.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
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?
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.
\
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
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.
-- Cheers!
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...
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).
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...
Thank you for the script. I will keep it in my system setup files for the day I decide to take the leap.
In B.C., our fascism is green.
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?
-- Make America hate again!
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.
Really? Has Netcraft confirmed this?
El SombreroRojo es muerto. Viva CentOS!
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You run ubuntu?
Mark is that you?
Acid House saves Souls
When was this released? Or did they already developed their own version of The Time Machine?
Well what is this with "Metisse"?
;) Look here
Heard of Google?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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!
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
that's not the impression I got from their demonstration videos
I found very useful-looking stuff here, like this.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
all of these 3d desktops do one simple thing
AeroGlass on two thirds of the hardware
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Why don't you take a few breaths before pronouncing the death of rpm?
XML causes global warming.
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/
wtf.n0x.org
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
actually I have a PR hat too. I get to write stuff like this. Aren't I lucky.
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.
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.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
It looks to me like there is still no provision for mirroring the root disk at install time. Bleck!
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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 ?
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).
Those users of apt are still using rpm. apt for rpm is less maintained than rpm is, so you're arguing against yourself here.
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
It's not dumb to do an upgrade
Remember that a lot of users (those who run cooker) do upgrades (via urpmi) daily or weekly
"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
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.