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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."
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.
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?!
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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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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!
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.
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).
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
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
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.
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
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!
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).
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.
Je ne parle pas francais.
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.
You run ubuntu?
Mark is that you?
Acid House saves Souls
Well what is this with "Metisse"?
;) Look here
Heard of Google?
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