Mandriva Linux 2008 Now Available

AdamWill writes "Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site and on the network of public mirror servers. In 2008 you will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you've come to expect. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards, and wireless chips). There is a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, a new network configuration center, and a set of improvements to the Mandriva software management tools. Read about the new features in depth in the release tour, or view the release notes. The One installation CD is the recommended download: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included."

Comments

Link leads to archive

[LiquidCoooled]

Proper link should be: http://www.mandriva.com/en/download.html

Re:Link leads to archive

[AdamWill]

Yes, I submitted a correction to the story about five minutes after I submitted the story. The editor obviously missed it :(. That is indeed the correct link. There are also torrents at http://torrent.mandriva.com/public .

What happened to Matisse?

[mhall119]

Mandriva already had shiney window manager effects didn't they? Have they dropped Matisse in favor of Compiz?

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[Zombie Ryushu]

Its still in Drak3d as far as I can tell, you can use that or Compiz Fusion.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[AdamWill]

Metisse is still there. You can choose between Metisse and Compiz Fusion with drak3d. Mandriva has shipped Compiz since the release of 2007. 2007 came with Compiz. 2007 Spring came with Compiz, Beryl and Metisse. 2008 comes with Compiz Fusion and Metisse.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[Ant P.]

I'm going to point out all the UI stuff in linux that is clearly lifted from mac osx and windows. OK, go ahead. We're all waiting in anticipation.

Before you reply, bear in mind Compiz was around months before Vista.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[Hatta]

Brain dead desktop users value familiarity above all else. Linux desktop apps get criticized for their GUI every time they do something different. Look at the GIMP for instance. Or all the bitching about cut+paste.

IMO, the linux GUI has been ahead of windows for a long time. Look at X-forwarding, virtual desktops, window shading, always-on-top. None of these things work in windows.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[mashade]

Compiz and Beryl came way before Vista's release, buster.

Admittedly, many of the composite features are similar to what's been available in MacOSX for a while, but it's hardly a ripoff of Exposé.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[SEMW]

Linux desktop apps get criticized for their GUI every time they do something different. Actually, it has been my experience that apps only tend to be criticised if they do something different from the usual way arbitrarily; for no good reason or 'just to be different'. Since the original way is often that way for a good reason, this tends to result in a worse interface than what would have resulted if the implementers just copied what people actually schooled in UI design were doing. Even if there is no usability advantage to one way or the other (as is often the case with keyboard shortcuts), keeping to the established shortcuts enables people to transfer their knowledge of shortcuts from other applications to that one, for faster learnability.

GUIs that are genuinely more usable and innovative -- usually because they are based on actual data from usability studies and tests, rather than the programmers' design ideas -- are regularly lauded.

But since a lot of people seem to believe that GUI usability is equivalent to the the precense of features such as window shading, I fear that such applications will continue to be the exception rather than the norm.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[SEMW]

Compiz and Beryl came way before Vista's release, buster. That might have been a relevent comment if Microsoft, like Apple, were reticent and secretive about their products until their release.

But since Microsoft have been showing off their Longhorn desktop compositor since Winhec 2003 (Videos, including "Beryl-style" floppy windows; not to mention with gratuitous numbers of leaked Longhorn alphas), several years before Beryl and Compiz; it's a bit cheeky to stand there and claim that since Vista didn't go gold until 2007, it was copying the *nix implementations and not vice-versa.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[larry bagina]

Before you reply, bear in mind Compiz was around months before Vista.

Where do you get that from? The first Compiz release was january 2006. Aero was included in the July 2005 Vista Beta 1.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[mhall119]

Sun demo'd Looking Glass in 2003 also, Metacity had compositing ability in 2004 and Fvwm in 2005. Luminocity was sometime in late-2005 early-2006, and Xfwm also had compositing abilities sometime in 2006. Even MacOSX didn't have much in the way of desktop effects until 2003. They were all developed in parallel when the technology became available to make them feasible.

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[rubycodez]

so you want to count that half-baked Aero beta that crashed so many people's pc on startup? Vista was *released* a year after xgl and compiz

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[AdamWill]

No. His point was that the Linux compositing managers did not rip off Windows.

Amazingly enough, nobody ripped anybody else off. Compositing is a fairly obvious idea. As the technology to implement it became available, it was implemented, by all the major operating systems.

FILM AT 11!

Re:What happened to Matisse?

[AVee]

So, they got it implemented faster. Doesn't invalidate the original point that the ideas where lifted of Vista (and OSX, which was released in 2001).

Non-Free

[Virgil Tibbs]

It's interesting they are including all this NON-Free stuff by default, it seems like they are trying to be linux mint.
I don't applaud their inclusion of proprietary binaries in GNU+linux as default

Re:Non-Free

[AdamWill]

We give you the choice. The One and Powerpack editions include non-free stuff for convenience. For those who value free software principles, the Free edition includes nothing but free software. if that's your preference, use the Free edition.

Re:Non-Free

[jackharrer]

That's the true spirit of GNULinux - choice. That's why GNU/Linux is for everybody - you can have it in whatever flavour you like!

Re:Non-Free

[Darundal]

Enjoy your blag, then!

Ubuntu

[Virgil Tibbs]

Ubuntu has basically stolen all the hype mandriva used to have hasn't it?
Mandriva used to be one of the only 'gratuis' distros which had a nice desktop by default
didn't it pioneer the way towards 'point and click', 'just working'?

Re:Ubuntu

[AdamWill]

You never actually had to do that to install software on Mandrake / Mandriva, though some people got the idea that they did. Ever since the very early releases Mandriva has had a dependency resolving package manager, urpmi, and a proper set of online repositories. For information on how the system works in the current release, see http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software .

Re:Ubuntu

[GooberToo]

RPM-Hell is why I dumped Redhat!

I constantly see this touted. I've tried various distributions with different package formats. Frankly I found debian to be the exact same as RPM based systems. Both have their problems. Both have their advantages. Both have pretty much the exact same problems, differing only in implementation details. IMO, to say one is better or worse based only on the package format is to be ignorant of the subject matter. Heck, I actually had a harder time managing packages on debian based systems than I had on RPM based systems at one point in time. And I'm sure the inverse is true for others. It all depends on what you're trying to do.

There is no such thing as a magical package format which makes dogs love cats, in a romantic kind of way. Ultimately, it all boils down to the utilities available to manage those packages. And these days, they are all more or less the same. With tools like urpmi and yum, anyone that has RPM hell is suffering from a self imposed affliction. Heck, it is pretty easy to turn tar files directly into RPMs these days too. Most RPM distros addressed "RPM-hell" some three to five years ago, if not longer. It happened about the time debian guys started claiming they had resolved the issue. Seems so many listened, they missed that most other distributions had too.

I do agree RH (commercial version) was probably the last, or at least one of the slowest, to address this of modern distributions. Not long ago up2date was their tool of choice. These days it is yum.

Long story short, anyone complaining of RPM-hell is either living in the past or flat out suffering from denial.

Re:Ubuntu

[crush]

I appreciate that you say that you haven't used an RPM based distro for several years. I think you'd find if you tried one now that the tools (such as YUM and PUP and SMART) simplify package managament greatly. When you add to this that the quality and quantity of RPM packaging (now 5000 packages for Fedora) is going up there really isn't much of a case to make for debs and distros based on them being superior. Add to this that there are examples of "Deb-hell" if you look for them.

The reason that debs used to be superior was because of the Debian community working together to package Free software according to agreed high standards. It's a pity that more people don't explicitly acknowledge that Ubuntu is just a slightly tweaked distro sitting on top of all this work done by the Debian community.

Re:Ubuntu

[trenien]

To be completely honest, urpmi does have one drawback, as compared to apt-get: it's slower to update the packages database - and slower to parse it when you boot up rpmdrake.

Or you can go for the smaller sized packages listings, but then you get pretty much no information as to what one package is.

I wish they'd do something about it. It does make me look longingly the debian-based distros way each and every time I want to install something I mostly can't use the CLI for.

Re:Ubuntu

[Hucko]

Hmmmm.. dunno about your time schedule; one year ago I gave up on rpm-based systems partially for this very reason. Two years ago I was using the urpmi exclusively. I searched for another less deteriorating system but not wanting to lose my downloads (I didn't have broadband) I went to Fedora, then SUSE. I certainly didn't find what you are reporting to be so last year. Much happier with Debian systems, as the repositories seem to be better organised and just less hassle. If what you say is true now, I may investigate for better hardware interfaces..

Re:Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

It's not about the packaging format (deb vs rpm) or the package/repository manager (apt vs yum). It's about how well the repository is maintained. Fink on MacOS X uses apt/deb, and it's a horror. Debian takes great care with the quality of its repository. Ubuntu uses that Debian quality to build from; it's slightly flakier, but livably so for new candy.

Re:Ubuntu

[hey!]

Well put.

If you stick to the distro's official repositories, life tends to be simple. It's when you want something thats not in the official repositories, and you decide to add other repositories that life starts to get complicated and unpredictable.

Pretty much, I think its better to stay with the official repositories, then use source tarballs to get the shiny new stuff. The "convenience" of non-official repositories isn't worth the trouble.

Re:Ubuntu

[crush]

Agree completely. It's to do with how many packages there are and how carefully they're created. Debian probably still has a slight advantage in this area over other distros. The community process (with mentoring and package review and good standards) is excellent. I believe that Fedora is going in the right direction with this stuff and has learnt from the lessons of Debian.

Re:Ubuntu

[Fred_A]

You never actually had to do that to install software on Mandrake / Mandriva, though some people got the idea that they did. Ever since the very early releases Mandriva has had a dependency resolving package manager, urpmi, and a proper set of online repositories. In my experience urpmi has always worked very well. The only (very minor) gripes I had with Mandrake the numerous times I used it were the configuration tools that were less than stellar at times (although as expected, they got better with each release) and the fact that they often shipped brittle apps in order to be on the bleeding edge (which is a choice after all).

But I've never had any dependency issues. urpmi always worked just fine. OTOH if you just use RPM, I guess YMMV.

Nowadays I tend to use Kubuntu (desktop) and Debian (servers) but I might switch to something else one of these days. They're all pretty much the same anyway.

Re:Ubuntu

[s-meister]

Ubuntu has basically stolen all the hype mandriva used to have hasn't it?

You don't suppose they're launching Mandriva 2008 now because they know the release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon is imminent, do you? Nah, there's my cynicism showing.

Mandrake 9.1 was a great introduction to Linux for me, but subsequent versions got more and more bloaty. I never got the sound working in the old laptop I was trialling it on. All that "Join the club" stuff was irritating, so when Kubuntu Dapper Drake was released, that was the end of Mandriva for me.

And the laptop? Xubuntu Dapper Drake with working sound. Well, one duck worked...

Re:Ubuntu

[AdamWill]

"You don't suppose they're launching Mandriva 2008 now because they know the release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon is imminent, do you?"

No, we're not. We release on a six month cycle, and always have, except for 2007 which came on a one year cycle as an experiment. Excepting that release, we've released around every April and every October since before Ubuntu existed.

Maybe Ubuntu initially chose to do all their releases slightly after ours in order to try and capitalize on the buzz created by each Mandriva release...:)

Re:Ubuntu

[s-meister]

Maybe Ubuntu initially chose to do all their releases slightly after ours in order to try and capitalize on the buzz created by each Mandriva release...:)

Touché :)

Re:Ubuntu

[Virgil Tibbs]

to be honest i havent ever seriously looked at mandriva....
i used it like 3 times when i first got some form on gnu+linux. after that the person who was pushing me onto gnu+linux stopped pushing me to mandrake, at which point it dropped from my radar.
now im using debian & ubuntu on various machines, ill take a look.
no promises etc, but ill take a look, and u cant ask for more that that :)

Re:Ubuntu

[Virgil Tibbs]

oh re ubuntu: what i really love about ubuntu is ubuntuguide.org
I know its not official, but u wouldnt believe how useful it is to people who find MANY pages of stuff annoying. i know it has a section: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Mandriva for mandriva... but i would suggest you launch something similar yourself....
to be honest, i may use ubuntu, but i dont have any particular affiliation with it and at the end of the day, the competition is probably healthy and productive....

anyway, when i switched to ubuntu i found that website reall really helpful, you might want to consider looking into it, something similar.

Re: bells and whistles

[IBBoard]

Compiz Fusion does have some advantages that aren't just bells and whistles: Expose-style "show me the windows" so you can see what's in different applications and which you really want, negative and ADD modes, fading so that only your most prominent window is catching your attention, a widgets layer so you can have things easily accessible but not on any desktop, screen annotation, window grouping/tabbing,...

Okay, so most people put it in for "I can make my windows do silly transitions", and it would be better if more functionality were added instead, but the eye candy can be the basis for functionality as well :)

Re: bells and whistles

[Virgil Tibbs]

basically the idea is that these distros lure people off OS X and vista. while eye candy is definly not what most people want, it lures people...
you are right, the bells and whistles are motre important atm... mainly because a lot of developers have decided that the core apps are up to the job, but doing stuff better than MS is worth it...

Re: bells and whistles

[dokebi]

After reading your comment, and then your sig, then your comment again,
Where were you when Windows replaced DOS?

Re: bells and whistles

[mhall119]

What is the deal with every single large distro out there incorporating 3d acelerated desktops and shining bells and whistles as the main features in all new releases? Well the article summary mentioned updates of KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice.org and Firefox, plus the part about a new kernel with CFS. But I guess you just saw "compiz" and decided to post your opinion straight away.

Oh, go to Hell.

[Zombie Ryushu]

This guy's pissing me off, and I'm going to tell him one thing Mandriva Linux has that is very practical that no other Linux has unless you want to start your own mirror system. Domain based parallel application installation. In particular, using LDAP and Kerberos, you can use Kerberos authentication to mass deploy an entire network of application in one command. It uses LDAP to check it, Kerberos to authenticate it, SSH to copy it, and urpmi to install it. This is something I have not seen with any other Linux.

Linux has Active Directory authentication out of the box, an easy front end to ndiswrapper, an easy method for adding Internet software repositories. I really hate this guy. e all work so hard and he tramples on everything we have done.

Mark my words, I will see you using a Linux Desktop yet!

Re:Oh, go to Hell.

[Zombie Ryushu]

I tend to type badly when I am mad as Hell.

Re:Oh, go to Hell.

[Penguinisto]

You do know that a bash/csh/ksh script that reads a list of targets and iterates scp and ssh commands through a conditional loop (pointed to that list) is pretty easy to build, right? Couple that with pre-existing SSH keys on your target machines, and you're all set. Doesn't take more than a couple of hours to set up - less if you already have the script built from something earlier.

LDAP is just the icing on the cake (Hell, I use NIS for my auth...)

/P

Re:Oh, go to Hell.

[Zombie Ryushu]

I used to do something similar with fanout. The major advantage is that it scp's the files to the machines rather than each machine pulling the files over and over again, LDAP isn't nessessary but its a nice addition. Kerberos helps because you are not copying the ssh keys all over the place.

oblig:

[Virgil Tibbs]

using GNU/linux

>>**

varients accepted:
using GNU/unix
uning GNU/minix
using GNU/some_thing_else

Re: bells and whistles

[bondjamesbond]

Gosh, ask Steve Jobs. He's made quite a good living selling shiny things with bells and whistles.

Re: bells and whistles

[wanderingknight]

Yeah, because Aero is not Vista's most loudly trumpeted feature.

Oh, wait...

transitionary distro?

[poetmatt]

How does this compare to say Ubuntu for people who are still somewhat new to Linux? Last time I remember Mandriva requiring manual editing of the grub file off the bat which isn't so bad now, but I question if it'll put off new users.

Re:transitionary distro?

[jiawen]

I started Linux with Mandriva 9.1, then later used 10.1 and 2007. They slowly got things working better in some ways, but every major release meant tons of important broken packages. In 2007, Firestarter, XEphem and Gweled were quite completely broken, as I remember it. Setting up my Wacom tablet meant huge headaches every major release. They never got a decent package management system (rpmdrake is a huge pain to use; dependency hell was all over the place, the GUI quite often didn't actually select the packages I clicked on and many more problems). Et cetera.

Around that time, Ubuntu was getting a lot more press. I tried it and have never gone back. Ubuntu has its problems -- there was some package missing from Gnome that required quite a bit of hunting down to get my themes working, for example, which wasn't a problem in Mandriva -- but overall, it's vastly superior. Package management, Wacom setup, a million little interface choices -- Ubuntu steals headlines from Mandriva for good reason.

Mandriva was a good distro to start with. It gave me a lot of explanation and hand-holding where I needed it. But given a choice, I would've used Ubuntu right from the start and never tried Mandriva.

Re:transitionary distro?

[PCM2]

I never did like Ubuntu. It always had this weird sudo setup and set the root password to some random password.

In Ubuntu the root account is disabled by default. You cannot login as root and you cannot su to root unless you manually assign it a password. Most users have no reason to do so, however.

Re:transitionary distro?

[flyingfsck]

Mandriva is a 'heavy' distro and includes everything including the kitchen sink. That being said, the Mandriva wizards are second to none. So if you have a machine with a large disk drive (and nowadays that is everybody) then Mandriva is for you. For a total newcomer, Mandriva is excellent, better than Ubuntu, since the wizards are better. It is the only distro where you really can do everything with a mouse.

Re:transitionary distro?

[flyingfsck]

BTW, the trick is "sudo -i". Cheers, H.

Re:transitionary distro?

[AdamWill]

grub has been default since 2007.1 (since it has a better graphical mode, lilo's graphical mode was a horrible hoary patch we didn't feel like keeping on life support any longer). lilo is still available as an option, of course.

Re:transitionary distro?

[GooberToo]

Grub support was probably mandated by the drive to support Xen. Xen kernels usually require grub.

Re:transitionary distro?

[ewhenn]

Personally, I find it *easier* than Ubuntu.

I installed 2007 Spring as my fist linux distro in 5 years. Mandriva auto detected everythign and set it up. My Wireless and sound worked out of the box. Not something I can say for Ubuntu. Ubuntu was a PITA to get wireless working. And I never got sound working on Ubuntu. That alone was a deal maker for me. I don't want to mess around for hours trying to get stuff to work. I jsut want it to work. I actually like Mandriva better than XP for internet/office stuff.

Keep in mind this is coming from a novice with linux, so if you want someone who's opinion would be comparable to the everyday-joe's opinion, yeah you found it here. I can stick a disk in and follow the on screen instructions, and that's about it. Mandriva worked, Ubuntu didn't.

Re:transitionary distro?

[boiert]

Nope, the trick is "sudo passwd", set the new root password and use root or su - whenever you want.

Re:transitionary distro?

[ardin,mcallister]

Don't get me wrong, I like Mandrake too, but you must have some weird hardware for sound. Wireless I have no idea, but sound.. sound's always worked on linux for me. Hell, SLACKWARE had working sound by default too.

OT side Note:
The only problem I have with linux right now is how videos work on it. I've got TV shows that worked perfectly on windows, that are skippy on linux. I've sort of got it fixed right now by changing the sound output to SDL.

-Ardin

Re:transitionary distro?

[AdamWill]

Actually, sound is becoming troublesome again with recent motherboards. A lot of new motherboards use slightly differing implementations of the HDA audio codec, and each different ones needs minor tweaks to the snd-hda-intel driver to make it work 'out of the box'. I think we're up to dozens or hundreds of these tweaks now. If you went out and bought a random sample of modern laptops, the onboard sound in a lot of them would not work with, say, kernel 2.6.21.

Re:transitionary distro?

[jaxtherat]

Uhm what? What's wrong with: sudo su -

Re:transitionary distro?

[ewhenn]

A recent Core-2 Duo Gateway Laptop.

Generic intel sound/wireless stuff.

Compiz Fusion

[bostons1337]

Seems to be most new linux releases are adopting Compiz Fusion in place of what they had/didn't have before. Ubuntu's new release (Gutsy Gibbon) will be using Compiz Fusion by default also. Hopefully Compiz Fusion isn't too buggy, its on the newer side, or there are going to be alot of angry Linux users.

Re:Compiz Fusion

[mhall119]

Compiz Fusion seems to be stable enough (been using it since it dropped into Ubuntu 7.10 alphas), the only problems with it I have experienced have been bugs in my proprietary nVidia driver. I used Beryl before that, which was also quite stable (and has some features I'm missing in Fusion). I must say that even with my antique GeForce 3 card, it is a more responsive window manager than unaccelerated Metacity (and I've seen less CPU usage). Which says something since even after requiring more powerful hardware, people say that Vista's Aero runs slower and consumes more CPU time.

Re:Compiz Fusion

[Pootworm]

I picked up openSuse 10.3 the other day, which also ships with Compiz Fusion. After using their (amazingly wildly easy) nVidia driver installer (point-click-restart X-done) and enabling desktop effects, I got a beautiful white cube. Everything up to that point had been sailing smoother than ever I've encountered with a Linux distro, so I was hoping it'd all Just Work. It didn't. No, I didn't go rooting through FAQs and mailing lists to find out why, I just booted back into Gentoo. Seems close though. So close. Incidentally, a Vista install on the same computer choked to death on my onboard flash card reader. I _did_ go rooting through FAQs and mailing lists for that, and I think I probably would have arrived at some Compiz answers in a tenth the time it took to find anything related to the problem I was experiencing with Vista. Of course, nVidia's drivers are fine in Vista...*wince*

Re:Compiz Fusion

[dbcad7]

Tried Beryl (in Linux Mint Celina), and now Compiz Fusion (Debian Lenny)... both 64 bit. Have had crashes in both.. but seem to have less in Lenny with Compiz Fusion... This stuff is soooo damn close to being stable. I am using onboard Nvidia 6200, and really fast enough for me, but makes me wonder what it would be like if I got a "real" video card.

Am I angry that I crash ? not really. I can turn off Compiz and run the standard window manager and be stable.. then I can turn it back on and get an idea what it would be like if I could keep it (for days instead of hours), and to tell you the truth I will be glad when it is stable, because I "would" like to keep it ... so not angry, just anticipating the the future. It will get there,

Re:Compiz Fusion

[Iowan41]

Same problem in my laptop in Feisty Fawn. Just the Intel 915 graphics. If you turn off all of the special effects, then you can use it, but then you have what value from Compiz? And they don't warn you. You think to yourself "hey, this looks cool, I should try it" and you find yourself unable to use your computer.

Re: bells and whistles

[AdamWill]

It's not the main feature of 2008. We just mention it because we know it's important to many users. The 3D desktop stuff in 2008 just an incremental upgrade over previous releases - we had Compiz, then Compiz and Beryl, now we have Compiz Fusion.

Re:What about Mandingo Linux?

[Virgil Tibbs]

not a very funny joke was it AC?

64 bits?

[N7DR]

Their wiki says: "Mandriva Linux 2008 is available in three editions: One, Powerpack and Free, for both i586 and x86-64 architectures", but so far I have been unable to find the 64-bit version of either One or Free (One is the "free + proprietary" version; Free is the "free only" version).

I can't tell if my inability to find the 64-bit version of One or Free is due to their confusing site design, my incompetence, or because those versions don't actually exist. Several places on their site say that all versions are available from "the official download site": http://www.mandriva.com/archives/ But there's no indication there at all of how to get the 64-bit versions (at least, not at the time I'm writing this). I can't say that I'm impressed by the apparent lack of internal coordination on their website for this release: several links point to the Spring 2007 edition as still being current.

I hate to draw the conclusion that this is (yet) one more sign of Mandriva's decreasing relevance, but I would be very surprised if Ubuntu's upcoming release exhibited any of these kinds of quirks.

Re:64 bits?

[nschubach]

I'm pretty sure the 64-Bit files are on the Install CD. I read that it will install a 64-Bit client if you have a 64-Bit processor and you have to override it on install if you want the 32-Bit. Though, I don't know if that's only on the DVD version.

Re:64 bits?

[N7DR]

Can you cite what leads you to believe that? If they have done that, I think it's a change from the past, and I can find no obvious statement to support you.

Mind you, I can't find a way to download the DVD version anyway. I must have the wrong kind of mind to grasp the organization of their site.

Re:64 bits?

[AdamWill]

The Free x86-64 edition is available, from the download mirrors or at http://torrent.mandriva.com/public . There's no x86-64 One at the present time, I'll have to update that text. If you get to www.mandriva.com/archives/ , that means you hit a broken link. We just changed www.mandriva.com , concurrent with the 2008 release, but the new site is still having some kinks worked out. www.mandriva.com/archives/ is the old version site, preserved for now in case we need it. As it's the old site and it won't be used any more, nothing on it was updated for 2008. We are currently sending all broken links under www.mandriva.com to www.mandriva.com/archives/ , on the basis that whatever you were looking for is probably still in there somewhere. As we get all the kinks worked out of the new site, you won't see this happening so much. We would've liked a few more days to polish the new site, but we couldn't push 2008 release without the new site, and we didn't want to delay the release solely to finish the website. Slashdot initially ran this story with a broken link to www.mandriva.com/download.html (should have been www.mandriva.com/en/download.html ), so you may have got to the /archives page that way.

Re:64 bits?

[GreggBz]

A great percentage of the complaints against Mandriva stem from their maze of homepages and subverted, hidden or missing download links. It's just not completely obvious where to get Mandriva. It should be.

I've been totally impressed with the 2007.1 (Spring)

It's a little more complete then Ubuntu, is closer to the Red-Hat we use where I work, and has a much improved package management system.
Also, the ATI drivers are good and the hardware compatibility has been at least as good as Ubuntu in my experience. The media support and embedded player in firefox has been about flawless, something I did not have with Ubuntu. The updates also seem speedy and have worked flawlessly.

I think my biggest beef with Ubuntu is the RootSudu. I understand the whole disable root login notion, I just can't get used to it. I work faster when I'm really root. I'll just use a strong password.

All that being said, Ubuntu is still very good, and you're right, Mandriva is so damn hard to download. I usually end up cribbing the mirrors listed in the installer and poking around the the ftp/http directories when they release a new version.

Re:64 bits?

[AdamWill]

"A great percentage of the complaints against Mandriva stem from their maze of homepages and subverted, hidden or missing download links. It's just not completely obvious where to get Mandriva. It should be." as I said, we're still working on the new page. once that's completed it'll be as easy as you can wish. I mean, go to www.mandriva.com . Note the gigantic green button marked "Download". :)

Re:64 bits?

[Knuckles]

I work faster when I'm really root. I'll just use a strong password.

Faster to trash your machine, yeah.

Re:64 bits?

[GooberToo]

I've been totally impressed with the 2007.1

Mandriva definitely went through some growing pains. Okay, okay, it was growing leprosy. The three releases prior to 2007 had some real crufty bugs and lots of things which just didn't work right. These problems brought into question the viability of the entire distribution. Since 2007, they have finally come full circle and now offer a high quality, robust (fat) distribution, like what originally made them popular. The 2007.1 release only continued to improve and polish.

Don't be afraid to try Mandriva. I've tried many different distributions and went elsewhere during their dark days, but I came back. Personally I like it much better than Fedora and especially Red Hat. I consider in on par with Ubuntu for package completeness. And the wizards is a real bonus for most inexperienced users.

Re:64 bits?

[nschubach]

Nah, the site is grossly over complicated. I actually searched the forum for that bit of info. I, like you, can't find jack squat on the official site.

Re:64 bits?

[certain death]

I have to comment on the site design you mentioned. I think their site should be flushed and started over from scratch. I am not a layman as far as computers go, have been on the innernets since 1991, and know how to find shit on a website, but theirs sucks! I could not find my ass with both hands if I depended on their site for a map to it. I have been a "Sponsor" of them (Mandriva, Mandrake, etc.) since that option became available and it has always been near impossible to find the downloads on the site. Okay...done ranting!

Re:64 bits?

[dos_dude]

How about a simple sudo su?

Re:64 bits?

[AdamWill]

Step 1:

go to www.mandriva.com

Step 2:

click on the giant green button that says Download

Advice on how we could make it easier is very welcome. :)

Re:64 bits?

[certain death]

I am speaking of logging into the mandriva club and trying to locate a download. I have resorted to sending an email to the support people as a last desperate ditch effort to find what I am looking for. Oh, and real advice would be, keep it easy to download, don't change this after a couple days or weeks so that you have to hunt for the download again. That, and get more mirrors, they are saturated.

Re:64 bits?

[zhadu]

I think my biggest beef with Ubuntu is the RootSudu. I understand the whole disable root login notion, I just can't get used to it. I work faster when I'm really root. I'll just use a strong password.

*sigh*

sudo -i

Re:64 bits?

[AdamWill]

the new mandriva.com is a permanent design, it's not temporary for 2008. it'll stay like that. for the Club, yeah, it's a bit less obvious, but then we're not really going to be offering downloads through the Club in future anyway with the changes in that area. There's a Download link in the bar of links near the top of the Club page. That takes you to the download section where Club-specific downloads (i.e. Powerpack editions) are hosted.

Outdated Firefox?

[quarkomatic]

Why wouldn't it come with the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.7?

Re:Outdated Firefox?

[Lumenary7204]

Why wouldn't it come with the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.7?

Because the people who compile and package the distro from source need to draw a line somewhere, and test for proper functionality with what they have.

If they kept updating distro packages every time a minor thing changes before release, there would never be time for any real testing, and overall quality would suffer.

Re:Outdated Firefox?

[AdamWill]

2.0.0.7 included only a security fix that is not relevant to Linux users. Since we were already in version freeze, it would have been silly to break it in order to include a package that has absolutely no benefit.

Re:Outdated Firefox?

[quarkomatic]

Well, surely it will be available from the package manager as an update, since 2.0.0.7 addresses a critical security vulnerability. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vulnerabilities.html#firefox2.0.0.7

Re:Outdated Firefox?

[AdamWill]

as I said, that vulnerability does not affect Linux. See the advisory, http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2007/mfsa2007-28.html : "On his blog Petko D. Petkov reported that QuickTime Media-Link files contain a qtnext attribute that could be used on Windows systems to launch the default browser with arbitrary command-line options." (my emphasis)

2007, 2008?

[mrslacker]

Someone tell them that it's not 2008 for another 12 weeks. Is this going to be like cars, where the "2008" models were actually made in early 2007 - and when you sell it, it looks a year newer than it actually is?

Sorry, car analogy.

I hope this isn't the same as RC1

[kwabbles]

RC1 was out what... maybe 1 month ago? I tried it and after countless bugs, widgets/controls that didn't work, and other annoying nuisances that I didn't feel like fixing - I dropped it. I was surprised to see a final version released so soon.

Improvements?

[multisync]

and a set of improvements to the Mandriva software management tools.

I hope by "improvements," they mean returning some of the functionality the software management tools used to have. There was a time when the software manager would give you basic information, like the total number of packages selected and their sizes, overall progress etc. Then, a couple of releases back, all of that info disappeared. There may be a way of getting "verbose" output, but the default is decidedly minimalist.

Re:Improvements?

[presidentbeef]

Agreed. And I still haven't gotten completed used to the new layout for adding/removing/updating software.

Re:Improvements?

[multisync]

Yeah, I'm looking at it right now (Mandriva Spring 2007 I think). Running the Software Packages Update. (I was at work before and a little foggy on what pisses me off about it).

You get a list of packages that have updates available, pre-checked for your convenience, but no info on their size.

Selecting Update starts the downloads. A dialog box pops up - stealing focus, btw - and shows the total size of the file currently being downloaded as well as the progress, but it doesn't tell you how many more files remain to be downloaded, their size or how far along you are in the whole procedure. No problem, I'll just look at that list and see how many files follow the one currently being downloaded. That'll give me some idea. Bit if the list is too long to fit the screen, you can't scroll down because the download dialog has focus.

Later, when packages are being installed, they do tell you 1/20, 2/20 etc. But it just seems klunky.

The funny thing is, earlier versions of the package manager gave info like overall progress. I believe they also gave you the choice of hiding that info (as you can during install, unless they've taken it away there too. I don't remember). I thought the whole point of Linux was giving the user choices.

Sorry to rant on about this, I guess it's not *really* that big a deal, but I don't understand why you take a decent UI away and replace it with something less functional and - sorry - ugly to boot.

Bleeding Edge...

[Lumenary7204]

However, if you're adventurous and would like to build your own Linux box with all bleeding-edge components, you could try the guidelines posted on the "Linux From Scratch" website (not an endorsement, just a place to start):

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Re:Bleeding Edge...

[jcasper]

... or if you don't want to go all the way to building your whole system from scratch (which is educational initially, but takes a lot of time and effort to keep up to date afterward), you can use a distro like Arch Linux which generally has the latest version of everything, but still has the convenience of package management with pre-built binary packages, etc.

Re: bells and whistles

[kwabbles]

Laughing my ass off when VLAD from Australia released the first w32 PE virus, only months after Bill Gates said Windows 95 executables can't be infected.

Re: bells and whistles

[XHIIHIIHX]

It has other features? Everything else seems as FU as ever. Oh, wait, tab completion is on by default, that's a good thing.

Default desktop is extremely ugly

[QCompson]

While the feature-list and included packages is very impressive, the default KDE desktop is truly hideous:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/uploads/9/9a/2008-kde-desktop.png

I realize this is a matter of personal taste, and that one can easily alter the look of the desktop, but still... I challenge someone to claim that the taskbar and menu-button look nice. Even the easter bunny wouldn't pick that light pastel blue as a default color. First impressions do matter.

Re:Default desktop is extremely ugly

[jsight]

Despite their reputation for being desktop oriented and polished, they have always had a tendancy to do this. I'll never forget the early versions with stars as checkboxes. And colors selected such that it was never obvious whether the star meant that it was selected or was not.

Ubuntu took their market share easily thanks to tremendously foolish management mistakes with the Mandrake/Mandriva distro. I think the gap is just widening even more now.

Re:Default desktop is extremely ugly

[mahlerfan999]

The color scheme depends on the version you use. So if you hate the baby blue pastel theme, just wait until try the awful orange one! lol

Okay, seriously, can't wait to try out this release, Mandriva keeps getting better.

Re:Default desktop is extremely ugly

[tehcyder]

I realize this is a matter of personal taste, and that one can easily alter the look of the desktop, but still... I challenge someone to claim that the taskbar and menu-button look nice. Even the easter bunny wouldn't pick that light pastel blue as a default color. First impressions do matter.

At least it isn't brown...

Re:A religious war! Perfect for /. "discussion"!

[shanen]

For Slashdot's moderation system to function properly, we need as many users as possible to Meta-Moderate. You are currently eligible... why not hop over and help?

Is this nagging supposed to be an expression of thanks for my contribution? Shucks. Why don't I feel properly thankful for the invitation to waste more time "validating" a broken moderation system? Can you get it through your head that my point is that the moderation system is *NOT* functioning properly. It is a censorious poison that is destroying thoughtful discussion.

Then again, that's probably what some people like most about /., eh?

Re:What's in a Name

[AdamWill]

No, it's not. You're being petty.

And now we present...

[poetmatt]

Anyone have a copy of "Why trolls post anonymously?" I've been looking all over for a copy and could use it right about now.

Re:And now we present...

[Random Destruction]

I used Mandrake 9.0 up until they switched to mandriva, and never had to edit a grub file manually. Especially considering it used (still uses?) lilo instead of grub. I'm with the AC here.

Re:And now we present...

[poetmatt]

Let me check my CDs, I believe it was the first build that it was Mandriva or it may have been during the mandrake days (I'll check the cd later), but I had to edit the config (whether that was grub or lilo I don't remember). However, I had a harddrive with dual boot at the time and it wouldn't give me the option of XP without editing grub/lilo, which wasn't that bad but still.

Re:And now we present...

[Hucko]

Mandrake was the first to auto-magically dual boot for me... I think even on separate hd.

Re:And now we present...

[Hucko]

Come off it, this is way over-rated. And I wrote the bloody thing! I'm starting to think we need to be more selective with the mod points distribution. It was anecdotal, and a 'worked for me'. Fair dinkum; modders are a joke!

Re:What's in a Name

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed all the informative posts from you in this thread and figured you were involved in Mandriva development. So, since no one else has said it, congratulations on the release!

Re:What's in a Name

[AdamWill]

Thanks a lot. :)

I'm Adam Williamson, my official tagline reads:

Mandriva community representative | Bugmaster | Community newsletter editor | Proofreader | Packager

basically, I have SVN and SSH access to break just about the entire company, and none of the required formal training to use it. :D

Re: bells and whistles

[Atti K.]

Yeah, yeah, remember the old days, when we launched win.com to play Solitaire (and maybe start Winword once in a while)? ;)

Re:What's in a Name

[SpacePunk]

It's not a valid reason. Although the name is 'trendy' in business naming terms in that it signifies 'something', but really means nothing. Look at all silly-assed nonsensical names out there that companies are using. There's at least one company that I've heard of that does nothing more than to think up silly nonsensical names for other companies.

Package repositories?

[Wylfing]

I'm genuinely curious. One of the main things that has kept me from both Fedora and Mandriva is the package management/repositories of Debian-based systems. I just cannot live without that anymore. I mean, software might be available in RPM format, but then you have to hunt dependencies yourself. No thank you. And last time I tried, it was possible to get repository-like functionality via tools like yum, but you still had to track down a thousand different repositories (the safety of which was typically unknown).

Is this any better now? Do you still have to hunt for 3 hours on the interwebs to figure out how to install anything that didn't come with the distro?

Re:Package repositories?

[flyingfsck]

Well, all I can think is that your fear of RPM is still rooted in Redhat 3. Things have come a long way since 1997! I always thought that Synaptic is merely a clone of Mandriva's Software Manager.

Re:Package repositories?

[AdamWill]

"Is this any better now? Do you still have to hunt for 3 hours on the interwebs to figure out how to install anything that didn't come with the distro?"

No. No, you don't, and you haven't for several years, as I said. Please read:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software

it explains it all rather clearly.

Re:Package repositories?

[Knara]

I mean, software might be available in RPM format, but then you have to hunt dependencies yourself.

This hasn't been true if you stick to the official repositories for any major distribution for a while now. Granted, if you wander off into the wilds and just start installing rpm's you found on sourceforge, you might start having some work on your hands, but I haven't stumbled into RPM hell myself for quite a while.

YMMV (and keep in mind that .0 on any dist release is just askin' for trouble)

Re:Package repositories?

[Serhei]

Your comment contradicts itself.

Oh, wait, I thought your signature was part of the post. Never mind.

Re:Package repositories?

[BokLM]

Mouahahaha, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. You really don't need to hunt dependencies yourself, tools such as urpmi and others do it for you, and it's been like that for years.

but you still had to track down a thousand different repositories

Not true. I'm only using the official mandriva repositories, and everything I need is in there, no need to use other repositories.

Do you still have to hunt for 3 hours on the interwebs to figure out how to install anything that didn't come with the distro?

I'm curious about how you install something that didn't come with the distro on Debian.

Re: bells and whistles

[filesiteguy]

What is the deal with every single large distro out there incorporating 3d acelerated desktops and shining bells and whistles as the main features in all new releases? Sadly, this says mush about the state of computing today

I see you were flagged as a troll. It is too bad the /. scoring people don't see a valid post when it is staring them in the face.

Though I prefer Linux to Wintendo (and use it on my home machines) you have a point. Much of what has been hyped in the latest Linux distros is eye-candy effects. This is similar to my experience with Wintendo Vista. All eye-candy and no real useful features. I have tried Compiz - and went back to plain old KDE. I have also tried Vista and went and upgraded to SUSE 10.2.

Fortunately, there are those who are working on new desktop ideas which will probably see the light of day after the visionaries come out with the eye candy.

Of course, there are those out there who think X is still a big mistake.

Re:A religious war! Perfect for /. "discussion"!

[flyingfsck]

Uhmm, whatsamatter dood? Smoked your cornflakes this morning? Cheer up!

Re:A religious war! Perfect for /. "discussion"!

[shanen]

Not at all. I simply noticed and commented that /. is a waste of time pretending to be a discussion forum. If you disagree with that opinion or think that you have superior evidence or better reasoning, perhaps you could do something about it. Or perhaps you thought you could be moderated funny for that trivial comment?

Re: bells and whistles

[flyingfsck]

DOS - Where? He wasn't born yet, that's where...

Re:What's in a Name

[Achra]

Weren't they going to merge with Lycoris at one point? Your wife finding a CD labeled "ManLyca" might be a good reason to avoid the distribution.

Prob w/ QuickTime, not Firefox per se...

[Lumenary7204]

It should be noted that a careful reading of the advisory does not make any mention of the vulnerability being related to the use of Firefox per se, but rather to the use of QuickTime in conjunction with Firefox.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to use a specially crafted QuickTime object to launch the default browser within Windows. This implies that the initial vulnerability resides within QuickTime, and is supported by the following:

... QuickTime Media-Link files contain a qtnext attribute that could be used on Windows systems to launch the default browser ... This vulnerability is compounded, however, by the ability to launch the browser with arbitrary command line options. For example, an attacker could theoretically launch an instance of Firefox (presuming it was the default browser) and use the

-chrome switch to execute scripts that could spoof a browser user interface. For example, portions of the real Firefox interface could be hidden and a counterfeit section rendered, in conjunction with a cloned web page that shows

https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn when in reality the person is really logging into

http://www.my-identity-theft-site.tld The ability to execute scripts from the command line was probably a feature, at least initially, but when the ramifications became clearer MFSA 2007-23 was issued and the capability removed. QuickTime bypasses this fix.

It is very likely that the code to execute said scrips exists in most, if not all, Firefox 2.0.0.6/operating system combinations.

It's the hole in QuickTime that makes the hole in Firefox more easily exploitable. On Linux this point is moot, since Apple has not yet released an official version of QuickTime for Linux.

Re: bells and whistles

[mikael_j]

win.com? Are you sure about that? I don't have any real memories of Windows pre-3.x but unless I've completely forgotten about assembly programming .com executables are limited to 64 kiB and I can't really imagine any version of Windows fitting into that, especially not with all the constraints (64 kiB is total size including stack and all that stuff, not just the size of the executable stored on disk). But hey, maybe I'm wrong and I'm sure someone will point out how and why.. :)

/Mikael

Sudo?

[Zarluk]

I think my biggest beef with Ubuntu is the RootSudu. I understand the whole disable root login notion, I just can't get used to it. I work faster when I'm really root. I'll just use a strong password.

Just try 'sudo su', it will get you a root session -- as long as you are in the admin group ;-)

Re: bells and whistles

[Kingrames]

sure, it's eye candy.

What else is there to improve?

Re: bells and whistles

[QCompson]

What else is there to improve?

Speed, speed, and more speed.

That's great and all...

[Infonaut]

... but is it as good as Amiga 5?

I Like Mandriva

[RudyHartmann]

There isn't a perfect distro out there. I install and fiddle with them as a hobby of sorts. Also as a business aside. There are some that are rock solid, but conservative and not appealing. There are other bleeding edge distros that just don't work. I tend towards the pretty distros with lots of features. There are a few that I had to spend a great deal of time finding pieces to make everything work. You know, codecs, plugins, yadda yadda. Ubuntu takes alot of time making me do this stuff. I prefer KDE anyway. So....Mandriva by default supports KDE. They also are pretty close to the edge, but their stuff works. I thought Sabayon had alot of sex appeal, but it locked up alot. One thing though, their inclusion on LinDVD is limited. I use the SPDIF on my machine for digital audio output, and LinDVD doesn't support changing your audio settings. That is kinda lame. 2008 is the best distro I have ever used. I'm going to have to get all those unspeakable codecs for Xine again to play DVD's. But....Mandriva 2008 is a keeper. Rudeman

Bring a Sadwitch if you're upgrading...

[lordofthechia]

Just a heads up, if you're upgrading from an earlier version... well I've been using Mandriva since 10.1, I have not had a fully successful upgrade yet (usually end up wiping my / /usr partitions and starting anew). So get ready for an evening of fun, backup your fstab (you may need it later) and your xorg.conf (if your current one is making you happy).

Presently I've completed the upgrade to 2008, sadly now I have only one monitor working (out of a dual head setup), no applications under KDE (woo, lets play name that app in the Konsole window ^_^), and approximately half the glxgears performance I had prior to the upgrade.

No luck installing a repository either. Why... Why oh why didn't I wait till the *weekend* to do this!!!

So any progress in porting the DrakTools to Kubuntu? Pretty much only thing keeping me with Mandriva atm.

Re:Bring a Sadwitch if you're upgrading...

[Budenny]

Yes, quite right, exactly my own experience. This is what drove me to Debian. And this is what makes Mandriva basically unusable by the unsophisticated. The distro itself, any particular version, may run great. Never let a naive user try to upgrade it, though.

Re: bells and whistles

[Atti K.]

The Windows 3.x loader was certainly called win.com, even in Win 9x it was called like that, but it was launched automatically. Now, I don't know for sure if it was really a ".com" executable, or it was an .exe with .com extension, or a .com which loaded some .exe some from Windows, which loaded the rest... Anyway, it seemed one of the most amazing executables to me at that time :)

Several things...

[RedBear]

To begin with, I was a Mandrake user and even paid for a Silver account or whatever it was for a couple of years. I used other Linux distros also, and liked them. I love the idea of Linux in general, free software, package management and all that. It's all great stuff, in theory. But today, as I read this announcement, there are many reasons I continue to be completely unimpressed with the "progress" of Linux distros over the years since I stopped using it. In the vain and ridiculous hope that someone is listening without their finger poised over the "troll" button, I'd like to just point out a few things for the umpteenth time...

KDE 3.x has been in use for way too long. I was reading about KDE 4.x literally (in the literally literal sense) years ago. I got very excited about the possibility of having "native" KDE 4.x applications running on Windows and Macs as well as Linux, without needing special intermediary layers of software on those other platforms. I gave up on Linux a long time ago, but I sure would love to be able to run some of the nicer KDE applications without needing to use Linux or set up some complex Cygwin or X11 environment. Yet, several years later (years, not months), there is no stable KDE 4.x release in sight. Yes, I'm sure many bugs have been fixed and features have been added between 3.0 and 3.5.7, but it still isn't KDE 4.x with its promise of true cross-platform goodness. WTF?

Mandriva 2008? What is it, a quarterly magazine? Is it a car? It isn't going to be 2008 for another 2.5 months. WTF?

OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.6, in a distro that was just released? OO.o 2.3 and FF 2.0.0.7 have been out for a while now. It's been about a decade since I started using Linux, and development methods are still so ridiculously inefficient and unstable that they still need to do weeks of stability testing before including the most up-to-date versions of desktop software? There is something seriously wrong with that, in my not-so-humble opinion. Part of which is rooted in the fact that every type of Linux distro still seems to need its own special software repository, separate from all the others, where different people are responsible for compiling the same software in different ways for each family of Linux distros. Good God, when I think of all the man-hours that are being wasted with all this idiotic redundancy, and all the time spent by users complaining in forums that their distro-of-choice doesn't have the latest version of package X yet because the package maintainer is on vacation, it makes my head hurt.

Yeah, package management is a great idea, in theory. For servers it really is great. For desktop usage, it falls so short of actually simplifying things that it's ridiculous. After almost two decades of Linux development there is no grand unified package management system in sight. The few pieces of software that have pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions still need at least three different types of packages just to cover "most" of the popular Linux distros. And then we wonder why nobody bothers to develop for "Linux". There is no "Linux", that's why. There are only Linux-based families of distros, each requiring a different packaging procedure. And there is no single clear-cut procedure for installing software completely outside of the native package management system in a way that neither will ever interfere with the other. That too is different for every distro, and not something that is easy for non-geeks to implement on their own personal computer. WTF?

"Reworked hardware detection sub-system". "New network configuration center". I see things like this in almost every distro release announcement I bother to read. Yes, improvement is great. No, redesigning systems constantly is not great. Having to completely rework things means you did it wrong before. This happens entirely too often. It also means that many Linux distros have completely different interfaces to various important system functions. This is one of the many things that confuses the hec

Re:Several things...

[AdamWill]

Sheesh, take a pill.

First, as has been explained several times in this thread, there is absolutely zero point in including Firefox 2.0.0.7, as the only change in 2.0.0.7 is a fix which is entirely irrelevant to Linux.

OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 was released on September 18th. That is not 'a while'. We were already in the Release Candidate stage at that point. Would you expect Microsoft to do a major version update of, say, Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer between Vista RC2 and Vista final? Of course not.

"The few pieces of software that have pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions still need at least three different types of packages just to cover "most" of the popular Linux distros"

This is because the idea of having pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions is, frankly, silly. The package management system works best when people understand it, and worst when they try to do end runs around it. This is not surprising. Software writers should write, and packagers (who work for individual distros) should package. That system works great. It's when people start messing with it that you get problems.

"And then we wonder why nobody bothers to develop for "Linux""

We do? Can't say I find myself kept up at night wondering about that. Maybe because lots of people *do* develop for Linux. It's simple - release source code.

"And there is no single clear-cut procedure for installing software completely outside of the native package management system in a way that neither will ever interfere with the other."

Why do you want one? What's wrong with the package management system?

"Good God, when I think of all the man-hours that are being wasted with all this idiotic redundancy, and all the time spent by users complaining in forums that their distro-of-choice doesn't have the latest version of package X yet because the package maintainer is on vacation, it makes my head hurt."

Then go think about something else and quit trolling Linux threads. Good lord, if anyone's wasting their time around here it's you.

Re:Several things...

[ErroneousBee]

Why do you want one? What's wrong with the package management system?

Nothing, since autopackage came along.

Its just a shame that no-one appears to use it, leading to issues like your current truecrypt woes, or the Unreal 2004 installer requiring tweaks to get UT2004 running on Mandriva.

BTW, you must try alot harder to be patient with those you suspect are trolls. Many of them are genuinely frustrated users, and a Mandriva representative coming across all 'spiky' and 'French' doesnt show your company in a good light. You really must treat them kindly, saying 'there, there, mummy kiss it better', right up until they pull off the mask to reveal they are Steve Ballmer.

Re:Several things...

[AdamWill]

I'm as English as Neil Hancock, I'm afraid.

Truecrypt woes? Do elaborate.

"Unreal 2004 installer"

there's your problem. as I wrote in my original message. :)

Re:Several things...

[ErroneousBee]

Truecrypt woes? Do elaborate.

"Unreal 2004 installer"

there's your problem. as I wrote in my original message. :)

Truecrypt.
I recently moved to truecrypt for my backup external disk (for a host of reasons, but primarily portability). urpmi truecrypt failed, some reading led me to urpmi realcrypt, which failed. So I went to the source. Which required kernel-source (and not the stripped version either). So thats a 200Mb download. On each PC. Followed by a compile taking 20 minutes.

On the first PC it took about 1 hour to get from urpmi truecrypt to installed, and required me to exercise extreme cleverness to understand the problems and work around them. Subsequent installs took 1/2 hour. It took a couple of minutes to go from the truecrypt download link to installed on windows. It would have taken a couple of minutes on Linux if an autopackage version was available on the truecrypt site.

I lightly investigated why urpmi realcrypt failed, and it appears it cos I dont have cooker as a repository. I dont want cooker as a repository, because I want a stable system.

Ive had similar issues, Wesnoth before it got packaged. Recently it was a 64bit version of partimage, only a patched version not available in Mandriva repositories worked, so it was the usual urpmi_failure->research why->get_source->compile->get_dependancies->compile->more_deps->compile->etc when an autopackage would require less hassle and fewer braincells.

urpmi is great when it works. When it fails, it can take alot of research, and some serious bash/sysadmin skills to get something going. I am convinced assisting developers to convert to autopackage is the way forward for the minor distros.

BTW. Seriously, drop the attitude. "Thank you for raising this issue, we appreciate your concerns, etc" may be unctuous and insincere, but never, ever, put down potential customers in a public forum.

Re:Several things...

[BokLM]

It would have taken a couple of minutes on Linux if an autopackage version was available on the truecrypt site.

Good luck using autopackage for something that require modifications in the kernel !

Re:Several things...

[RedBear]

Wrong, wrong, wrong? You mean I haven't been waiting for KDE 4 for years? That's not my recollection.

How nice that it is finally about to have an initial point-zero release. However, having read some of the KDE roadmaps I noticed they have a tendency to release major versions before they have feature parity with the previous major version. Then they continue adding features with each minor version release, . So I'm not holding my breath for a stable selection of KDE apps being commonly available in ready-to-use format for all platforms immediately this December. I also won't be getting excited about Linux distros finally coming out with KDE 4 pre-installed until they get to about version 4.4, for the same reasons. There probably won't even be a mainstream Linux distro using KDE 4 until there is at least one minor version update. I'm guessing it will be another year before the majority of distros will finally be using KDE 4. Again, not holding my breath.

But more importantly, even if I'm wrong on a few details here, it doesn't matter (to me). I simply don't care anymore. I was excited about the potential of KDE 4.0 a few years ago. Then I moved on with life. You can take that negatively and call me a troll, or you can take it as a simple statement of personal opinion based on my previous experience, and an indicator that a lot of people like me would still be using Linux if KDE 4 had come out a couple of years ago. When I can download pretty much any KDE application I want in a Windows and Mac OS X native version, then I'll start being impressed.

Guess what? Pointing out projects that are still in alpha stage as an indicator of progress isn't very impressive either.

Re:Several things...

[RedBear]

OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 was released on September 18th. That is not 'a while'. We were already in the Release Candidate stage at that point. Would you expect Microsoft to do a major version update of, say, Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer between Vista RC2 and Vista final? Of course not.

No, but since when is going from 2.2 to 2.3 a major version update? I would expect them to apply security patches and minor version updates between an RC and a release version, and I do expect the FOSS community to evolve better development procedures than Microsoft, but apparently that's asking too much. Two weeks should be plenty of time to put in the latest version of something that many desktop users will be interacting with on a daily basis.

This is because the idea of having pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions is, frankly, silly. The package management system works best when people understand it, and worst when they try to do end runs around it. This is not surprising. Software writers should write, and packagers (who work for individual distros) should package. That system works great. It's when people start messing with it that you get problems.

I love this. You do realize you're helping to support my assertions, right? No? Maybe you should re-read what you wrote here. It's just like I said before. Package management systems only work for software that stays inside the limited box the system was designed for. Try to do something outside the box and it breaks down. How about that. What you're not realizing, or refuse to accept, is that there are many different legitimate and illegitimate reasons people have for wanting to do something outside that box.

Your whole paragraph here is filled with typical idealist blind spots. "Do end runs around it", "software writers should", "packagers should", "when people start messing with it". These statements are rather arrogant in nature. "If you don't do it my way, you're doing it wrong," and so forth. Guess what? You're never going to get everyone to do something the same way. There are always exceptions, and if that isn't allowed for in the design, it's a bad design. There will always be some "silly" software out there that won't be provided as source code. You can choose to be an idealist and not use that software, but not everyone has that choice or wants to be such an extreme idealist. And most people don't like to be called silly for wanting to do things differently.

We do? Can't say I find myself kept up at night wondering about that. Maybe because lots of people *do* develop for Linux. It's simple - release source code.

You are an individual. By "we" I was speaking of a community with a large number of members who have spent the last several years complaining that almost nobody in the commercial software world has started to seriously develop Linux versions of their software. You apparently don't care about any commercial or proprietary software, but some people want or need such software and there is nothing wrong with that. Source code doesn't really have much to do with it.

Why do you want one? What's wrong with the package management system?

What difference does it make why I want one? There are reasons to want a way to work outside the package management system. Ever tried to install two different versions of the same software package? Ever wanted to install a package for only one user? Ever wanted to install some software that isn't available in your package management system and never will be? Good luck with that. But more importantly, the main problem here is that you're assuming that because you see no reason to do it, there is no reason. That kind of thinking is arrogant, and wrong. And one of the reasons that package management systems aren't perfect for every user and every situation.

Then go think about something else and quit trolling Linux threads. Good lord, if anyone's wasting their time around here it's you.

Oh, don't I know it. Constructive criticism or pointing out flaws in Our Favorite Operating System is NOT welcome. I know. Complete waste of time. Can't help it.

Re:Several things...

[AdamWill]

Has nothing to do with urpmi, but with the packaging of truecrypt. You can file bugs for issues like this at http://bugzilla.mandriva.com/ , where they will be addressed.

autopackage is not the answer to all ills. for instance, the way autopackage is configured by upstream to operate on Mandriva will interfere with the operation of the regular Mandriva packages. it's also completely unsuitable for anything particularly complex or low-level, it really only works well for simple application-level stuff. it's not a bad idea, but it does not solve all problems, and the way it's implemented currently is not great and is definitely not supported by the Mandriva development community.

I post in various places in a manner appropriate to that place. that is, I post on slashdot in a manner broadly appropriate to the typical approach of slashdot users - blunt and direct. I find this is appreciated more than using an all-purpose smiling corporate drone approach in all environments.

Re:Several things...

[AdamWill]

"What you're not realizing, or refuse to accept, is that there are many different legitimate and illegitimate reasons people have for wanting to do something outside that box."

None of which you have provided or explained, and whose notional existence I thus feel entirely justified in ignoring entirely.

"You apparently don't care about any commercial or proprietary software"

Why do you say that? There's no reason commercial and proprietary software cannot be managed within the central repository / package management system paradigm. Mandriva Linux 2008 has two repositories for non-free packages, both of which are populated and used.

"There are reasons to want a way to work outside the package management system."

Again, please provide them.

"Ever tried to install two different versions of the same software package?"

Sure. For instance, on Mandriva Linux 2008, try:

urpmi gcc
urpmi gcc4.3

and you've got gcc 4.2 and gcc 4.3.

or try:

urpmi task-kde
urpmi task-kde4

and you've got KDE 3 and KDE 4. Easy, ain't it?

"Ever wanted to install a package for only one user?"

RPMs are built to be relocatable (if you've ever looked at a spec file, that's why they use %{_prefix}, %{_bindir}, %{_libdir} etc etc etc instead of just /usr , /usr/bin , /usr/lib). You could install most 2008 packages inside a user's home directory if you really wanted to.

"Ever wanted to install some software that isn't available in your package management system and never will be?"

All software should be managed through a package management system. I won't say all software could be, as that's a hostage to fortune, but I will say some ridiculously high percentage could.

"Good luck with that. But more importantly, the main problem here is that you're assuming that because you see no reason to do it, there is no reason. That kind of thinking is arrogant, and wrong. And one of the reasons that package management systems aren't perfect for every user and every situation."

No, I am saying that the vast majority of usage scenarios can and should be handled through package management, and I am annoyed when people suggest silly ideas that would massively undermine the quality of package management on Linux systems purely to solve problems that aren't really there.

Re: bells and whistles

[mikael_j]

Well, I know that Windows 3.x had a file called win.exe which was AFAICR (As Far As I Can Remember) the actual executable. Anyway, I checked my facts and Windows 1.0 required 256 kiB of RAM and a .com executable is limited to a total footprint of 64 kiB (one segment) so that kind of makes it hard for Windows to require more RAM than it can use...

/Mikael

Re: bells and whistles

[Atti K.]

Well, maybe there was a win.exe too, but I'm sure the loader was win.com. As I said, I'm not sure it was a "real" .com executable (i.e. max 64 kb). Anyway, windows was (and is) built up of a lot of executables, the role if this was just lo load the rest (and display that Win 3.x splash while they were loading ;). The reason why is was called a .com might be that, if you typed just "win" on the DOS command line, and both an .exe and a .com existed in the %PATH% with that name, the .com would be launched, not the exe. As an interesting thing, if you check the system32 folder on WinXP (that's what I have, but it might be present also on other NT-based windows), there actually is a win.com :) and if you check its properties, the description says: "WIN.COM for compatibility" :) Anyway, this getting way too offtopic, so I think it's enough of remembering the good old DOS/Win 3.x (on those shiny 386s, of course :D) days :)

Re:A religious war! Perfect for /. "discussion"!

[mgblst]

What is a bigger waste of time, shutting the hell up and going somewhere else, or continually posting about how it is a waste of time?

Improvements

[Wowsers]

I have been picking at the cooker (pre-release) of 2008.0 of Mandriva to find problems in it, and overall it is better than 2007.1 (Spring).

The most important thing I think is the switch to the most recent kernel which has speeded the computer up no end compared to the 2007.1 kernel, and at long last small things like the motherboard & processor sensors / fan speeds details work without lots of voodoo from the users side.

The merger of Beryl back to Compiz was not 100% IMO, you'd think the best code would be used, but Compiz uses far more processor resources then Beryl, and has other small faults Beryl didn't. Also, when I moved from Beryl to Compiz, it took some work from the user as it didn't disable this and that before the upgrade and as a result mangled the xorg.conf and compositing-wm configuration. The menu system has changed a bit, and takes some getting used to.

Worth of note, they changed the way the kernel is named a little, so it's now kernel-desktop-xx instead of kernel-xx.

Having said all that, probably most users will download the ISO's and install that way instead of urpmi method.

If you have Mandriva 2007.1, I think it's worth the update, if only for the better speed from the newer kernel.

I don't post anonymously...

[tjstork]

And I'm a troll. Now, since I'm a troll and I just sort of walk away, as all the arrows bounce off of me, does that really mean that I'm a golem... like a golem would be someone who trolls but doesn't take the wrath too personally...like, made out of stone.

Re:I don't post anonymously...

[poetmatt]

if I had mod points, I would simultaneously mod you troll, funny, and underrated :P However, is this like jewish golem, or like asimov robot? And is this in any sort of overlord, or merely functional and sentient?

Re:I don't post anonymously...

[tjstork]

However, is this like jewish golem

I'm like thinking, Golem in the old Night Stalker, or, better still, the old D&D board game (I date myself now)...

Mandriva improves

[zackzack]

Well, just want to say after using several distro that Mandriva is for me still one of the best "overall" best distro for desktop usage and newbie to linux :

-Distro is rich, and experienced (world wide first class ditro since 1998, 16000 packages, etc)

-Technology and innovation are great (best of class hardawre detection, 3D, control center, etc)

-Support is solid (both by community or as a commercial service is needed)

-Open to external contributors and full respect for free philosphy (all devpt are GPLed, full distro given back to commnuity)

-try to find win-win self founded community / commercial business model (no need for millionaire to serve community, you can vote with your money if you agree the model)

IHMO, the major default relies for me in "branding" the distro and communication with wide community (something Ubuntu does really well at the contrary). Hopefully with this release some communication effort are comming (the club is dissolved for a "plain" open and free of charge community services, prices of commercial offers for individuals are cheaper, web site is revamped, etc).

I invite people who didn't follow up mandriva to come back and look by themselve the changes, I find personnaly, that mandriva is recovering pretty well and as i user from the 9.2 version (2003-2007), I am really satisfied by the current version and also happy with the direction taken by mandriva.

regards.