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Mandriva Linux 2010 Is Finally Out
ennael writes "We finally did it. Mandriva Linux 2010 is out and comes with many improvements and innovations. We still go on supporting in the same level of integration GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3.2. Support for netbooks is improved as users can now easily test Moblin 2.0 environment. 'Smart desktop' coming from European research is now fully integrated and is the first real working semantic desktop. Mandriva Control Center also brings improvements in tools: a new netprofile management tool, a GUI for Tomoyo security framework, and parental control. A big thanks to our community, who worked hard and made this release possible."
I actually really like Mandriva, unlike others here >_>
Well somebody told me You had a boyfriend Who looks like a girlfriend That I had in February of last year It's not confidential I've got potential
I used Mandrake for a couple of years before Mandriva lobotomized it.
I use Debian myself, but started out with Mandrake (which became Mandriva). It's a very nice distro actually, more polished than Ubuntu. Also I believe it comes with codecs and other non-free stuff as well as pretty good support so the buyer does get value for their money. For someone just switching from Windows who wants a higher degree of "fit and finish" it's a solid choice. It's not for those whose primary concern is an idealistic and uncompromising free OS though.
Caveat Utilitor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Actually they have a gratis version (One) and a commercial version (Powerpack); they're almost the same, but Powerpack includes some non-free software.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm surprised they are still around. I thought most individuals had switched to the quality free distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, and most Linux-using businesses were using CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise or Suse.
I have been using Mandriva since the days of Mandrake ... 8.1 specifically ... and frankly each time I have tried switching to any other distro I always find myself coming back. Not that the other distros are bad, but I honestly think Mandriva has the hardware detection down cold, and has been routinely better than any others. When the 'buntu showed up I tried switching, and every iteration had a deal breaker. I stopped trying at the LTS edition. Today the only other distro I use is Zenwalk, not some mainstream hotshot like Suse, fedora or Ubuntu.
I guess I am asking, why is it that such a good, arguably superior, distro seems to have to pull teeth just to get a few scraps of publicity, while some others seem to be living in some sort of reality distortion field?
In B.C., our fascism is green.
It isn't even 2010 yet!
Oops, I forgot to mention: they also have a version named "Free", that includes absolutely no proprietary apps or drivers.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Mandriva doesn't cost 60 Euro, so please stop the FUD. You can get Mandriva running perfectly fine by using "Mandriva Free 2010", and they have community repos for mp3 etc just like Debian has "debian-multimedia" and Opensuse has packman.
"Ubuntu is an modern day white trash word that means 'I can't fucking read'".
\suseuser
Or take your argument to its logical conclusion and just run Windows - the real de facto desktop winner?
...considering Mandrivia costs 60 euros and has a MUCH smaller userbase than Ubuntu, which is free and is the de facto desktop distro winner. Shouldn't a linux newcomer just adopt the most supported distro aka Ubuntu?
Mandriva is free, too. Otherwise, you may be right. Ubuntu may be a better distro for a "Linux newcomer". On the other hand, getting support for other distros is not wildly different or inherently worse than getting support for Ubuntu. I hope you realize that Ubuntu might not be everybody's cup of tea, and not everybody is new to Linux. While Ubuntu may be the most popular choice for Linux on the desktop, it is by no means the only practical or best choice for everyone.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Mandriva has a free as in beer one CD (like Ubuntu) version: you pay for the version that comes as a multi CD set (so you can install more on installation without downloading) and support.
In any case, the cost of an OS is trivial compared to its importance to most users: if 60 Euros gives you something better, spend it.
If you think you should adopt the most widely used desktop, you should logically use Windows.
Mandriva is a very good distro, and much more newbie friendly. It has better hardware detection, and is very easy to use. The only real shortcoming is that the software installer is not quite as good as Synaptic.
"Linux newcomer"!! ... that would be Ubuntu when compared to Mandriva(drake). This distro has had a very useful control panel for admin tasks a long time + a solid KDE environment. Gnome is just not to my liking, I tried K/Ubuntu several times... eventually ended back at Mandriva. Hope this release is as good as 2009.1.
Hardware support is good. My gut feeling has been it is better than in Ubuntu, but this is just personal experiences with some boxes that ran Mandriva but not Ubuntu, several years ago, and may not apply to latest versions of both.
Software versions in Mandriva are usually very fresh. It also seems to have better good 32 and 64 bit interoperability than most. I have been running the 64-bit version, yet I have not seen the 32-bit Flash troubles that users of other distros report. Just install the plugins and tell nspluginwrapper to update its information. I guess the fact that the author of nspluginwrapper used to work for Mandriva shows!
One good thing in favor of Mandriva is the PLF ("Penguin Liberation Front") repository that you can use to easily add software that the patent-encumbered in some parts of the world.
Umm... Mandriva is free. You *can* buy it boxed and get some support,etc., but for the average home user it doesn't cost a penny more than Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, or FreeDOS.
It's also still a fairly dominant distro, and in my opinion is a better place to start if you don't want your OS to treat you like a total moron (every time I try and use Ubuntu, it just feels like it's insulting my intelligence). Mind you, for some people that's probably the appropriate design for an OS, but I'm personally quite happy with Mandriva (one of my computers is running 2009 Spring, I may try upgrading it).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
For those of you who jumped onto the Linux boat in the Ubuntu era, Mandriva / Mandrake is mostly a hold-over from the days when Red Hat Linux was the biggest Linux distribution around. Red Hat was still a little difficult for some users, so Mandrake was based off Red Hat with more of a focus on polish and ease of use for desktop systems... Maybe similar to the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. Like Ubuntu, Mandrake was very important, and if someone needed an easy Linux distro, Mandrake Linux was almost the standard.
I still remember ordering Mandrake and Slackware CD's through the mail because they were too big to download on a 56k connection. For a few dollars any number of companies would burn disks as send them through the mail. It wasn't standard for everyone to have broadband, or to be able to do updates through the Internet. In retrospect, Linux was certainly clumsier, rougher, and less stable on the desktop. A quick spin with Mandrake Linux 7 can show you how radically the Linux desktop experience has changed in the last nine years.
This clumsy user experience was also responsible for turning many Linux geeks away from the "bloated" desktop environments and more toward bare metal distributions such as Slackware and Debian, along with minimalist window managers, xterms, and other such tools. In my case, after struggling with Red Hat and Mandrake, I found the simplicity of Slackware to actually be easier, and lived over in that world for the next 7-8 years until Ubuntu really started to shine. I am sure there are many other Slashdotters who have had similar experiences in their years with Linux.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
...needs to be shot. Mandriva is still the best desktop linux distro out there. Ubuntu is made of fail because it loves Gnomes. OpenSuse is made of fail because it's full of clunky "enterprise" (Another word for "crap") admin stuff. Fedora is made of fail because RedHat is more interested in RHEL than anything else. That leaves Mandriva. It's fast, it's free (Despite OP might think. Hint: Try visiting the Mandriva website and clicking on the Download link...), boasts great repos, wonderful configuration tools and is all round a top noch desktop experience. It's what I use at work because I need a distro I can rely on to install right, work properly and not throw up a fuss when it comes to installing software, playing music and getting things done.
I've been using Mandriva for many years and like it as well. Originally I picked it because it had the best mix of stable, secure servers out of the box and installed postfix by default back when Sendmail was buggy. Decent firewall, tons of packages, xinetd is easy to configure. Bugs actually get fixed. I'm not a fan of the way KDE is going--it's a reasource hog on a low end system and it's too easy to fuck up your desktop and not be able to restore it with all those plasmids or panels or whatever, but their Gnome setup has gotten a lot of love in the past couple of releases.
yes it got a mangina
...since you decided to use this year's most overused word, "fail", as a noun. When you can make a post without using trendwords, maybe I'll take you seriously.
...considering Mandrivia costs 60 euros and has a MUCH smaller userbase than Ubuntu, which is free and is the de facto desktop distro winner. Shouldn't a linux newcomer just adopt the most supported distro aka Ubuntu?
Well, if said newcomer desires KDE, the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. Kubuntu, for the past 4 releases (basically, since Feisty) have been alpha quality. They ship with broken packages, zero customization, and bugs that would be considered by any other responsible vendor as showstopper (for instance, wireless that broke most people's Internet connection after updating to Jaunty). Besides, as other pointed out, Mandiva has free editions.
unless it's got great support, i can't imagine paying for a linux distro either.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There is a wonderful location for software whose licenses make it difficult to include in Mandriva, such as libdvdcss for reading DVD's in the USA, emulators for game consoles because Mandriva won't incorporate them directly to avoid US DMCA legal issues, and Dan Bernstein's oddball tools whose licenses used to prevent rebundling. It's called the Penguin Liberation Front, it's built around Mandriva, and its source RPM's are convenient for any RPM based distro that wants access to these tools.
I find it extremely handy because it has old, weird tools like xv and vtwm for which I sadly miss development.
I agree with most of what you are typing however it should be noted that a lot of the "Bloat" was by choice of the user and for5 the most part accidently. It's been awhile but from what I remember there was quite an extensive menu to choose from and the casual/new user was often likely to choose much more than they needed. Nice if you know what you want but to a n00b it could be quite an issue.
Probably an old joke here - Mandriva ... makes me wonder if I should trust it more as a passenger, in contrast to Womandriva.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
This sounds very much like my own experiences with Linux.I had a friend/co-worker help me setup a Debian system many years ago but, I never quite "got" Debian and it was very frustrating for me. I continued to run the Debian system for several years and I even tried out Corel Linux with similar results but, after reading about Mandrake(the name back then) I figured it couldn't be any worse so I gave that a try and WOW...all my hardware magically started working and it wasn't too hard for me to setup the system and use it. :)
Now several years later I use Debian on my servers and I'm learning to use the KDE that comes with Debian but, I mostly just the shell/Xterm/CLI on those systems.
This is great timing too because my wife just mentioned earlier tonight that she'd like to try out a Linux system on an old laptop we have here and I have a pretty good idea which Distro we are going to try first
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than have to have a frontal lobotomy."
Well, It's wrong to say these tools are only for Debian or Slackware, I'm running awesome 3.4 on my mandriva and I mostly use terminal/curses based programs in rxvt-unicode. You may be interested to know that wmii, dwm, xmonad, lxde, fluxbox, openbox and many more minimalist window managers are also available for Mandriva. Though of course most of mandriva users either use KDE/GNOME/XFCE.
You may also be interested to know that the mini image, that contains a minimal 32 and 64 bits installer comes with LXDE and replaces the good old IceWM.
A friend of mine is a slacker too and he was surprised that I "still" use Mandriva and did not switch to slack, deb or arch, and distro often cares some kind of reputation, but I can assure you it's in most case more versatile than it appears to be, and after all, it ships with gcc :)
Cheers,
Anyone knows how is the support for GMA500 netbooks? I've tried googling for it, but didn't understand if it is included by default or one needs to do the same kind of jumps through hoops as in kubuntu.
Oops, I forgot to mention: they also have a version named "Free", that includes absolutely no proprietary apps or drivers.
Don't forget, adding non-free codecs and apps is as simple as adding the PLF repository from http://easyurpmi.zarb.org./
It's not for those whose primary concern is an idealistic and uncompromising free OS though
Why not? They release a "Mandriva Free" ISO with every release, which contains only F/OSS software. You can install the proprietary stuff yourself if you want to, but the install media is about as "idealistic and uncompromising[ly] free" as any Debian GNU/Linux user could want.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Out of curiosity, does kdesu (the graphical privilege-elevation dialog) work yet? The last Kubuntu build I tried had kdesu set up to use `su` not `sudo` (it's a configuration option). Since [K]Ubuntu's root account is disabled by default, it doesn't matter what password you enter - su won't work.
This was a blatantly obvious showstopper bug that requires literally a minute or two to fix. The fact that it shipped in a release version of Kubuntu was where I lost all faith in the distribution's QA efforts.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Ubuntu does XFS, (as well as ext*, JFS, MurderFS and so on) through the standard installer. mdraid, lvm and truecrypt only work through the alternate installer disc (but the curses interface ain't that much more difficult than the GUI, so it oughtn't be an issue.
Mandriva is very easy to use, but also has all the power user features you can wish for easily available: by default there is a root account you can login to directly, unlike in Ubuntu. Installer supports more file system choices than most other distros (been running XFS at home for a long time).
I'd argue that linux newbies should better not have a root account they can log in to directly, and power users that _do_ need that so badly can probably figure out themselves that they only have to do 'sudo passwd root' once to enable root-logins in Ubuntu. Also I don't get your point about filesystems, last time I installed Ubuntu from scratch (8.04) I was able to pick tons of filesystems in the installer.
But don't get me wrong, you have a good point if you just meant to indicate that there's most likely a non-trivial demographic that would like Mandrive more than Ubuntu, just like with most other distro's (some people still love Slackware or Gentoo).
"Ubuntu is an modern day white trash word that means 'I can't fucking read'".
That's not what I've heard.
p.s. No, I didn't change my sig to fit the comment.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Fedora was actually quite similar to Ubuntu by the time I switched. The Debian like packaging system kinda grew on me and the GNOME desktop from Ubuntu was better than the one from Fedora at that time.
PS: Oh, yeah, I actually used Debian for a time before switching to Fedora. Releases took forever and the applications grew stale quickly, so I gave up using Debian since. Their GNOME desktop sucked. At the time my network connection was horrible, so constantly having to update packages from debian unstable wasn't for me.
Mandriva / Mandrake is mostly a hold-over from the days when Red Hat Linux was the biggest Linux distribution around
Ahh old times, anyone remember the parodies:
Mandrake Linux [teletubbies picture]
Lesbian Linux [Debian-like picture]
Dead Rat Linux [Redhat-like]
Others I am missing? :(
I could not find them on teh google
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I use Mandrake since 2001 at least and the only problems I had was with hardware that was not supported at all on any Linux. Apart from that, each time I installed it, it always worked without significant problem. My wife uses it and my mother (82) has a Mandriva machine as a back-up. When her Windows box will be out of order, I will make her switch to Mandriva, because I am 100% sure that she will not need to reboot it for months, there will be no virus problems and the like.
The only thing I hope is that Mandriva will stay simple to use, very stable, without useless gadgets and sophistications: I am ready to pay for that, and I am quite sure that many "old" users would be ready to invest on a Linux distribution that will garanty them the same features, ergonomy, interface and data formats for the next twenty or thirty years.
I remember when, for a time, Mandrake was -the- Linux to get. Now look at them, practically off the radar.
This is my sig.
Mandriva's not even run by the guy that founded Mandrake. So everyone that remembers the old Mandrake should remember that this is just somebody else with sorta the same name doing the distro now.
This is my sig.
I remember trying it a long time ago and it didn't work right for me, so I never went back. It may have improved by now, but my current Linux distro works fine for me--why should I bother?
How should one go about finding the best choice of distro for their needs without trying them all out? This is a serious question...
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Mandriva is free. There is only one version (Powerpack) which is not. It's up to you : I've always used the free version.
unless it's got great support, i can't imagine paying for a linux distro either.
Why I pay for this great distro is simple. I want to support them and do my little part to keep it going. I have nothing else to give back other than money. I don't code and I'm only an end user so paying for this great distro is all I have to give. It is well worth the yearly powerpack fee.
My experience with Mandrake was probably three years or so ago now. It was right before the name change, if memory serves.
I had an old CD from a magazine cover from a few months before that; same old story. I needed an LFS host, and at the time was on 56k dialup, so downloading anything was out of the question. I was extremely ambivalent about using Mandrake, because at the time, it had the reputation as the resident "user friendly," distro; but as they say, any port in a storm. I closed my eyes, held my nose, and dived in.
I was extremely, and pleasantly, surprised. Hardware got detected from memory, with the exception of the winmodem, but I didn't blame Linux for that; at the time I was having to jerry rig/compile half a kernel binary to get it to co-operate. The environment was KDE with a nice, blue, very European theme.
Sure, it was still a bit of a fixer-upper; LFS needed a couple of extra things installed and mildly fiddled with before it would build, but given the integrity of binary only distros these days, that's fairly standard. Some of the rpm spec files made baby Jesus cry, as well.
What amazed me, was that for a supposed newb distro, it was as flexible as it was. I could install things if I wanted to, and get away with compiling from source, which was extremely rare for rpm-based distros, at least back then. (I haven't used rpm in probably 3.5 years) I was also able to change things via the config files I was used to from Slackware as well, without too much work.
Based on that experience at least (although I'm assuming some things have changed now) I feel quite positive towards Mandriva. It still isn't a distro that I would *go out of my way* to get, (my preferred environments are either FreeBSD or Arch; although then again, that was three years ago; in fairness I probably should take the new release out for a spin before judging) but I'm not knocking it, either.
Convenience distros can actually be good in a jam if the fundamental design is not *too* bad. I also used to crap on rpm a lot, but it is better than I used to give it credit for, and I have an American sysadmin friend who swears it's come miles since I last used it. For anything where I wanted to carry a cd around full of binaries to slam onto a system *fast,* then as long as the spec files are written well, rpm is good.
If you're a novice and want something convenient, but not as broken as Ubuntu, or if you're a veteran but need something quick and dirty, and don't mind wiping off a bit of said dirt, Mandriva could be just the ticket.
Forums, I guess. For example, if you like KDE, I could recommend Mandriva, OpenSUSE, or Arch. If you're not a Linux expert or you don't like to search within a wiki, I would not recommend Arch. If you don't like Mono or Microsoft, I would not recommend OpenSUSE. So, that leads you to Mandriva, which is a very good choice :)
from the posts, I can't find anyone who actually installed it. So how is it?
an modern day eh? you may want to perform a grammar check on your insults.
Math
about new gentoo releases? Someone should post a story everytime they emerge --sync && emerge world
I could not agree more. KUbuntu quality has been, from the usable only for hard core hackers (Intrepid) to the just ok state, provided that you know how to work around the upgrade crashes (Karmic). I was a paying Mandrake user for about 5 years and switched to KUbuntu when Mandriva/Mandrake quality started to decline by the time they changed names.
Now I must confess that I've been more and more frustrated with KUbuntu quality (or lack thereof) and I've started to think switching. However, the KUbuntu team seem to be aware of the problems and have just launched the Timelord project to fix the basics, which makes me think again.
Freetard
And why should I use it instead of Ungabunga Linux?
Logical conclusion? Windows is incredibly expensive, the "I am poor" edition is $120US and doesn't come with an office suite or PDF reader. This goes directly against the value-for-money side of the argument.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The ease-of-use / great desktop mantle long ago moved from Mandriva to PCLinuxOS, essentially a fork of Mandriva. Is it a co-incidence the Mandriva is re-asserting itself at a time when the PCLinuxOS developers community has indulged in a mass-suicide. Attempts at becoming a Ubuntu user over the years have failed to impress me.
After progressing from Yggdrasil to PCLinuxOS over 17 years (via Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, Madrake), I don't want to take the backward step that Ubuntu seems (from trying it), so have downloaded Mandriva 2010 to run in parallel with PCLinuxOS. The battle for my desktop is likely to be between Mandriva and Unity (the next generation PCLinuxOs)
2009 Spring with the KDE4 desktop has given me an excellent experience on my Eee 701 with 2GB RAM (tried it with 512MB RAM, it was crashy and slow due to out-of-memory, though Mandriva includes a couple of lighter weight desktops which might be worth trying if you don't have KDE as a requirement!).
It works out-of-the-box on Eee 701 with the hardware well-supported without manual fiddling (a few magic function keys don't work, oh well). It looks nice, it's KDE implementation is nice and polished. It's like running a modern desktop OS, really excellent. My main objection is simply that it doesn't have a vanilla (x)nethack package :-(
I'm very excited to see 2010 and will upgrade to it after giving early adopters a chance to shake out any release bugs ;-)
Huh? I've been running it since 7.04/7.10 (part/fulltime) and never experienced what you're talking about. Normally I sudo from the command line but I'm quite sure I've used the graphic tool at least once per release.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
the one thing that's really improved is kdenlive)
I tried to install Mandriva 2010, but aparently its installer doesn't think my SSD is a harddrive... although all previous mandriva versions installed on it just fine... maybe I'll switch the ports where my harddrives are plugged in - that may change something, but then again i'll have to reinstall grub manually (mandrivas bootloader repair tool never worked for me)
mandriva 2009 was completely unusable with kde 4.1... I think what I'll do soon is using mandriva-online to update my system (although I'd prefer a fresh installation) and if it goes bad, I'll switch back to 2008 Spring...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Hey man, blacklisting pcspkr rather than fixing a gnome-session bug is a definition of a quality distro! Don't insult teh Uboontoo!
You didn't want to use your hardware anyway.
I actually like Gentoo's emerge as a package management system better then Debian's apt. They both have dependency resolution, however, if you decide that at some later date you wish to remove something Gentoo is clearly the winner. There is no way to remove unused dependencies in apt, Gentoo has emerge -P.
I use Ubuntu in any environment where I need it to be very stable and I use Gentoo where I want a smaller footprint and more speed.
Ubuntu's shine also takes quite a bit of bloat... it's always fun cleaning up after the fact.
yeah windows 7 the seventh blunder of the world
There are One cd's KDE or Gnome
Free dual arch cd
and free x86_64 or i586
Or if so inclined you can net install using a
floppy or a mini cd using your closest mirror.
The Navy Motto "IF it ain't broke Fix It" "A day is wasted if you don't learn something new"
Mandriva is a much better distro for the "Linux newcomer" IMHO. The install is nicer, the configuration ("Drake") tools are nicer.
Ubuntu is a larger more community based distro, that is its strength.
I like Ubuntu, but Mandriva is much faster at rooting out bugs in my experience. (I use Ubuntu Studio, and it has been years since I have had a RT kernel that worked. Can you imagine a kernel that will lock any AMD computer if the network is used... welcome to Ubuntu Studio. And they marked that bug "minor". lol )
Out of curiosity, does kdesu (the graphical privilege-elevation dialog) work yet? The last Kubuntu build I tried had kdesu set up to use `su` not `sudo` (it's a configuration option). Since [K]Ubuntu's root account is disabled by default, it doesn't matter what password you enter - su won't work.
I don't remember encountering this problem, but the correct command to run has been "kdesudo" for a couple releases now.
Ubuntu does XFS, (as well as ext*, JFS, MurderFS and so on) through the standard installer.
XFS has been available on Mandrake/Mandriva since Mandrake 8.2 if I remember correctly. Since that time it has been possible for users to resize system filesystems (e.g. /usr) using a graphical interface. This is still not possible on many distributions.
mdraid, lvm and truecrypt only work through the alternate installer disc (but the curses interface ain't that much more difficult than the GUI, so it oughtn't be an issue.
The Mandriva installer supports RAID, LVM, and LUKS encryption in the graphical installer. This GUI tool is also available after installation.
I would actually advocate having a go at a few using VMWare or the likes. I worked my way through many major and a few minor distros that caught my fancy on Distro Watch back when I was working nights doing tech support at a university using an old PIII-500. Ah those were the days *gets a little misty-eyed*. I can, however, honestly say that installing Gentoo was one of the most informative (and yes, frustrating) experiences of my early Linux days. If you want to learn how a system is structured I would advise you do it. But back to your question (a little). The major distros all offer pretty much the same experience just implemented differently. Debian-based distro's (Ubuntu, MEPIS etc) offer a huge amount of installable packages that are easily acquired by using one of several package managers (Synaptic being the main one). Red Hat (or RPM) based distros are similar to Debian based distros in that there is a large amount of software available and it's often easy to find, Mandriva has urpmi which is a neat little package manager but may require additional setup after install (mea culpa: I haven't used Mandriva since Mandrake 9 so this may have changed). Those are the two _main_ categories of distribution but there is so much more. I'm a Slackware guy but that's because I yearn for the more simple days and it is not for everyone. It has a small (comparatively) package repository that is not as easy to use as Debian or the RPM-based distro's repos but there is slackbuilds.org which is pretty easy to use. To be honest, most distros are derivatives of one of these (mostly Debian and Red Hat) but there are oddities like SUSE which uses RPM's (or at least did the last time I checked) but is rather different to other RPM based distros.
I really don't think you can just read about a distro to figure out if you'll like it or not as if you are using it for general computing then any of the majors will do you just fine. It's a matter of personal taste and, to a certain extent, what you get used to. I started off as a Debian guy so I was, until about 3 years ago, comfortable with most Debian derivatives. But I ran out of things to break so I switched to Slackware! Have a go at a few and play around under the hood to see if you like how things are laid out. It's fun, I promise!
What does the DMCA have to do with emulators?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Since [K]Ubuntu's root account is disabled by default, it doesn't matter what password you enter - su won't work.
not really disabled, just an unknown password set at install, the easy fix
sudo passwd
Do any versions support the Creative Labs X-Fi sound cards?
[Intentionally left blank]
Currently about 40 server boxes, about dozen of workstations. Tried other distros many times since 2002, always switched back.
Good job, Mandriva guys!
Note: I'm a slackware user
Those people are probably still waiting for the Hurd.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
That's not true.
There is the One edition, which is a single CD, meant to be run as a live CD, or can be installed.
There is also the Free edition, which comes as a DVD, or as multiple CD's. It has to be installed to run it. It doesn't contain any proprietary drivers or software, but you can choose to install them - i.e. you will be prompted to install either the free nv driver, or proprietary nVidia driver.
The 3rd option is PowerPack, which you have to pay for, which contains proprietary drivers and software - i.e. a commercially licensed DVD player.
There are other commercial versions available for firewall, enterprise servers etc. Check it out yourself!
http://blog.mandriva.com/2009/11/04/mandriva-linux-2010-is-out/
http://www2.mandriva.com/downloads/
So, you're saying that there is no advantage over Ubuntu?
A full GUI root account is a terrible idea, as everything you run then has full root access and EVERY ONE OF THOSE PROGRAMS can now be a vector for infection. Especially your web browser, IM client, anything that suddenly, unexpectedly has root access and communicates with the outside world. All of those security flaws that developers make a lower priority because the user permissions prevent from actually functioning no longer apply.
The "supports more file system choices" nonsense is just nonsense, since the "wubi" installer for Ubuntu allows Ubuntu to run off of a FAT32 or NTFS partition, which Mandriva can't do, and all other filesystems available are those that the Linux kernel provides, which are the same for Ubuntu and Mandriva.
I've had systems a few years ago that couldn't run Mandriva and Ubuntu ran on just fine (haven't tried Mandriva in a while), so your anecdote about hardware support is bunk.
Oh, and the reason why I left Mandrake for SuSE (and later Ubuntu) in the first place: RPM Hell. Mandrake is only slightly better than SuSE (and moreso than Fedora) at this, but I don't want to fight with my package manager because of bizarre internal consistency issues that prevent upgrading packages, or adding third-party software. I've never had this problem on Ubuntu or Debian or Elive or any other .deb-based distribution, but on RPM-based distributions, this eventual inability to upgrade/install certain packages because of bizarre consistency issues has arisen, much like issues with the Windows Registry, only worse, because it prevents you from actually doing what you need to, rather than just slow you down a bit.
Ubuntu also has a method of installing patent-encumbered software, and it's built-in, not an external repository:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
Even if you don't do that, any time you try to play an MP3 or WMV, etc, it will ask you if you want to download and install the codec required, on the spot, just warning you that it's patent-encumbered. How is that not *better* than your solution in Mandriva?
Did Ubuntu 9.10 have hiccups? Yes, it did. One of my systems was bitten by a hiccup where a customized /etc/fstab (automounting a remote filesystem on startup) caused the system to sit and wait at boot for the remote filesystem before it had enabled networking support.
But that's the price you pay when you go outside the norms and do something unexpected -- none of my "normal" systems (including a MythTV box, a laptop with GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and Enlightenment, and two desktops) had any hiccups, only one acting as a server that mounted disparate Windows and Linux shared directories at startup and then merged the various video directories together with the FUSE-based funionfs had any issues -- because how many people in the world actually did such a thing as that?
It wasn't too long ago I was reading how wonderful Ubuntu was. Now on this post, it's "Ubuntu is full of fail". You guys are the emo kids in school that as soon as something gets popular "it sucks".
Oh and I'm not sure how Gnome on the desktop is fail. KDE isn't all that wonderful.
well done, man. i started around debian 2.0 in '98, then moved to red hat 6, but had forgotten all those intricacies of the scene at the time. as one who jumped on the boat before ubuntu, i also appreciated the post, and thanks for edifying the newbies.
The 2010 cars have been out for a while...
Free Martian Whores!
Good question. I think my experience is typical. I started out with the most popular distribution at the time. For me that was Red Hat. Nowadays, it would probably be Ubuntu. There are good reasons why the most popular distro is the most popular distro. That makes it an excellent place to start.
As you work with that first distro, you find yourself dealing with certain issues. You see forum posts on slashdot, reviews on linux.com, or elsewhere that claim another distro handles your particular issues better, so the next time you would upgrade, you try the other distro out instead. Repeat ad infinitum.
I switched to Mandrake (now Mandriva) because I heard they had better driver support for desktop configurations. Then I found I was compiling a lot of stuff by hand to get the latest and greatest and solve dependency issues, so I tried out linuxfromscratch to give myself complete control and thoroughly learn Linux. I started seeing a bunch of slashdot posts that said gentoo provided the benefits of compiling your own, but automated much of the tediousness, so I tried gentoo, and actually stuck with it several years. Then I wanted a more user friendly distro with quick, easy maintenance that my wife could keep up with without my intervention on her laptop, so I tried Ubuntu, which I've stuck with for a couple years. Lately, I've been missing gentoo's lean minimalist approach and rolling releases, and have been seeing a lot of slashdot posts that praise arch linux as a good minimalist distro without all the self-compiling of gentoo, so I've downloaded that to give it a try, but still intend to keep Ubuntu on 2 of my 3 computers at home. I've tried other distros for short periods of time, but never made it more than a day or two past installation.
My point is that you don't really know what you want in a Linux distro without trying them out, but that doesn't mean you have to try every one out there in the course of your first month using Linux. I'm on my fifth distro in over ten years, about to try my sixth, and am slowly zeroing in on my exact needs. That doesn't mean I haven't been happy in general with whatever my current distro is, just that there are always tweaks possible to make it a little bit better.
I find it interesting that I landed on newbie-friendly Ubuntu after more hardcore choices like linuxfromscratch and gentoo, but I honestly don't think I would appreciate Ubuntu as much without trying the others first, and my previous experience helps me iron out the few rough edges Ubuntu has. For example, my nvidia drivers failed to upgrade seamlessly with the Karmic upgrade, but it was no problem at all for me to fix because I spent so many years doing things like that completely manually.
This space intentionally left blank.
As someone else points out, it's reasonably trivial to re-enable your root account in ubuntu. However, I mostly just use `sudo su -` for quick'n'dirty shell access.
Parent is right about Kubuntu putting an ugly face on KDE; whilst I'm prepared to admit that KDE4 is approaching feature parity with 3.5, kubuntu has been plagued with bugs since its release that made life impossible. I was also bitten by the non-functioning wireless (across three different WLAN cards, one intel, two atheros) and on a current freshly installed Karmic system, plasma-desktop routinely chomps CPU and RAM until crashing (currently spiking at 70% CPU usage and 1.4GB RAM) - problems I've never run into on other KDE distros. So far, anyway ;) Maybe I'll see what Debian's KDE is like...
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
They lost be when I spent $180 (3 years bronze membership to Club Mandrake or whatever it was) with them, and they decided that x86-64 was only for people paying more.
After 3 months of waiting for the possible release to bronze members I canceled, and started using a different distro (Debian).
As someone paying significant money for what amounted to being better download access (private torrent), and forum access, it was annoying.
I think those types of things really hurt them in the end, Ubuntu (a distro with the same goals) is a platform for developing custom distros to a point (e.g. ubuntu studio), while Mandrake essentially disappeared in the US. It is really hard to try and walk the line between open and private while competing with really open, a list of defunct commercial distros shows that.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I think it is worth noting, that though Mandrake started as essentially tweaked Red Hat with Mandrake logos and names (the installer of the first Mandrake was where it showed the most, but even in the using), it diverged from Red Hat, where Ubuntu really goes back to Debian for every release.
At least as an end user, Ubuntu feels more in sync with Debian than Mandrake did to Red Hat, even a couple quick releases in,
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
They require ROM images, which are usually illegal to distribute.
You don't /have/ to use KDE with Mandriva.
I've been using Mandriva 2009 (installed on a SSD) with Gnome with Pulse Audio disabled (there's a checkbox for that), and it's been great.
Well except for some X11 update that broke certain multi-screen functionality, but that's not anybody's fault.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Right, that's why there aren't ROM images in the repository. The emulators themselves are entirely legal, and it's well within the means of any hobbyist to dump their own ROMs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A full GUI root account is a terrible idea
Of course, which is why you can't log in as root in any display manager in Mandriva. However, you can log in as root on the console, or su to root. However, the more insecure "blanket sudo to root to the first user" is *not* present by default. What *is* present however in some cases, are "restricted" versions of some tools, e.g. the rurpmi version of urpmi, which restricts what you can do with packages, specifically so you can safely give users access to installing software themselves. Most GUI configuration tools are handled by consolehelper (in 2010.0 this might now be the *kit replacement).
Oh, and the reason why I left Mandrake for SuSE (and later Ubuntu) in the first place: RPM Hell. Mandrake is only slightly better than SuSE (and moreso than Fedora) at this, but I don't want to fight with my package manager because of bizarre internal consistency issues that prevent upgrading packages, or adding third-party software. I've never had this problem on Ubuntu or Debian or Elive or any other .deb-based distribution.
And I haven't had this on Mandrake/Mandriva since 7.0, which was the first release to ship urpmi, before apt was in a stable release of Debian.
Ubuntu also has a method of installing patent-encumbered software, and it's built-in, not an external repository
So, Ubuntu is violating DMCA?
Even if you don't do that, any time you try to play an MP3 or WMV, etc, it will ask you if you want to download and install the codec required, on the spot, just warning you that it's patent-encumbered.
MP3 playback is available out-the-box, the codeina thingy is also available by default.
How is that not *better* than your solution in Mandriva?
Can you play AMR audio?
Anyway, this is not a technical decision, Mandriva has a policy of not being involved in the distribution of any patent-infringing software. If software patents disappeared, it would take a few hours to get the packages into Mandriva.
Thanks for the responses. I installed Ubuntu about a year ago and couldn't stand it - nothing worked! I couldn't get the wireless drivers working therefore couldn't get online (no wired connection at the time). Because I couldn't get online (and am a noob) I couldn't get any other other software or drivers etc... So it was a buggy, clunky and ultimately useless. I tried again once I had a wired connection, everything worked straight away, was smooth and has worked without a hitch ever since!
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
I would totally buy Mandriva if it were a little cheaper. I just have to convince myself that it's $90 for the 8 years I've used Mandriva, not just for this version.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I download the Free version for installation on the 30 computers in the Linux lab at the college where I work; I buy PowerPack as a way of supporting Mandriva.
Hmm, I just noticed that it's 60 euros but 70 USD. Not exactly a precise conversion they've got there, but that's much more reasonable...
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word meaning "I can't configure Debian".
Also, Ubuntu's interface is the color of niggers.
I've found kde on ubuntu to be totally usable, though I install ubuntu first, then install kde desktop. I had a bad experience similar to what you describe installing kubuntu directly. I don't know if they've fixed it, sounds like not from your description, but I want both gnome and kde apps anyway, so might as well start by installing ubuntu.
Loose lips lose spit.
I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing it out. :)
Caveat Utilitor
Thanks for the correction. In fact, Mandriva Free 2010 is available right here. :)
Caveat Utilitor
Doh! When I clicked "submit" I got an error message saying "something went wrong...get a new form" so I did -- guess I should've checked the discussion first, because both replies showed up.
Caveat Utilitor
Been using it since Mandriva 8.1. The Mandriva x.0 and x.2 releases always seemed to be garbage, but the x.1s were golden.
Then when they changed to the "year.release", they were kind of crappy until about the 2008.1 release.
I've tried others (and I'm running EEEbuntu on my Eee) but I always seem to come back to Mandriva. Hell, I might try Mandriva One 2010.0 on my Eee, just for the hell of it!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The x.1 (8.1, 9.1, and 10.1) releases seemed to be the most polished. x.0 was OK, with some weirdness, and the x.2 releases always seemed to be crap and broken.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Having to figure out what is and isn't legal with the DMCA, and regulations like it, is an unreasonable legal burden for the creators of Mandriva. The DMCA is strange law, and it's safer to simply leave emulators out of the basic distribution.
Somehow Debian manages it fine. I don't think it's unfair to criticize Mandriva for being backwards in this respect.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually you can get the update version online for Windows 7 for around 78 bucks. That will update you from Windows XP to Windows 7. You can always download openoffice for windows if you need an office suite or adobe reader for PDF. Those are free just the time to download and install. :)
And no I am not a windows only fan as I use Linux at home and work.
Oh, dear. I'm not saying the Mandriva maintainers are backwards, just understandably cautious. Mandriva is a publicly traded company: Debian is many interesting and very useful things, but a publicly traded company doesn't seem to be one of them: this makes Mandriva more vulnerable to lawsuits about just this sort of thing.
Mandriva isn't free as in beer, you have to pay the subscription to downloaded it, unless you have an ancient 32 bit computer.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Just get Mandriva 2010 it really is very professional and well polished. The help channels on IRC at irc.freenode.net are without doubt the most helpful place on the planet. And for that stuff you just have to have that only runs in windows there is a good chance it will run in virtualbox. I run 3d max pro 9 on virtualbox in seamless mode and it works absolutely beautifully. Linux really is getting up to that out of the box standard that a lot of people can just use it without having to stuff around. I have run 2010 since RC1 and now have the official release it truly is Mandriva's best release to date. I have also tried many distributions but I always came back to Mandrake/Mandriva because for me it has always just worked(and worked well). :)
Before getting anything like Gentoo try a 'proper release' so as you have a chance to at least try using Linux before you have learnt to hate it.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I am totally amazed you can even use /.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
That root account business in Ubuntu is so dumb. i am amazed they are still doing it.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
This was a blatantly obvious showstopper bug that requires literally a minute or two to fix..
It might have taken you a minute or two to fix! I can assure you that the average Linux newbie sent to KUbuntu from a Windows environment (after being told that it's the way to go) would take a lot longer than that to sort it out. That sort of 'showstopper bug' is the sort of thing that makes the tentative newbie go back to Windows and forget about Linux altogether. I have always recommended newbies to Mandriva and they have always been happy so that is what I will continue to do,.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Hmm, interesting (and logical). This was several years back, on a KDE 3.5 system, but I'm pretty sure that it was called kdesu.
This was somebody who, aside from our school's Linux lab computers (which we don't get any root privileges on anyhow), had never used Linux and wanted to install it on their own system. It was not a pleasant experience.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
My point is that it would have taken a package maintainer a moment to fix. ./configure --use-sudo (I think that was the option; been a while since I tried building KDE from scratch) && make
Obviously either nobody had filed a bug (meaning nobody had tested it at all, since you'll probably hit a privilege elevation dialog pretty quickly after an installation) or this high-impact, low-complexity bug had simply been completely ignored.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I've only been using Kubuntu regularly since 7.04, so I can't really comment on kdesu problems from before that. I can say that Kubuntu releases have generally gotten a lot better in the last couple years, though there have been a few decisions that ended up not working out so well.
This is HYSTERICAL! Its like a fight between owners of Toyota Corollas and owners of Honda Civics, with some input from Sentra owners and a couple of guys who built their own cars from scratch.
At least you're not driving a Ford Focus, folks!
Me too; although mostly Debian and Slackware. Luckily, not long after that in the UK we had always-on with free dialup internet (0800 numbers), so I'd happily just let debian update everything over the weekend. For me, it was the dawn of a new internet-centric OS age, even before broadband :) Unfortunately it's harder and harder to find even broadband that's as nicely uncapped** these days. Thank god for BeThere.
** Yes, I know the 56k was a natural kind of cap, but my point is, if I had the time, I could download anything.
I have been a Windows user for years and I learned about Linux in college. I was introduced to Linux Red Hat and the old Fedora. That's what we used in class and I hated it, as a matter of fact I didn't understand the purpose of Linux back then. I hated learning commands and starting something from scratch but anyways I passed the class with a C and skipped the class every day. I didn't learn crap.... anyways.... 5 years passed and I got bored of Windows. Don't get me wrong, everything I install on Windows works and I have mastered it to a point where nothing crashes on me, my 7 computers have worked fine for me. Anyhow, I decided to give Linux a try and I tried all of them, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Mythubuntu, Debian, Suse, PclinuxOS, etc. etc. I tried all of them and the only one I really like is Mandriva. As a matter of fact I formatted all my computers and I'm running a home network of 7 computers including some dinosaur laptops that I use as dedicated firewalls in my home network and I haven't looked back, Mandriva is all I use now. Honestly I'm still a Linux N00b but Mandriva is good enough to convert any Windows power user into Linux, I converted all my friends into Mandriva users.
In my honest opinion Mandriva is the best Linux I have tried, I had 1 crash in a year of heavy use, installed tons of programs and tweaked it many times and zero crashes. The 2010 version is very stable, easy to use, fast and so powerful I use Dreamworks, Photoshop, games and some ram hungry graphic design programs and it still going fast as hell.
I got into an arguement with an experienced Linux user a while back, he told me that if I didn't knew all the commands and all that command line crap I wasn't really a Linux user. And sorry to you experienced guys but you can't expect a Windows user to do that! It's good enough for me and I even make donations to Mandriva, that's how much I like it. I show some support at least and that's all. I can consider myself a Linux user.
Are you suggesting people to use XFS? Why would you do that? That's beyond mean.
I tried migrating all my data to XFS once. About a month later I was desperately migrating it all back to ext3. Not only XFS has serious design flaws that make it one of the most fragile FS around, the driver implementation is even able to corrupt the stored data (that is, not just the directory structure, but the file contents too) even during normal operation. Two weeks after setting up a server with XFS, I had to shut it down to fix the file system errors; another 2 weeks uptime, I had to do it again, but this time only so i could back the data up and reinstall the system on an ext3 partition (same disk, not a single badblock up to this day).
Installed it recently on my laptop.The KDE implementation is awesome. The OS is snappy and fast. Artwork is good, although could have been slighty better. Booting is fast. Boots in less than 30 seconds. No nagging or showstopper bugs. Overall, the best Linux release in recent times
I've used Linux for about 10 years now, starting with Mandrake (the original Mandriva) back in the "RPM Hell" dark ages. For the past several years I've used Ubuntu (since 6.06, I think) with Gnome, but have watch KDE 4 mature with some interest. Having recently started playing with Virtual Box, this story gave me the motivation to compare Kubuntu 9.10 to Mandriva 2010 from my own personal Gnome-tainted perspective, since KDE 4 enthusiasts keep posting that Kunbuntu doesn't do KDE 4 justice next to a "real" KDE distribution like Mandriva. This was a highly biased, what-I-care-about perspective. Your mileage will most *definitely* vary.
I installed Kubuntu first, and was underwhelmed (to be polite). Just finished playing with Mandriva 2010, and ... wow. *Huge* difference.
Kubuntu was *much* easier to install, very similar to the trademark ease of Ubuntu. Mandriva was what I remembered from many years ago - scores of screens asking me the most trivial details ("How should we display time?" Well, pick something and if I really hate it I'll change it! Geesh! "Do you have any other repositories?" I have no earthly idea. "Which desktop would you like - KDE, Gnome, or other?" Other? Really? And didn't this used to have a "Both" entry?).
Once installed, however, Kubuntu left me cold. No Firefox (I launched the Konquerer thing, and it crashed on my second tab and took me to Bugzilla, which listed more "similar" Konquerer bug reports than I had heart to even skim). Few tools pre-installed. No games at all. And a weird sliding K-Menu thingy that took four clicks just to launch an application. I was left with a sinking "*now* what do I do?" kind of feeling, which is unusual in my experience in the rich world of free software.
Mandriva looked great on first boot (though it really wanted me to complete a detailed questionnaire, which I started and then abandoned). I didn't like having to log in (if someone I don't trust is accessing my console, I have a much bigger problem than computer security - like, how did this person get in my *house*!), but once in, the menu was pre-populated with all the comforting old favorites - FireFox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Aramok, Okular, Scribus (hadn't looked that one in a few years!), and on and on - and so many games they had to have sub-categories to fit them all on the comfortingly normal menu. And a "starter quick launch bar" in the lower left, next to the Mandriva Star that acted like a K-Menu. I have no idea what a "Diff Check" is (a notice keeps popping up in the lower right to assure me that nobody has tampered with my computer - is this a common problem???), but thus far it all seems... comfortable.
Not sure I'll be switching to KDE 4 any time soon, but certainly Mandriva presents a very convincing case that it's ready to this Gnome-oriented user. Kubuntu doesn't seem to quite be there yet, but since Ubuntu is so nicely polished, I'm sure given some time they'll produce something I like. But now I see what KDE enthusiasts mean when they complain that Kubuntu unfairly tarnishes their reputation.
Just my $0.02, and a "Well done, Mandriva!" to the nice folks on the continent. I fondly miss you guys. :-)
Posted from my Mandriva VM...
Not in my experience... Everything takes longer to run and applications crash a bit more frequently.
I am not devoid of humor.
Well, it works for me well in Mandriva, and apparently also for lots of other people, otherwise XFS would have surely disappeared from the kernel by now. I have not encountered data loss with it so far. I wonder how long ago did you have your bad experiences? I have heard XFS was really flaky in the beginning, which may have earned it a lasting bad reputation, even if it has mended its ways.
Granted, the usage on my XFS computer is not so heavy, but the power cord occasinally gets yanked by a 3-year-old, exercising the journaling features.
As to why, I find it has a noticeably better performance than ext3 for my uses. Ext3 for example somehow manages to spend ages in deleting a large directory tree.
k-desu desu desu...