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Mandriva 2011 Out
shibashaba writes "Mandriva 2011 is out. Look around for ISOs or click here if you already have Mandriva installed. [Or use the 32-bit torrent.] Mandriva may not be as popular as Ubuntu, but they came long before and had an easy to use (and powerful) desktop back when it was almost unheard of."
So if I understand correctly, the argument for getting mandriva boils down to: "Use it because it's older than Ubuntu"?
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
...it was in fact a useful distro, it was compatible with most computers on the planet, all kinds of exotic hardware, I absolutely loved it.
But then it became Mandriva (aka Mandrivel...), economical support issues, fleeing contributors, and the support for obsolete hardware was coming apart until the distro became completely useless, first to fail was basic SoundCard support, even the soundblaster series...that worked fine under the Mandrake distro name...failed on several basic issues...such as...SOUND! -_-
One of the most wonderful things about Mandrake was that you could almost get 3D out-of-the-box, an Nvidia installer was just a click away *kind of like ubuntu today, but Mandrivel...? Things that worked before...broke, again because of the competent contributors fleeing (something about certain benevolent leaders...)
Ubuntu is going the same ways these days with UNITY, more splitting than unity if you ask me...everything is about tablets & touch screen, everyone wants to be modern...but what is modern? Have we forgotten all about functionality?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I didn't know Mandriva is still alive. I've used them for the better part of a decade, first Mandrake, later it became Mandriva. They had so many problems: near bankruptcy, and for a while completely seemed to have lost it completely. Their distro anyway was a bit hit and miss, one great release followed by a mediocre release and then a great one again, but overall I loved it. Some three years ago I made the switch to Ubuntu because of all that - and Ubuntu seemed to have the better future. Also Ubuntu has an LTS option, saves me having to do a complete upgrade so often. Keeping things as they are for a while is nice when you're using the computer to get actual work done.
Any current experience with Mandriva? Are they still good? Worth trying again?
Shut up.
You must be great at parties.
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=06862
Cheers!
-United Anonymous Cowards
I haven't been able to touch Mandrivel since the moronic and unbearable name change.
So what matters over other desktop distributions is installation, administration, and how it look. There is a tour to show the big headlines, differences with previous versions, and screenshots of the main components, but you can just download it, put it in a pendrive and test it to see if you like it.
The real joke is the fact that the iso is a live dvd, with an install to hard disk option. So it is more like ubuntu this way. Only downside is you can't download the iso and rip the RPMs from it for a network upgrade. Their website says this also :
Seems kinda dumb to me, the packages are still in Mandriva's repo, but they are in contrib. There's also something about a package manager being worked on too:
Other noteable updates are RPM 5, systemd replacing sysvinit, and a newer kernel. (2.6.38.7)
Mandriva 2011 is out just in time for 2012! Seriously though, for those who were kde 3.5 fans, mandriva goes the distance to make kde4 feel like windows 7 sans-aero. :)
I was one of the many Mandrake (it wasnt called mandriva back then) users and it drove me away from Linux for 4 more years. Kudos to an article with no real convincing reason to even put the OS in vm.
Mandriva isn't trusted by the community, that is why they forked it and named it Mageia, mainly to keep it from going under and to head for a new direction.
You must go to some pretty fucking lame parties.
Is it The Year of the Linux Desktop and nobody told me?!?
The DVD's being produced that I have seen are lke the live install aspect of Ubuntu. The poblem with that is that Mandriva 2010.2 had a dedicated installer that could both preform complete installations of full setups, as well as on the fly upgrades, rebuilding and if you had Mandriva installed already, it would rebuild and upgrade everything. These ISO images are compressed with squashfs, so you can't extract the RPMs from them and push a live upgrade. I hope that in the future a non-live full install DVD is produced not this 1.6 GB "live install" crap from Ubuntu's way of doing things.
I am used to paralell LDAP+Kerberos+SSH installations of all my machines. This sqashfs method is unacceptable. Especially considering Mageia CAN do that.
...then what is IN?!?!? Windows 2011?
It is 2011!
That's a good start, and a good sign.
Around the turn of the century, I ordered cd sets of all the major distros from Cheapbytes. (This was dialup days, so I couldn't just download them).
I loved Slackware (7), but the package management (or at least dependency management) got to be a bit tedious. I remember one time getting into over 16 levels of dependencies several times just trying to build The GIMP. So I tried Mudrake and it was great, except it 1) the graphics were really corny and 2) it was slow as balls compared to Slackware.
Then I tried Debian, and that seemed to be "just right". Light on resources, and installing packages was a breeze. Debian Unstable was my main squeeze for a number of years, until I discovered FreeBSD. But that's another stowey.
I recently checked out the Mandrivel Free edition. It works and all, but there's really nothing that sets it apart. It feels like another Kubuntu.
do() || do_not();
No, just no. My experience with this distro in the past was not good.
i can't buy a distro based on a desktop. sorry. (i'm lookin; at you too ubuntu, you derps!)
I dropped mandrake linux when they fired the founder back in 06(?) After that I switched to LFS (and BLFS). Currently my new laptop hosts Ubuntu until I can get a new LFS built.
They want you to pay for support and make you go thru hoops to get information. Why bother switch to another distribution. I think it's made by frogs.
seems OK for a desktop and I will agree KDE has cleaned up quite a bit though its still a little awkward at times. The Mandriva default theme is all over the place, the defaults for the windows are light and bright, the panels are dark. The application launcher is fucking huge, as in entire screen huge, with icons the size of a coin. That is not welcome!
I will install it for real, just when I have some time to fart with the umpteen-thousand theme options, which is a tad disappointing for a "easy to use release". Default it not broken, its just ugly and jarring. The rest depends on their package manager and time.
Fucking 10 minutes and 7 seconds until release. You are IT edging and you know it!
At least it no longer has the anagrams "dark amen" and "ram naked" (which is what they do).
I love Linux distributions. I love using the shell when that works best. I love using GUI applications when that works best. Package managers make my life at least a hundred times easier because all of the software is in one place and all of the critical bug fixes are in one place. Hardware support is pretty decent too, especially if you're a person like me who needs the basic functionality and shies away from bloated and branded blobs of sales pitches.
But until I can settle down on one version or one distribution for a couple of years, with the ability to upgrade application 'X' because it has a feature I need and without the need to upgrade the distribution to version 'Y' which inevitably carries a lot of baggage that I don't want to deal with, I'm afraid I'm going to be stuck in the Windows ghetto. Because no matter how many perils that ghetto has, at least I'm managing to work on my computer rather than work form my computer.
Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
"they came long before and had an easy to use (and powerful) desktop back when it was almost unheard of"
I used Madrake up to version 9.0. Unlike other distributions it worked out of the box without hours of fiddling to get a working setup. When I installed 9.2, that experience was gone and the Windows partition I hardly ever used before, suddenly became my default choice for a while. Then Ubuntu came along. Hope it doesn't reinvent itself away from usefulness.
On cursory inspection, Mandriva's new UI uses a GTK+ style, an icon theme based on Elementary, a full-screen launcher similar to Unity's Dash, and a modified version of Dolphin with no menu bar (and no way to enable it). I haven't kept up with why Rosa Labs (page in Russian) has taken over Mandriva UI development, but they have made their mark.
Is the full-screen icon picker, as in gnome-shell, Unity, and now "Simple Welcome" in Mandriva the wave of the future, or just a passing fad? (Personally, I prefer menus.)
-No "traditional" installation disc; just a graphical live installer, and quite a weak one compared to the traditional installer at that. Fine if you want that, but if you don't...?
-They replaced the regular KDE menu with some disgustingly slooooow, atrocious piece of shit of a menu that takes the WHOLE FUCKING SCREEN. Literally, the whole god damn thing, and it seems you have to re-click its icon or click one of the entries in it to get the damn thing out of the way. After clicking its icon to get it out of the way, expect another wait before the piece of shit goes "poof" and finally lets you do what you want. Really, is there any reason for this? And what the hell is this ROSA group that made this abominable thing?
-GNOME, Xfce and other desktop environments/window managers are no longer included *or* supported. It's either KDE4, or no some unsupported environment.
Mandriva seems to really be running themselves into the ground... ironically, Mageia has none of these problems, because it is what Mandriva *used* to be. It's a better Mandriva than Mandriva itself these days. If anyone wants Mandriva, just use Mageia... or try the latest Mandriva and see for yourself just how bad it is.
last one i used
Back then we didn't have live distros so you couldn't just boot off the CD to try it out, you had to commit to installing it in a fashion first and the linux for windows method was the best way for newbies
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Yes, tell me what distro has working cut/copy paste. No bullshit, no infinite buffer, no middle click crap, no special program, just cut/copy paste.
Now tell me it has a GUI I can get shit done with, has not ripped out functionality for vapid eye candy, removed features that allow an install to be debugged, told the emacs fanbois to get bent and stuck wayland in the desert where it belongs.
For getting the shit done, the best interface is still toilet.
They have good updates, excellent repositories, and a system that is both fairly cutting edge and quite stable. In other words it works and works well. Rarely do you ever need to go hunting beyond the official repos except to get unfree stuff that is ALL well supported in the PLF repos (which have a nice simple web interface that will set them up in URPMI with a couple of clicks). I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, etc, and all of them have relatively poor repos compared to Mandriva and I had to hunt around, install stuff from various 3rd party repos, deal with dependency hell, etc. Haven't had to deal with any of that with Mandriva in quite a while now.
OTOH there are some downsides. URPMI isn't quite as slick as some of the APT based package managers, and French people + documentation apparently = disastrous mess. Still, there's plenty of expertise on the net to solve any issues, the documentation exists, it is just badly organized.
Mandriva the company seems to have lost some of its steam in the last few years, but they are still pumping out an excellent distro. After using it as my primary desktop OS, internal server OS, and on numerous laptops for 10 years I really have no major complaints and see no compelling reason to switch. SUSE is the only other distro that supports KDE even half as well, and I'm just not that interested in switching to Gnome. Mandriva does what a distro should do, does it well, and will serve most people's needs quite well. I wouldn't run it on production servers only because it is a pain in the arse to leave off the desktop packages entirely for some reason, though it will WORK fine.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
There is already a review of Mandriva up on DistroWatch http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110829#feature
I have to work with a variety of distros (RHEL, SuSE, Fedora, CentOS, ubunto) on the servers at my office, as well as running Mandriva on desktops and at home, and agree it is far the easiest to deal with in terms of available repos, etc. (Just try building the latest GRASS on SuSE!)
Agreed. When I was studying computability theory, one of the texts was by a native French-speaker, the other native-Greek. I had to understand the proofs in order to be able to figure out what the words in the theorem-statements meant!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
well its there but its off of the disk impression that it left with me is this is something ON TOP of the windowing system, fuck they didnt even bother to try and match the colors, so you in this baby vomit blue enviroment and BAM here is a full screen black window, click on something and its light blue again.
what are they trying to give me a seizure with the contrast flashing or are they really being that shitty on a release?
in particular the hopelessly outdated Skype (who still do not have a 64bit version in static / dynamic - and Linux users don't all use Ubuntu).
Skype doesn't have a 64 bit version at all. They have Debian and Ubuntu packages that are labeled as 64 bit, but the binaries contained within are 32 bit, and require 32 bit libraries.
I think they do this so that dpkg won't give a "architecture does not match system" error, which doesn't apply to the raw archives. So you can use the package manager to install the skype binaries, but you're on your own for hunting down and installing the 32 bit libraries.
"Mandriva Desktop 2011 has been builded by the new technology . . ."
A distro that continues to use faulty grammar on its public announcement pages does not care about the impression it makes on the English-speaking world. They have done this from their beginning and don't care. How can one take them seriously?
If anything, this proves how flexible Plasma Workspaces are. A handful of new Plasma widgets and you can end up with a completely different environment.
I hope Mandriva and Rosa upstream their work to KDE that everyone could optionally use it.
Second best is your sister's purse.
I have an original copy of Mandrake 7.2... I was searching through my dads storage unit after he passed away and found a copy of Linux for Windows which came with a factory Mandrake 7.2. I was pretty excited when I found it lol.
Scientific Linux looks and performs great on my system. LTS is stated to be to 2017, longer than my hardware will exist. (Unless I pack my hardware up for a science museum).
Matches what Mandriva is offering. Think of distributions this way, I drive a Ford, you drive a GMC vehicle, and someone else a Chrysler. Cars are cars, distributions are distributions. It is all a question of personal tastes.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada