If you're talking PHR, we're #6 on the six month measurement (which is the most reliable as it maps to the release cycles of the major distros, so it smooths out the bumps), and have been going up for the last two years. However, I don't think Mint or PCLOS are actually as widely-used or important as Mandriva - that's my honest personal opinion. If you disagree, that is of course your right. In the absence of solid metrics, we'll have to agree to disagree:)
However, I now realize I obviously should have said fifth biggest distro. By any reasonable metric I'd have to admit that Debian is up there.
The honest person in me would also point out that there are various free takes on the same idea, in exchange for you doing a bit of elbow work to install it. There was a community-developed Mandriva branch called MCNL that did this for a long time, though it's currently stagnant. I believe there's also community-developed USB images for Ubuntu and Fedora.
Hey, that was the laptop manufacturers' bright idea, not ours. Although the uncharitable might wonder if they were drinking the same Kool-Aid we had when we came up with Mandriva...=)
I think it's some kind of suite of education-related webapps, or something. I'm honestly not entirely sure.
That would likely be it. You're not actually supposed to set the drivers up by manually installing the packages. You're meant to use the graphics card configuration tool. It will automatically detect your card, and if the non-free repository is available, it will ask if you want to use the proprietary driver. If you say yes, it installs and configures it for you.
It also handles the SSE wrinkle. Note this little bit in Cards+ (part of ldetect-lst, which handles mapping cards to driver definitions):
NAME NVIDIA GeForce FX and later
DRIVER nv
DRIVER2 nvidia-current
DRIVER2_NO_SSE nvidia96xx
XFdrake knows when a CPU with no SSE support is being used, and uses the DRIVER2_NO_SSE definition for the card being configured, if it exists.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but your situation was essentially user error. You chose to bypass the auto-detection mechanism and try to set up the driver manually, and you chose the wrong version of the driver. It's hard to see how we could have prevented you from doing that. Remember - Linux does not try overly hard to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot if you're really set on doing it.:)
It'd be strange for PWP to really resolve a bug in Free, because the only difference is that PWP includes non-free and commercial packages. All the non-free (but redistributable) stuff is available from the public/non-free repository, so the only packages you actually can't get anywhere but the PWP are commercial packages - ones we aren't legally allowed to distribute to the general public. It's a very short list, these days - basically Cedega, some Fluendo codecs, and stuff like Acrobat and RealPlayer that you can get free from the original creator anyway.
Usually when something seems to be 'solved' by Powerpack it comes down to someone not realizing that Free doesn't include any non-free drivers (but you can easily get them post-install), or just that they happened to make some change during the install process.
It may also be to do with the downloader you have selected. urpmi can use either curl or wget. You can set this in the repository management tool's Global Options window. Try switching and see if it increases the info you get.
There's a Firefox 3 package in the/main/testing repository for 2008 Spring (incorrectly, actually - it's supposed to be in/main/backports). It just won't be shipped as an official update unless Firefox 2 goes out of maintenance.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the tools Ubuntu *does* have (actually, they're mostly well designed and work well) but it just doesn't have the range of tools that MCC and YAST have. Among the tools you likely won't find on Ubuntu (I didn't check for a couple of releases) - fax server setup, UPS setup, network profile manager, internet sharing wizard, Windows font import tool, log viewer, backup tool, snapshot tool, SMB and NFS server and client setup tools, firewall, parental control, bootsplash configuration tool.
Do you have any reports like this ATM which don't seem to be getting addressed? If so, email me or PM (on the MDV forums) and I'll take a look at them myself.
We don't use full hdlists any more; it was replaced with a system where the information is split across several.xml files. This allows the necessary file to be downloaded on-the-fly (for instance, if you try to look at a package's file list in rpmdrake - or run urpmq -l - then the.xml file that contains file lists for all the packages in that repository will be downloaded at that time).
If you'd rather have one big wait when you update your repositories rather than a smaller wait the first time you try and access a specific type of data for a given repository, you can go to the repository editing program, go to Options / Global Options, and set "XML meta-data download policy" to Update-only. That should give you basically the same behaviour as you used to have with full hdlists.
I'm not aware of any general problem with the packaged NVIDIA drivers. They work normally for most users. If you give more specific information about the problem (maybe in our forums or by email), I will try and help.
As I said, I really don't know what post selection criteria gets the post on 2008 Spring's *final* release rejected but this one accepted. Which is why I just submit everything and take whatever we can get published, these days.
KDE 3.5 is available in contrib - aside from that there's no stable release of a major desktop included, though GNOME 2.23 is actually working quite well for me, and there's Xfce or IceWM or whatever to fall back on. But yes, this really is an alpha.
When you find a package with an error like that, please report it on the forums or (preferably) to Bugzilla - it'll help in getting it fixed. It does happen sometimes, mostly to contrib packages when the package gets rotten (because a maintainer leaves or stops maintaining a package for some reason). For 2009 there should be no such problems within the/main repository, we are working on ensuring that at present.
The same market as always, better than Ubuntu does.;) No, seriously, give it a try, you might be surprised.
We do actually have a reasonably large enterprise business, mainly in Europe (and particularly France, obviously). We also have several significant OEM deals, including a pre-load deal with one of the largest Brazilian PC manufacturers (several thousand PCs are shipped pre-loaded with Mandriva in Brazil every month). We also have an involvement with Intel's Classmate PC program, we're involved in a large project in Angola to basically revamp its entire national IT structure, and there's a netbook / mini-laptop / whatever you call them coming out with Mandriva pre-loaded later this year - the Gdium (http://www.gdium.com).
But yeah, we still have a significant (and growing) user base among normal every day Linux users. Sales of the Powerpack and Flash are pretty strong, and there's many times more people using the free editions.
Why are you trying to run a random copy of Firefox out of your home directory instead of just using the packaged copy like everyone else?
And how the hell do you not have libpango0 installed? Just about nothing will work without it these days, and that's the package with libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 in it...
There is no One True Definition of what's an alpha, what's a beta, what's a release candidate, and what gets released to who. Everyone does it differently.
Slashdot don't take paid ads as news. I submitted this through the submission form same as everyone else (and as noted above,/. rejects 95% of MDV-related stories). My contact address is.mandriva.com, so whoever reads the submissions knows I work for MDV.
And, yes, of course we're relevant. We're probably the fourth biggest distribution overall (behind Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora / RH). We're the largest remaining independent commercial desktop Linux distributor (excepting Canonical, which is not really a conventional company but basically entirely funded out of Mr. Shuttleworth's pocket) - if you want a company that exists by providing Linux distributions to end-users (and doesn't do it as a loss leader or a development spin off), Mandriva is basically it. And 2008 Spring got probably the best overall reviews out of the crop released at the same time, as noted by Distrowatch this week.
No, it's not, which is why it's just as well the final release of this comes out in October, not now.:) By October we reckon KDE 4 will be in pretty good shape. If it's not we can still revert to KDE 3, but we don't think it'll be necessary.
The main point is configuration utilities. Of the other mainstream distros, only SUSE's YaST has anything like the range of the Mandriva Control Center, but it doesn't take kindly to you altering the files it controls manually (it tends to just reset them, completely overwriting your manual modifications). MDV doesn't do this. That was what the OP meant with that point. Ubuntu and Fedora (and derivatives) have nothing like MCC / YaST.
Doesn't have anywhere near MDV's range of configuration utilities, which is what the OP was getting at.
Also we'd argue our centralized backports repository system is rather better than Ubuntu's "seventy billion PPA" system, for bleeding edge packages.
(Yes, for anyone who didn't get the memo yet, I work for Mandriva).
Honestly? I wish I knew the criteria.
I submit every significant bit of Mandriva news. Almost everything gets rejected. For instance, Slashdot did not post a story on the *final* release of 2008 Spring - that one was rejected.
So I just throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. I didn't really expect this to, but we'll take it.
I think it probably involves rubber chickens and stuff.
Er...actually, it's mostly environmental groups - presumably what you're referring to as "the cult of global warming" - who exposed most of the issues with biofuels in the first place. The only people who support unsustainable biofuel use are a) the big corporations in the biofuel market (big surprise there) and b) governments who want something that will look like a solution to the not-sufficiently-inquisitive.
yeah, reading your case again it sounds like you just got a lucky chip (and had a very big heatsink):) how long was it running with no fan? what other fans did you have in the system? if you had a fairly big case fan close to the CPU, that would have helped...
IIRC, the system AMD added after the Tom's incident was more primitive than Intel's - as you describe, it just shut the system down if it went over a certain temperature, rather than throttling the CPU. But still, that's a lot better than motherboard melting time.:) I'm really not sure what either AMD's or Intel's current systems do.
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If you're talking PHR, we're #6 on the six month measurement (which is the most reliable as it maps to the release cycles of the major distros, so it smooths out the bumps), and have been going up for the last two years. However, I don't think Mint or PCLOS are actually as widely-used or important as Mandriva - that's my honest personal opinion. If you disagree, that is of course your right. In the absence of solid metrics, we'll have to agree to disagree :)
However, I now realize I obviously should have said fifth biggest distro. By any reasonable metric I'd have to admit that Debian is up there.
Sounds like you may be interested in the Mandriva Flash, then: http://www.mandriva.com/en/product/mandriva-flash-2008-spring
The honest person in me would also point out that there are various free takes on the same idea, in exchange for you doing a bit of elbow work to install it. There was a community-developed Mandriva branch called MCNL that did this for a long time, though it's currently stagnant. I believe there's also community-developed USB images for Ubuntu and Fedora.
Hey, that was the laptop manufacturers' bright idea, not ours. Although the uncharitable might wonder if they were drinking the same Kool-Aid we had when we came up with Mandriva...=)
I think it's some kind of suite of education-related webapps, or something. I'm honestly not entirely sure.
That would likely be it. You're not actually supposed to set the drivers up by manually installing the packages. You're meant to use the graphics card configuration tool. It will automatically detect your card, and if the non-free repository is available, it will ask if you want to use the proprietary driver. If you say yes, it installs and configures it for you.
:)
It also handles the SSE wrinkle. Note this little bit in Cards+ (part of ldetect-lst, which handles mapping cards to driver definitions):
NAME NVIDIA GeForce FX and later
DRIVER nv
DRIVER2 nvidia-current
DRIVER2_NO_SSE nvidia96xx
XFdrake knows when a CPU with no SSE support is being used, and uses the DRIVER2_NO_SSE definition for the card being configured, if it exists.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but your situation was essentially user error. You chose to bypass the auto-detection mechanism and try to set up the driver manually, and you chose the wrong version of the driver. It's hard to see how we could have prevented you from doing that. Remember - Linux does not try overly hard to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot if you're really set on doing it.
It'd be strange for PWP to really resolve a bug in Free, because the only difference is that PWP includes non-free and commercial packages. All the non-free (but redistributable) stuff is available from the public /non-free repository, so the only packages you actually can't get anywhere but the PWP are commercial packages - ones we aren't legally allowed to distribute to the general public. It's a very short list, these days - basically Cedega, some Fluendo codecs, and stuff like Acrobat and RealPlayer that you can get free from the original creator anyway.
Usually when something seems to be 'solved' by Powerpack it comes down to someone not realizing that Free doesn't include any non-free drivers (but you can easily get them post-install), or just that they happened to make some change during the install process.
It may also be to do with the downloader you have selected. urpmi can use either curl or wget. You can set this in the repository management tool's Global Options window. Try switching and see if it increases the info you get.
There's a Firefox 3 package in the /main/testing repository for 2008 Spring (incorrectly, actually - it's supposed to be in /main/backports). It just won't be shipped as an official update unless Firefox 2 goes out of maintenance.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the tools Ubuntu *does* have (actually, they're mostly well designed and work well) but it just doesn't have the range of tools that MCC and YAST have. Among the tools you likely won't find on Ubuntu (I didn't check for a couple of releases) - fax server setup, UPS setup, network profile manager, internet sharing wizard, Windows font import tool, log viewer, backup tool, snapshot tool, SMB and NFS server and client setup tools, firewall, parental control, bootsplash configuration tool.
Well, via VirtualBox or QEmu, yes, it does indeed run Linux. =)
Do you have any reports like this ATM which don't seem to be getting addressed? If so, email me or PM (on the MDV forums) and I'll take a look at them myself.
See my post further down this thread, addressing that question.
If you'd rather have one big wait when you update your repositories rather than a smaller wait the first time you try and access a specific type of data for a given repository, you can go to the repository editing program, go to Options / Global Options, and set "XML meta-data download policy" to Update-only. That should give you basically the same behaviour as you used to have with full hdlists. I'm not aware of any general problem with the packaged NVIDIA drivers. They work normally for most users. If you give more specific information about the problem (maybe in our forums or by email), I will try and help.
As I said, I really don't know what post selection criteria gets the post on 2008 Spring's *final* release rejected but this one accepted. Which is why I just submit everything and take whatever we can get published, these days. KDE 3.5 is available in contrib - aside from that there's no stable release of a major desktop included, though GNOME 2.23 is actually working quite well for me, and there's Xfce or IceWM or whatever to fall back on. But yes, this really is an alpha.
When you find a package with an error like that, please report it on the forums or (preferably) to Bugzilla - it'll help in getting it fixed. It does happen sometimes, mostly to contrib packages when the package gets rotten (because a maintainer leaves or stops maintaining a package for some reason). For 2009 there should be no such problems within the /main repository, we are working on ensuring that at present.
We do actually have a reasonably large enterprise business, mainly in Europe (and particularly France, obviously). We also have several significant OEM deals, including a pre-load deal with one of the largest Brazilian PC manufacturers (several thousand PCs are shipped pre-loaded with Mandriva in Brazil every month). We also have an involvement with Intel's Classmate PC program, we're involved in a large project in Angola to basically revamp its entire national IT structure, and there's a netbook / mini-laptop / whatever you call them coming out with Mandriva pre-loaded later this year - the Gdium (http://www.gdium.com). But yeah, we still have a significant (and growing) user base among normal every day Linux users. Sales of the Powerpack and Flash are pretty strong, and there's many times more people using the free editions.
Why are you trying to run a random copy of Firefox out of your home directory instead of just using the packaged copy like everyone else? And how the hell do you not have libpango0 installed? Just about nothing will work without it these days, and that's the package with libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 in it...
There is no One True Definition of what's an alpha, what's a beta, what's a release candidate, and what gets released to who. Everyone does it differently.
And, yes, of course we're relevant. We're probably the fourth biggest distribution overall (behind Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora / RH). We're the largest remaining independent commercial desktop Linux distributor (excepting Canonical, which is not really a conventional company but basically entirely funded out of Mr. Shuttleworth's pocket) - if you want a company that exists by providing Linux distributions to end-users (and doesn't do it as a loss leader or a development spin off), Mandriva is basically it. And 2008 Spring got probably the best overall reviews out of the crop released at the same time, as noted by Distrowatch this week.
No, it's not, which is why it's just as well the final release of this comes out in October, not now. :) By October we reckon KDE 4 will be in pretty good shape. If it's not we can still revert to KDE 3, but we don't think it'll be necessary.
The main point is configuration utilities. Of the other mainstream distros, only SUSE's YaST has anything like the range of the Mandriva Control Center, but it doesn't take kindly to you altering the files it controls manually (it tends to just reset them, completely overwriting your manual modifications). MDV doesn't do this. That was what the OP meant with that point. Ubuntu and Fedora (and derivatives) have nothing like MCC / YaST.
Doesn't have anywhere near MDV's range of configuration utilities, which is what the OP was getting at. Also we'd argue our centralized backports repository system is rather better than Ubuntu's "seventy billion PPA" system, for bleeding edge packages. (Yes, for anyone who didn't get the memo yet, I work for Mandriva).
Honestly? I wish I knew the criteria. I submit every significant bit of Mandriva news. Almost everything gets rejected. For instance, Slashdot did not post a story on the *final* release of 2008 Spring - that one was rejected. So I just throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. I didn't really expect this to, but we'll take it. I think it probably involves rubber chickens and stuff.
I don't think we have yet determined whether it runs Crysis, either.
Er...actually, it's mostly environmental groups - presumably what you're referring to as "the cult of global warming" - who exposed most of the issues with biofuels in the first place. The only people who support unsustainable biofuel use are a) the big corporations in the biofuel market (big surprise there) and b) governments who want something that will look like a solution to the not-sufficiently-inquisitive.
IIRC, the system AMD added after the Tom's incident was more primitive than Intel's - as you describe, it just shut the system down if it went over a certain temperature, rather than throttling the CPU. But still, that's a lot better than motherboard melting time. :) I'm really not sure what either AMD's or Intel's current systems do.