Mandriva 2008 One Spring = WOW

2 hours after a HD install (don't ask how I broke Ubuntu...let's just say it involved desktop switching and a badly timed update ...here is what I'm finding.

Fast, KDE Seems faster than Ubuntu on my machine
Wireless came right on up during live CD
Pulse Audio
Canon Printer set up effortlessly
Canon Scanner same as above
Nvidia Driver installed, easy as Ubuntu
Great Control Center
Easy NFS and Samba shares
Easy install and good options during install, such as grub, etc.
Great Software installer (ala 'add/remove in ubuntu), no glitches with Evolution, etc
Uses same linux kernel version as Hardy Heron

I just paired my Bluetooth mouse graphically in about 15 seconds, well ok, 30 seconds

Card reader works outta da box like everything else......see my sig. Mandriva asked to set up my finger print scanner but I forgot the OEM name, will do that later. Haven't tried built in webcam yet, but really don't care about that all that much...a bonus.

Looks superb
KDE Menu same as Suse Menu (style)

Yeehaw!....they are going after Ubuntu in a big way! Gotta love it I'm more than impressed.....now let's see how Virtualbox with USB employs.... Right now this distro is number one for me, unless it blows up in 30 minutes. Those of you using PCLOS may want to consider taking another look at the mother distro It's very fast after a HD install. YMMV

EDIT: I'm not running compiz....as I've always found it flaky with many KDE distros....I will try it later though. I haven't delved into the many config options yet, just the basic things other than FF addon and panel, etc. This is 110% better to me than the first Mandriva 2008 One released earlier this year which I had issues with.

EDIT2: Thanks to rm2 for pointing out this release to me in another thread....now he can't say I'm a gnome gnerd anymore...lol

 

A glowing review. Maybe I will try this on my old Gateway next week.

 

I am very familiar with the first release this year and really expected more of the same....I'd liked the first 2008 One, (in a post around here somewhere), but wireless took to some 'fiddling' and would drop, BT was a pain, and little glitches here and there in my experience. Not bad, but not this release either.

I hope nothing crashes big on me destroys my 'glow' lol

 

Nice review.

Although this is just personal opinion, I dislike Mandriva very very much. Maybe its their star logo or ugly impersonation of windows, especially the screwed up xp like "start menu" icon.

Anyway thx for review, when are you getting sabayon 3.5??

 

Nice review, but no distro hopping for me, Arch for life! It's working perfectly for now.

 

They also offer a CD/DVD with Gnome instead of KDE as the default desktop right ?

 

Their site doesn't mention anything, however this blog does

 

Thats the last version,

But it seems they do offer a gnome cd for 2008 spring.
http://torrent.mandriva.com/public/
I wonder if their dvd includes gnome ?

EDIT: If I'm reading the distrowatch page right, Mandriva 2008 spring seems to include NVIDIA drivers for the first time
So that means it should work out of the box on my Dell M90 laptop.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mandriva

The laptop has SUSE SLED 10 on it, which also worked ot of the box two years ago, with compiz and all.

Hmm, Ubuntu also seems to have the NVIDIA drivers, I'll probably either go with debian or Ubuntu (the next release).
EDIT: Debian also seems to include the NVIDIA drivers, OMG, it just might work out of the box !!

 

Yes, Mandriva is a great distro. I am finally getting around to installing it. And, wow, I am impressed as well. Not only did the installer make entries for all the other Linux and Windows partitions on my laptop, but it also correctly identified the name and version of them. Very nicely done! Like you I found that everything worked out of the box on my ThinkPad T61, including wireless. But, that didn't surprise me since the last version did the same for me.

I agree with Blackbird about some of the themes and artwork on Mandriva. But, that is easy to change. (Well, I guess changing the boot-splash is a little more involved, but not impossible.) Any way, the distro is so solid that I can forgive a thing or two. It is certainly one of the distros that has a permanent place on my laptop. As for replacing PCLinuxOS on my home machine, I am not sure yet. I will have to play with it a little longer and see how their improved package management fares. PCLinuxOS is just so easy and convenient, and I do prefer their artwork.

 

Oh and did you read the part about it being compatible with the EeePC?

 

I told you guys it was very compatible with almost everything and runs flawless
i was just very annoyed with the ugly themes and then the difficutly of installing a new theme on KDE
asside from uglyness and a few problems with compiz and their screen saver never leaving my screen
it was very good
but i prefer being able to modify my desktop with ease!
looks mean alot to me with my comp

 

I used to feel that way, sort of....but not anymore....one thing I've recently learned to love about KDE is that you can basically tweak it out of it's KDE form...and this distro is fast, fast..gnome in Ubuntu 'feels' much more bloated I tell you.......you still have many apps that start with K (lol), but damn, so many of them just work so well....and keeps some of us Knot heads from piling up too many GTK libaries from knot knowing better.....lol

This is a keeper for me guys, don't anticipate any VirtualBox probs....I have to print from the VM. Also like rm2 said, Nvidia is ala Ubuntu...."there is a restricted driver available, would you like to install it" Bluetooth was beautiful. I'm a gnome gnerd reborn lol

 

I still want to use that star as a shuriken and throw it at the Mandriva's penguin mascots head.

By the way, is your Sabayon 3.5 download complete? I prefer Sabayon's KDE layout and in my opinion its a much better distribution than Mandriva, it has excellent hardware support

 

My Sabayon download was short a gig! I've got a torrent on it now....stay tuned Hardware, yes....it supported all my hardware OTB months ago....

 

LOL, I can already predict the future.

If Sabayon works as thezoid intends and configuring his bluetooth is cake then well here a post by him saying its a keeper and will be moved to the HD.

Be sure to test one new thing though, Equo and its graphical interface Spritz. Its the new binary package manager, this should be a jem as it will remove the need for always having to compile software you wish to install, which can take ages.

 

Haha....yessir, if somethings better, it gets a night's sleep on my HD lol Man, it's gonna have to be pretty good to up this one for me....lol

 

If you have a Broadcom BCM43xx wireless adapter(Wifi) spring is not for you as suppoprt for them as bring crippled beyond believe.

 

It's easy, you just install ndiswrapper.
Is there a b43cutter for Mandriva?

 

Last time I used Mandriva was when it was still called Mandrake(10 years ago) ^^... What's the difference between One and Powerpack? do they apt?

 

One is more basic & it's free, Powerpack isn't.

 

Package manager?

 

No, it's just extra applications.

 

I mean do I have to download stuff and compile them myself or they have stuff like the deb packages? I forgot all about how that distro works...

 

They use the RPM package system, I believe.

 

Good. I'll give it a try then.

 

Hope you like it, I'll be joining you a little later tonight,

 

Its worth it Mandriva is very out of the box compatible
My wireless worked with ease!

 

PCLinuxOS looks interesting.......

 

Mandriva doesnt use Apt it uses a command just like that though called urpmi
its basically the same thing i just prefer apt to urpmi

 

Okay, I installed it, liked the general look of it but I hated the whole rpm system... I guess I got used to apt too much... Back to 8.04 for the time being.

 

sudo apt-get install cerveza I got used to rpm with fedora, if works just as easy, I'm there.

 

I like the SMART package manager - actually I prefer it to apt:
http://wiki.suselinuxsupport.de/wikka.php?wakka=HowtoSmartPackageManager

I've been using it on SUSE.

 

Hi, all, thanks for the mostly positive comments on Mandriva . Just a few things:

There's three editions of Mandriva: Free, One and Powerpack. Free and Powerpack are based around a traditional-style installer. One is an installable live CD. Free and One don't cost anything, Powerpack does.

Free only includes free / open source software: nothing proprietary. So no NVIDIA / ATI proprietary drivers, no proprietary wireless firmware, Sun Java, Flash etc. It is very easy to add these after installation, though; just add the official Mandriva repositories by running the software installation tool. One of the official repositories is named 'non-free' and contains all this non-free stuff.

One includes most proprietary drivers and firmware. It doesn't have overall as much as Free or Powerpack, though, as it's smaller. There are KDE and GNOME versions (what Fedora would call 'spins'), and there's three images of each version, each with different languages on (as we can't fit all supported languages on a single image).

Powerpack has all the normal proprietary drivers etc. It also has some exclusive commercial software: stuff we actually have to pay for a license to distribute, that we couldn't legally distribute free of charge to anyone. This is the *only* software that's reserved to the Powerpack, everything else is available to anyone through public repositories. The boxed Powerpack also has a nice printed manual and you get 30 days of installation support with it. Powerpack is available in various ways (box, direct download, download subscription) from the Store - http://store.mandriva.com .

We've had the proprietary NVIDIA drivers in the Powerpack edition for years, and they've been in the One edition for four releases or so now.

Mandriva uses the RPM package format. There's really not a lot of difference between RPM and DEB; they're both basically glorified tarballs with some m eta-information. Neither is much fun to work with directly (try managing a Debian system with dpkg). What most people use are advanced, high-level package management apps which automate stuff like package retrieval and dependency resolution: this is what apt-get and synaptic do, on Debian-style systems. Of course, Mandriva has equivalent tools, and has for years. urpmi is the command line tool, the apt-get equivalent. rpmdrake is the GUI tool. Of course, the exact interface is slightly different, but they do basically the same job and in much the same way: you tell them what you want to install and they go out and download it and deal with dependency issues for you. There's no need to try and interface with RPM files directly.

For full instructions on the 'right' way to manage packages in Mandriva, see http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software .

We have official forums at http://forum.mandriva.com/ - anyone's welcome over there. If anyone has any questions or problems do feel free to drop me a line, I can't check all the forums I register for regularly, so PM at the MDV forums or email (awilliamson AT mandriva DOT com) is probably best Thanks again for taking a look at Mandriva.

edit: er - why does this forum software think 'm e t a' is a rude word? It keeps asterisk-ing it out...

 

One last thing: we support Broadcom wireless as well as any commercial (i.e. with some kind of legal liability insurance...) distribution can.

There's basically two ways you can use Broadcom cards under Linux. There's a native driver - well, a series of 'em, started out as bcm43xx , now b43. You can also use ndiswrapper, which as you may know, 'wraps' the Windows driver for use on Linux, a kludge to be used when there's no reliable native driver for a card.

The problem is that whichever way you choose, either the whole Windows driver or part of it is needed. The ndiswrapper route obviously needs the whole Windows driver. The native driver route, though, *also* needs part of the Windows driver: the firmware for the card, which (as with many modern wireless adapters) isn't stored in permanent memory on the card, but uploaded to the card at each boot from the system. The problem is that Broadcom don't distribute the firmware separately from the driver, and the copyright license for the driver does not permit third party redistribution. So there's no legal way to include the bits of the Windows driver needed for the native Linux driver to work (unless you can negotiate some kind of agreement with Broadcom, which doesn't seem likely to happen).

Therefore, the best a distro can do is make it really easy to get at what's needed. Mandriva handles this the following way. When you try and configure a Broadcom card, you can choose between the native driver and ndiswrapper. If you choose the native driver, it'll then ask you to locate a copy of the Windows driver for it. You do, and it extracts the needed firmware from it (using the bcm43xx-fwcutter tool). Then it goes ahead and sets up the driver. If you choose ndiswrapper, it again asks you to locate a copy of the Windows driver, which it then uses to set up ndiswrapper. We've tested this with several cards, and both methods do work, and it's the easiest way we could come up with. I'm actually sending this message using a Broadcom wireless adapter, as it happens, set up with the Mandriva GUI tool using ndiswrapper.

We'd like to have it working truly out of the box - no need to feed it a copy of the Windows driver - but unfortunately that's not legally possible at present.

 

Adam....I stand on my opinion re: Mandriva Spring, however I had problem where VB non free was freezing during an XP format. Never had this happen before with any distro. Linux isn't 'deployable' to me without a VM and usb for quick file transfer and printing, etc. Check out my name in the Mandriva forums, same as here, and look for my post. See what you think. Myself and several others couldn't solve it. Wrote it off to a minor version incompatibility. Therefore, I'm using Kubuntu. thanks

 

No problem, I'll take a look at it. Did you consider using VMware? The Server edition is free (as in beer) and works very well, I use that for my virtualization stuff.

 

I'm a former VMware user...the free edition doesn't support usb (the beta does though), that's why I couldn't use your VB -OSE out of the repo's.

EDIT: Yes, Welcome Adam, sorry for forgetting that!

 

Wow, a Mandriva rep on this board !!!
Welcome Adam !!

 

Good to see them supporting on other forums. I was going to try Mandriva out this weekend on my m1330 although hardy heron in its beta ran pretty sweet on it.

 

Well I now have a fresh install of Mandriva Spring 2008.1 powerpack so far its ok. Nothing outstanding other than the restricted drivers for NVIDA installed before the first boot. The wireless card did not set up before first boot but was very easy to configure once rebooted from install. Since I am running the 64bit version Flash does not work yet but there are workarounds on the forum for it.

I also need to figure out the repositories to install libdvdcss2 since LinDVD is no longer included with powerpack which is why I shelled out coin in the first place.

 

Oh got this to work as media server to my PS3 kinda nice. Now to add content.

 

forceofnature: there's a repo with stuff that can't legally go in the official repositories named PLF. Sorry about the LinDVD thing: there was a legal (patent) issue raised by a third party after the release of 2008 which stopped us including it in 2008 Spring as it's not resolved yet :\

LostDestiny: should have mentioned earlier - I love your avatar

theZoid: I didn't find your thread in my forum trawl yesterday - can you give me a link? Thanks!

 

Zoid, thanks for posting your review. I've also installed Mandriva and like it, too. Everything I've tried so far works well. With Suse I never did get sound to work, but otherwise thought the distro was nice. Mandriva picks up for me, where Suse dropped off. On this machine Mandriva is now installed along with Ubuntu 8.04, so if I find something not working quite right in one distro, I suspect the other will staighten out the situation.

 

I've got Mandriva One on my desktop now and I'm pretty impressed too! Everything works awesome right out of the box, and I actually have internet unlike with OpenSUSE (which I could never get to work). I've always wanted to try Linux so I think this is the Distro I'm going to settle on.

 

Hmmm, Maybe I'll try this out!

 

Adam, here is the thread, and your chance to be a hero

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=84554&highlight=

 

I had to reinstall and use GNOME it might be coincidence but Mandriva seems more stable with GNOME. Seems like the video memory use is better. Everything installs out of the box. Had to configure flash by dowloading the latest flash from adobe and use nspluginwrapper and install lib64dvdcss2 for dvd playback. Of course this is for 64 bit version. If you do try it I can links and instructions from the mandriva forum.

 

So, what is the point of using that as opposed to Ubuntu 8.04? Is there something that it does better then Ubuntu, whether from stability, speed, usability, etc?

I am running Ubuntu on an old P4 1GB Ram box with no issues whatsoever as far as speed or stability goes (no fancy 3d graphics here though )..

 

I simply simply think it's fast, rock solid and extremely well polished and supported....to me it has an edge on Kubuntu which I'm using now because of a VB glitch I had per above. Take your pick, you won't lose with either one.

 

Hey all,

I am also running T61 with Mandriva 2008. I am planning to go for wireless mouse..

have three options...

Logitech V450 Laser Cordless Mouse for Notebooks
Logitech V220 Cordless Optical Mouse**
Logitech V320 Cordless Optical Mouse for Notebooks

Would like to know which one works well with Mandriva 2008 (Its not 2008 One spring)

Thankx a lot...

Arun