Mandriva Linux One 2008 GNOME Review

Here's my review of Mandriva Linux One 2008 GNOME.

Setup

Manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard

Mainboard : Unspecified KM266-8235

Chipset : VIA P4M266/KM266 (VT8375)

Processor : AMD Athlon XP @ 1533 MHz

Physical Memory : 512 MB (1 x 512 DDR-SDRAM )

Video Card : S3 Inc 86C420 ProSavage DDR

Hard Disk : SAMSUNG (40 GB)

CD-Rom Drive : CyberDrv CW058D CD-R/RW

Monitor Type : LG W1952TQ - 19 inches

Network Card : Realtek Semiconductor RT8139 (A/B/C/810x/813x/C+) Fast Ethernet Adapter

Operating System : DreamLinux 3.1

Installation

I hopped over to the Mandriva site after picking it out as a distro i might like and downloaded the GNOME version from bittorent, as a fairly new user i accidentally picked up the 2008 version instead of the 2008 Spring version, which means i may do a review on that too. After booting into the LiveCD with okay resolutions i installed it quite easily by clicking install LiveCD on the desktop. After which i was greeted by a nice and easy prompt that guided me through the installation. It took about 30mins for it to finish and then it asked me to stop what i was doing and reboot. Mind you, it already asked me for my language and keyboard settings during the LiveCD bootup so i didn't need to enter that again.

Initial Impressions

I booted into Mandriva Linux fairly quickly and saw the desktop in about a minute or two. After checking out the resource monitor (about 7-9% CPU and 100MB RAM) i decided to install some updates. I'm not a fan of RPM based distro's at all so the install and remove software program was a life saver. Although not as easy as the Add/Remove utility you find in most Debian based distro's it was fairly easy to use and get around in. After waiting about 2 hours for all the updates to finish downloading and installing i rebooted. Everything still works fine and dandy but even after the updates, there is a little lag. It's been there since the LiveCD but it won't go away. I don't like the lag one bit, as my machine is perfectly capable of doing things lag free. In any case, flash was already installed and so was all the necessary tools you'd generally need.

Visuals

One of the main things that drew me to this distro as opposed to others is the eye candy, the mouse had a little whirly thingy going around it like in KDE but without the slowness. It also looks pretty shiny be default without looking too shiny so that was a big plus. A big turn off is the fonts, it looked horrible as you can see in the screenshots, just horrible. A lot like the fonts i had in WinXP, uhg.

Extra's

It didn't really come with any extras but there was a nice and easy to use configuration tool included that made my life a heck of a lot easier. From it i was able to enable and disable desktop composition and configure my mouse/keyboard and my monitor and everything. An all in one configuration tool with very good organization.

Ease of Use

It's very easy to use, very nice for a beginning user that has no Linux knowledge as it hold your hand along the entire way. The only thing that wasn't easy to use was the RPM package managing. I like DEB a lot more than RPM but this was pretty alright.

Conclusion

It's pretty okay, not too good not too bad. If you're looking for a better RPM based distro i suggest you just check out Fedora instead.

Screenshots

Pros

• Easy to use
• Hardware fully functional
• Visually nice
• Default software does all you want
Cons

• A little lag

In between:

• RPM based

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Thomas McLovin