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Mandriva Businesses Software

Mandriva Linux 2008 RC 1 Released 182

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the marching-on dept.
AdamWill writes "The first release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Galilee, is now available. The release notes are also available via the wiki. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate), and the detailed technical specifications are also available. This release candidate is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer, and as a mini-CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. A One combined live / install CD edition will be released in the near future (problems with unionfs prevented the One edition from being release at the same time as the other editions)."
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Mandriva Linux 2008 RC 1 Released More

Mandriva Linux 2008 RC 1 Released

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  • Hopefully (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fleshball ( 606934 )
    This will reignite interest in mandriva... I o not know why people always go for the less polished distros, like ubuntu, over something supported nad stable like mandriva.

    • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @06:54PM (#20488051)
      I've been using Mandriva for 6 years and I am thoroughly unimpressed with Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and all the other Linux distros that seem to be garnering so much attention. Ubuntu especially unimpresses me because it's supposed to be some big jump in desktop usability, but doesn't seem to offer anything that Mandriva doesn't offer, and actually tends to be lacking in quite a few areas.

      • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Informative)

        by Steel Shepherd ( 755314 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:27PM (#20488373) Homepage
        I used Mandriva for a few years and switched, eventually to Kubuntu. I tried Suse, Fedora, and Mepis. I really liked Mepis (based on Ubuntu) but switched to Kubuntu based on a sound driver problem. The switch was almost effortless. There is no question Mandriva is a polished distro. Desktop usability is certainly it's forte. My problem with it was package availability, especially when it's popularity began to slide. I ended up running cooker to try to keep up to date and try packages that were not available as stable. Switching to Mepis, based on Ubuntu, solved that for me. The management tools are not as good or as complete as the drake tools, but they are generally sufficient. I can't say though that I recall desktop usability being a strength of Ubunutu's. It's for everyone, as in many languages and affordable to all. If Mandriva gives you what you need, VERY COOL! If something isn't there, doesn't work, or isn't being kept up to date, a switch to Ubuntu will probably solve the problem.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Goldberg's Pants ( 139800 )
          Not sure why the original post is flagged as a troll right now. It's a perfectly fair comment. I've just got back into using Linux with Ubuntu and I love it. I used to use Mandrake in my previous Linux days. I always found it to be exceptionally good. Better than RedHat, Suse etc...

          If I could be bothered I'd do a comparison of distros, but Ubuntu was largely painless, does everything I want, and is ludicrously popular meaning if there's a program I want and I don't want to cock about with source releases, I
        • I tried Suse, Fedora, and Mepis. I really liked Mepis (based on Ubuntu) but switched to Kubuntu based on a sound driver problem. The switch was almost effortless.

          I'll second that, and point out it's one of the reasons I choose Linux over single-origin operating systems.

          Like Steel Shepherd, I've tried several distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) and was impressed with aspects of them, but eventually settled on the ones which work for me now (SLED10 for business and Sabayon for fun). Switching between the distro

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Greg_D ( 138979 )
            This seems to be an ongoing issue with Linux distros.

            I started out with Slackware, moved on to Redhat, then Mandrake came along and made Redhat more usable.

            I dipped out of Linux for a while, came back in, and moved right into Debian because I liked their package management better.

            Then used Mepis for a while before settling on Ubuntu.

            What seems to happen is that a new distro will come along and their user community will be galvanized into keeping the distro up to date with the features that the desktop user
            • Somewhat O/T
              I don't understand the dislike for "software as a service". It makes perfect sense from a management POV and it seems to me like an obvious evolution from fat client to thin client to externally managed thin client. Even for home users: remote administration for, say, 15$/year with upgrades, patches and the likes would be a useful tool. Turn on the PC, suddenly Vista is running and everything just works(tm) (yeah, far-fecthed, I know).
              Of course this does not mean that it's a perfect solution f
              • Software as a service will be used to control users even more. Right now you at least have the code running locally.

                On a DRM scale, SAS is even worse than Palladium.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by buchanmilne ( 258619 )

          I ended up running cooker to try to keep up to date and try packages that were not available as stable.

          This problem has been solved since the release of 2007.0, which introduced new media on the mirrors, and at the same time changes to the build system allowing maintainers to easily submit testing and backport packages from cooker.

          At present, selection of packages to backport is mainly done by the maintainer, but requests are often taken on IRC and mailing lists.

          IMHO, there is almost no advantage Ubuntu has

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by urbanradar ( 1001140 )

          My problem with it was package availability, especially when it's popularity began to slide. I ended up running cooker to try to keep up to date and try packages that were not available as stable. Switching to Mepis, based on Ubuntu, solved that for me. The management tools are not as good or as complete as the drake tools, but they are generally sufficient. I can't say though that I recall desktop usability being a strength of Ubunutu's. It's for everyone, as in many languages and affordable to all. If Man

          • Mandriva's repos are actually rather larger than PCLOS'. PCLOS drops a few thousand packages that are in MDV.

            • Mandriva's repos are actually rather larger than PCLOS'. PCLOS drops a few thousand packages that are in MDV.

              Really? That surprises me. I can't remember the last time I wanted to install something and it wasn't in the PCLOS repos. And as far as I know, PCLOS was actually born out of a project by Texstar (the main PCLOS developer) to provide non-official repositories with additional packages for the Mandriva community...

              Maybe my information is outdated...? But whatever the case is, PCLOS still provides

              • I'm not surprised, as you sound like a desktop end-user. PCLOS is more single-purpose than MDV (Tex would tell you the same) - it's aimed particularly at 'normal' desktop home users. So a bunch of packages that are really only of interest to servers, for instance, are left out. Mandriva is a general-purpose distro - it's intended to be usable as a production web server, for instance, as well as a regular desktop - so it has all that stuff.
                • Ah, good point, I hadn't taken that into consideration -- now it makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up.

                  I work in web development, so I do have to deal with servers once in a while, but I generally write code and leave the actual server setup and administration to other people (other than my very basic local installation of Apache), so yes, you're right, I am definitely first and foremost a desktop user.

                  I'll refine my statement then: I'd happily recommend PCLOS to anyone looking for a solid, modern

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
              I'm not sure about the Mandriva Repositories, which are quite large, but once you use Easy URPMI [zarb.org] to add the contrib and PLF sources, then I don't think there's a piece of software that I haven't been able to find.
        • Is Filelight still supported?

          Is the command line rhyme tool re-supported?

          Is ETHERAPE painlessly re-supported?

          I've had problems with libs for each.

          Will it let me force the install of Win4Lin 4 (or the pre-xp, pre-2k version so I can run win 98x, since I don't NEED xp or 2k on my Lx box...)
          • Filelight's fine, I think. Etherape hasn't been built since 2007.0, I'll give it a kick today to make sure it's okay in 2008 final. Rhyme does not appear to be packaged, I'll look into that.
            • Thanks for replying. I think Rhyme is a kewl tool. It makes looking up words and word endings a SNAP... It seems to me it should be a spotlight item for non-likers of the command line...
          • Well, I packaged Rhyme, but it doesn't work!

            [adamw@lenovo rhyme]$ rhyme orange
            Finding perfect rhymes for orange...
            2: orange

            see, useless ;)

            okay, okay, bad joke. All three packages will be fully up to date and working in 2008. Thanks again for the suggestions.
      • I am going to have to disagree with this one. I enjoyed Mandriva myself but having others that were unfamiliar with any Linux desktop use it was not quite as easy as having them use Ubuntu. It's one thing to offer a clean desktop with plenty of features, it's another to keep it clean and simple.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *
        Just curious as to what differences/lacks you've encountered?

        No linux distro has ever entirely caught me, but to date my favourite was Mandrake v7.2.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by the_womble ( 580291 )
        I agree completely. I tried Kubuntu and went back to Mandriva.

        There is one thing that is better in Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Package installation. The repo is a bit larger, Synaptic has a lot more in the way of search and filtering than RPMDrake, and apt has suggested and recommended package relationships as well a required.

        Other than that, Mandriva is better in every way. Configuration, in particular, is way ahead of Ubuntu, and more ahead of Kubuntu.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 )
      Too late for me. I used Mandrake for years, then the shift to Mandriva occurred, and then the problems started. The repositories got screwed up (I know, they were required to change the name, but they could have done it more smoothly), then packages became even more out of date (it was still running a 2.6.12 kernel for MDV2006 last time I checked), and finally I just got too fed up and switched to Fedora Core 5, and have been running Fedora ever since. I will probably upgrade an old file server that is s

      • Same boat... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by msimm ( 580077 )
        I'd almost like to give it another shot, but I'm happily running Kubuntu on my laptop and really can't justify pulling a solid system to scratch that itch. To date, personally, Kubuntu and the rest of the Ubuntu family have the most cohesive feel to a Linux based distro I've known. Mandriva's user tools used to shine, but unless they've done something remarkable I just don't see much advantage. And the breakage in the last version (specifically the x86_64) left a very sour taste in my mouth. Maybe on day at

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fyoder ( 857358 )
        When the name change occurred my account with their Mickey Mouse... make that Mandrake... rather Mandriva Club broke. My emails went unanswered, in spite of the fact I'd shelled out money to them. Switched to Fedora and haven't looked back (though am looking forward to trying Kubuntu). Frankly, I'm surprised they still exist.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ricegf ( 1059658 )

        I too used Mandrake / Mandriva for years (it was my first full-time distro), but wandered away a few years back. I lost track of the company once Gaël Duval left. Partly, I was disappointed by the website, which I never quite understood (perhaps I should have studied harder in French :-). Partly, I kept falling into dependency hell - when I tried Ubuntu, installing new packages Just Worked, and I couldn't bring myself to return to my first love.

        But I remember Mandriva fondly, and wish them all the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JayAEU ( 33022 )
        Why not give PCLinuxOS 2007 a shot, instead? It's based on Mandriva, but much more polished and ironed out than the original.

        You can get it from www.pclinuxos.org for free and it works like a charm. I just switched my wife from WXP over to it, which is something I never dreamt possible. No complaints, no nag, no malware, no viruses...

        Amyway, I think that original Mandriva has become too commercial while they don't give you the impression that they really can deliver on support etc.

    • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Interesting)

      by N7DR ( 536428 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:01PM (#20488127) Homepage
      I o not know why people always go for the less polished distros, like ubuntu, over something supported nad stable like mandriva.

      I can tell you why I switched to Kubuntu after six years with Mandr[ake,iva]:

      1. 64-bits was relegated to very-low-priority (an inordinate number of supposedly-supported 64-bit packages had dependency failures)
      2. A large percentage of bug reports would lie untouched not just for months, but for years. I have within the past couple of months received acknowledgements for bugs that I filed nearly two years ago -- and those acknowledgements basically came down to "this bug report is filed against a version that is no longer supported".
      3. When a bug report was acknowledged in a timely manner, it was almost always to the effect of "this bug does not exist in 32-bit version; unable to test 64-bit" (or the fact that it was filed against 64-bit was simply ignored)
      4. Official update mirrors would disappear for weeks at a time
      5. Security updates would be made available weeks after exploits became known.

      My experience with Kubuntu has not been painless, but I have found none of the above to be true for Kubuntu. It was with considerable reluctance that I switched, but in any case those were my reasons.

      YMMV, of course (and probably does).

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by flyingfsck ( 986395 )
        Hmm, things got decidedly better since the 2006 version. If 2008 is anythink like the 2007 Spring edition, then it will be suuuuuuupuuuuuuuurrrrb...

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mahlerfan999 ( 1077021 )
        I have to agree that Mandriva's team responds to bug reports too slowly, and do not do enough to fix them. I think that is simply due to lack of man power. But they are making better and better distros since they came into being (I mean Mandriva, not Mandrake). Perhaps if they pick up popularity, they will also make more money and then they can hire enough man power to do it right. Right now though they are far away from being there. I hope to see them improve to get to see better times though.

      • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Insightful)

        by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:58PM (#20488587)
        4. Official update mirrors would disappear for weeks at a time

        What drove me away from Mandrake (as it was then) was that every time I wanted to install a new package I'd have to spend a couple of hours:

        1. Searching for the new location for the repository. They seemed to constantly change the paths arbitrarily every few weeks or so, apparently because they 'decided' that the old path wasn't a good naming convention or something.

        2. Downloading the updated package info.

        In Debian/Ubuntu an apt-get update takes a little while, maybe a minute or so. In Mandrake the equivalent to apt-get update (using urpmi) would take an hour or so. On the same internet connection. Which was 100M.

        I used the 'easy urpmi' site to keep track of the repositories but it was still very very slow and painful work.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by imr ( 106517 )
          1. Searching for the new location for the repository. They seemed to constantly change the paths arbitrarily every few weeks or so, apparently because they 'decided' that the old path wasn't a good naming convention or something.
          This is now done interactively from the package manager, you just click "add" and it gets a list of mirrors over the internet, you choose one, and your medias are automagically configured:
          main + contrib + non-free which countain most of the stuff and their respective updates, backpo

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by flyingfsck ( 986395 )
          An hour??? Obviously your setup was wrong. The Mandriva update mechanism is the same idea as the Ubuntu one - updates are done from world-wide mirrors, so if it is configured right then it cannot be any better or worse than Ubuntu.

      • 5. Security updates would be made available weeks after exploits became known.

        Care to provide some proof on that one? A general and very broad statement like that calls for some proof to back it up.

        Unless you're referring to the kernel itself (which there were issues with, due to a certain kernel developer that's no longer with Mandriva), most (and I do say most... there are exceptions, just like any other distribution unless you're using Gentoo and can emerge the latest upstream version the moment i

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by quadfour ( 712978 )
        You've described my experience with Mandriva exactly. Numerous bug reports just ignored. Being verbally belittled when trying to shed light on issues (even though I was a contributor).

        It is far from a polished distro, and is leagues behind any other major distro due to the aforementioned issues IMO.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by imr ( 106517 )
        About the bug reporting problem, this problem has been adressed the last months by Adam who posted this news.
        He has set up a team to go through all bugs and clean up the base, and they now follow all new bugs so that they don't leave reports unanswered, forgotten or unsolved. They also take care of the reporter side, whenever people need to be asked for details or tests.
        There is also a new bugzilla, much quicker, setup by vdanen iirc.

        So yes, there has been problems, but there is also a strong will to do wha

      • 1. 64-bits was relegated to very-low-priority (an inordinate number of supposedly-supported 64-bit packages had dependency failures)

        I note that a lot of users insisting on running a 64bit OS for no other reason than they have an x86_64 CPU (which is quite a lame reason - specifically if you have less than 2GB ram in said machine) don't notice that Mandriva has always had good dual-arch support. This means that you can transparently install and run the 32bit packages as well (which for a long time was imposs

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )
      I know I stopped using Mandriva (still Mandrake) when I realized after 2 years in their club at the basic level I was paying more than for Windows (by far) a still couldn't get the 64-bit download. I ended up not using Lnux for a while, then went SUSE 10 (when Novell started making ISO downloads available again), and now use Ubuntu as my only desktop.

      I bet the popularity loss had to do with the requirement to join their club for ISO's with quick downloads.
      • Just in case you don't know, since 2007, ISOs are once more available to everyone (Club members and the public) at the same time.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )
          Too bad people stopped releasing packages for it as a major desktop distro in the 2-3 years in between. Between the effort the Debian team does, the effort the Ubuntu team doeas, and the fact that both often get pre-built packages from projects, or at the very least, special compile directions, it will take another distro getting the support of Ubuntu before I am ready to switch again <grammar Nazi, please correct tis sentace, I couldn't figure it out at all>. It may be behind Mandriva and SUSE now,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lproven ( 6030 )
      There is an aphorism: "Jack of all trades, master of none."

      Mandriva tries too hard to be all things to all men. You want KDE? You got it. Prefer GNOME? We do that, too. Want obscureWM? Yes, we include that. Want a smooth desktop? We offer that. Want everything and the kitchen sink? We can do that too.

      It's too much, too widespread.

      I don't want to spend lots of time tracking what is state of the art in Linux apps. I want someone who does that for a living, or as a passion, to choose the best of breed of each

  • RC is the new pre-alpha? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:01PM (#20488129)
    major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate)

    How does that work?

    • Re:RC is the new pre-alpha? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by man_of_mr_e ( 217855 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:37PM (#20488439)
      Yeah, I don't get it either.

      Release cycles have changed a lot in the last 10 years or so. With the advent of iterative software development cycles, you can often times get betas that are not feature complete (the idea is to test the iteration cycles that are complete) but a release candidate should be feature complete most definitely.

    • Re:RC is the new pre-alpha? (Score:5, Informative)

      by pieleric ( 917714 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:38PM (#20488445) Homepage
      I'm using this version right now and the only listed feature that seem missing is the hybrid suspend mode. IIRC, this feature is mostly implemented but there is still a little more work required. All the other features seem already here, excepted of course gnome 2.20 which is currently 2.19.92!

      So, no this is not a pre-alpha version ;-)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Petrushka ( 815171 )

        So, to summarise your post: there is a feature missing; therefore it is not pre-alpha. Well, OK, if that premise necessarily implies that conclusion for you, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and back away slowly and quietly.

        Just to clarify, it is surely obvious that this is not an RC but an alpha version. "Alpha" is after all the standard way of denoting "not feature complete". That's what "alpha" means.

        I trust no one is going to claim that "one feature missing" = RC. RC should mean "finished in abs

        • I trust no one is going to claim that "one feature missing" = RC.
          Microsoft did exactly that with the Vista release candidates. As I recall, Vista RC1 was released with the disclaimer that it wasn't feature complete, either.

          Not that I'd accept "Microsoft did it" as an excuse.

          • Re:RC is the new pre-alpha?(Score:2)
            by hawaiian717 (559933) on Thursday September 06, @03:13PM (#20498069)
            (http://www.quanterium.com/)

            I trust no one is going to claim that "one feature missing" = RC.
            Microsoft did exactly that with the Vista release candidates. As I recall, Vista RC1 was released with the disclaimer that it wasn't feature complete, either.

            Not that I'd accept "Microsoft did it" as an excuse.

            Hell, Microsoft has always done that with shipping product, not just the RCs. ;-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Goaway ( 82658 )
      Well, since "alpha" turned into "beta" and "beta" turned into "release candidate", I guess it's only to be expected that the process would continue. I wonder what new category we will need to make up next.

      I nominate "gold master" for the new "beta"!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The marketroid mindset is increasingly prevalent in the open-source world these days. Mozilla publishes misleading statistics in their press releases and drops features to meet deadlines. Slackware skips version numbers to "keep up" with the competition. And people abuse the terms "alpha", "beta" and "release candidate" to mean what they want them to mean [kde.org] rather than something sensible.

      People who are thinking of labelling something a "release candidate", ask yourselves one question: if major new bugs

      • As I mentioned, in our defense, we've been doing it this way for *years*. Mandriva - ahead of the curve as always! ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by AdamWill ( 604569 )
      Honestly, I've been copying and pasting the same release announcement since Beta 1 and I forgot to take that bit out. :)

      Almost everything on that page is now included. However, it's true to say that Mandriva RCs are not really true release candidates - they're not builds that we honestly believe could be the final release unless someone finds a bug (well, the *last* one usually is, for 2007 Spring that was RC3, for instance). They should really be considered more as late betas. We didn't even hit version fr
    • Well that's easy: it means that the package is already available on their servers and everything, but if you try to apt-get install any one of them, you get an error message "bash: apt-get: command not found". Nothing serious, they'll fix it eventually :)
      • actually, apt-rpm is in the Mandriva repos for anyone who feels like using it. As are smart and yum. :)

  • Crikey (Score:5, Funny)

    by werdz ( 1150775 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:34PM (#20488417) Homepage
    I read the headline first as "Microsoft Linux 2008 RC 1 Released" and nearly spat my tea out at my screen...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rts008 ( 812749 )
      Arghhh!!!

      Now I have to go scrub my brain with bleach!

      I hope this don't cause The Nightmares again. *pictures Bill Gates in a Tux, handing Penguin chairs (yes, also in Tuxes) to Steve Ballmer, who was....NOOOO!! Make It Stop!!!*

      Yeah, maybe if I dilute the bleach with lye...that'll work!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceeam ( 39911 )
      No, they use X.Y versioning scheme and are at 10.something currently ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tarlus ( 1000874 )
      Dunno... I'd pirate it.

  • Actually (Score:3, Insightful)

    by obeythefist ( 719316 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @07:51PM (#20488547) Journal
    I like that they've called the product "2008"... in the larger OS world, where Linux is still a little fringey compared to Windows, anchoring the product to a time instead of a more abstract version number will make less savvy end users more comfortable with their understanding of the product.

    This is a good move! More FOSS products aiming at the mass market should consider adopting a similar approach!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 )

      I like that they've called the product "2008"... in the larger OS world, where Linux is still a little fringey compared to Windows, anchoring the product to a time instead of a more abstract version number will make less savvy end users more comfortable with their understanding of the product.

      This is a good move! More FOSS products aiming at the mass market should consider adopting a similar approach!

      Agreed. We should put chrome condoms on and run around declaring "I'm the Big Meat 2008!"

      Fuck, but I hate m

      • Hate them all you like, put them on the "B" Ark, whatever, but marketing makes or breaks a product and we all know it.

        Look at Linux, it's free, it's competitive, but it's not marketed and it's not marketing driven, and you can tell by looking at it. It's starting to change, but the fact of the matter remains.

        People do not want unmarketable products.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by setagllib ( 753300 )
      Ubuntu does this too, where 7.04 means "month 4 of year 2007". It's not very obvious.
      • Ubuntu does this too, where 7.04 means "month 4 of year 2007". It's not very obvious.

        You're right it's not obvious. I'm an old time Linux nerd who has worked as a *nix admin and reads /. on a daily basis etc. I know way more about Linux and *nix than most 'average users' would ever care to. I've been running Ubuntu for a few months now as all the hype got me really curious and I wanted to see just what kind of "inroads" they had been making on the desktop that has everyone talking.

        Your post is what informed
      • that's really going to get confusing when the year 3000 hits. like, do they go 1000.04, or do they suddenly kick in the millenium number like 999.10 -> 3000.04 Hope they get the patches for dist-update for this out in time
        • and more importantly, what adjective and animal will that release be?
        • Some distros, like gentoo and ark linux played it smart with versions of YYYY.? . They're future proof up to 9999 AD, and beyond!

    • Re:Actually (Score:4, Informative)

      by imr ( 106517 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @10:12PM (#20489619)
      anchoring the product to a time
      You are so right. And it was really thought as a representation of the technical reality and timeline of the distro, not for pure marketing reasons.
      Here is the complete story that is behind this names, if that interrests you...

      The naming convention came from the switch to a one year release cycle for the 2006.
      Since the distro was going to be there for one year, and since most of this year was going to be 2006, it made more sense to call it 2006 and have it called 2006 for 3 months in 2005 than the other way around.
      The decision to switch to a one year cycle came from users requests for more stability.

      Unfortunatly, this move, despite having been made at the users requests, wasnt a popular success. Just read the comments on this page and you will see that a lot of people want the last version of many apps as soon as possible. Which has some sense in the free software world where some apps just move so fast and sometimes a newer version means more stability.
      So with the 2007.0 the distro came back to a 6 months cycle.

      But some aspects of the one year cycle remained in order to have the best of both world and again, it had to be reflected in the naming convention.

      So, 6 months later the 2007.1 was built from the 2007.0 with no revolutionnary change to its foundations (like kernel, glib, gcc) but instead with many improvements and polishings in the desktops, fixing all those little bugs that were so irritating with every mandrake/mandriva release up to now, and a lot of work has been put into improving the existing mandriva tools, like the package manager and now the connexion manager.
      So the 2007.1 was a really stable yet up to date distro.

      Another nice aspect of the distro since that time is the backporting infrastructure.
      Since the distro was going to stay for one year, in 2006 a lot of work has been put into making the softwares from the development version available easily to the previous version of the distro through a process that should not be a burden for the contributors. So the distro was back to a 6 months cycle, but this infrastructure was and is still there, and now important fast evolving apps like firefox can be backported quicker, which was one of the complaints made often to the distro. (You can see the importance of backporting in MEPIS recent swith to debian).

      So all this led to chosing a name that would convey the fact that the 2007.1 was very close to the 2007.0, an evolution in time: "2007 spring".

      Take all that with a grain of salt, I'm managing the Mandriva french forums for Mandriva, but I'm coming from the mandriva community and it really is my distro of choice.
  • Or a mirror with some bandwidth (distrib-coffee is downish)

  • For all those who haven't tried Mandriva lately (Score:5, Informative)

    by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @10:16PM (#20489645) Homepage
    For all those who haven't tried Mandriva in a while, quite a lot has changed. It'd be great if you could try Mandriva again before posting comments. For instance, managing remote repositories is far easier than it used to be: you can configure a full set of official repositories from within the Mandriva package management tools. Instructions are at http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Insta lling_and_removing_software#Making_more_applicatio ns_available [mandriva.com] .

    We've made big improvements in overall polish and stability since the releases that many people remember badly (2005, 2006). 2007 Spring looks much better, has far fewer package quality problems and runs more stably than those releases on most systems. 2008 will be better again, there's been a lot of work done on improving overall package quality, and it includes a very good and recent kernel build with very good hardware support. For instance, we have probably the best graphics card detection and configuration system in a major distro. I'm pretty sure that 99% of cards from major manufacturers (Intel, NVIDIA, ATI) will be correctly detected and configured in 2008. Our support for VIA / S3 (Uni)chrome chips (which are used on VIA's popular mini-ITx motherboards, for e.g.) is better than any other major distro to my knowledge.

    Since 2007 Spring, we have a public non-free repository (that is configured when you set up repositories following the instructions above), so it's easy for anyone to get stuff like the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Sun Java and so on. For instance, for the NVIDIA / ATI drivers, just enable the repository and then re-run the graphics card configuration tool, and it will give you the option of using the proprietary driver.

    Since 2007, we have official /backports repositories (in 2007 Spring and later, these are configured when you set up repositories, but not enabled by default for stability; you can enable them with a single click in the repository configuration tool). These contain up-to-date versions of popular applications. For instance, the 2007 Spring /backports repositories have amaroK 1.4.7, Compiz Fusion (0.5.2), VirtualBox 1.5.0, k3b 1.0.3, pidgin 2.0.1 (will update to 2.1 soon), avant-window-navigator latest SVN, brasero 0.6.0, deluge 0.5.4.1, gimmie 0.2.7, jokosher 0.9, mediatomb 0.10.0, miro 0.9.8.1, ntfs-3g 1.516, powertop 1.3, seamonkey 1.1.4, smplayer 0.5.21, tovid 0.30, transmission 0.72 and a *huge* amount of other updated packages (these are just some examples I picked). These are not officially supported, but they *are* built in a clean environment on the official Mandriva buildsystem and all built against each other, so they represent a contiguous set of packages that you will never have trouble using together, which is far better than the case on many other distributions where you have to use dozens of single-purpose or tiny third party repositories that are unofficial, not necessarily cleanly built, and often conflict with each other. There's a couple of other distros with /backports repositories to my knowledge, including Ubuntu, but Mandriva's are far bigger than any other distro and include far more useful packages.

    so, yes, Mandriva is changing, quite a lot in fact. It'd be great if you'd give us another chance with 2008, read up on the forums - http://forum.mandriva.com/ [mandriva.com] - and the Wiki - http://wiki.mandriva.com/ [mandriva.com] - and see if your issues aren't improved.

    On the Bugzilla situation - N7DR is not at all wrong in his criticism as it relates to earlier times. During the 2008 release cycle, we created a Bug Squad and I was appointed Bugmaster. The Bug Squad now triages all bugs reported, which has helped immensely with the response rate and time for newer issues.
    • We've made big improvements in overall polish and stability since the releases that many people remember badly (2005, 2006). 2007 Spring looks much better, has far fewer package quality problems and runs more stably than those releases on most systems.

      A problem with this is, and you probably are already aware, is that the 2005 release was touted as 'polished' and 'stable' and 'greatly improved' at the time as well. We've heard the spin before, and it'll probably take another couple releases before you win

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by AdamWill ( 604569 )
        Well, let me give you more concrete examples, then - during the 2008 development cycle, I personally have gone through and rebuilt almost every package (there's a few which simply can't be built any more, but over 95%) in the main repository with a mdk* release tag (indicating that it hasn't been built since Mandriva 2006 or earlier) or a 2007.0* release tag (indicating it hasn't been built since Mandriva 2007), making sure they build, run, and are compliant with our current packaging policies. This has nev
      • Oh, and I forgot to mention: we've had a PHP5 package since release 10.1:

        http://sophie.zarb.org/rpmfind?mversion=10.1&searc h=php5&st=fuzzyname&submit=Submit+Query&qcount=20 [zarb.org]

        10.1 came out in October 2004.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gosand ( 234100 )
      For all those who haven't tried Mandriva in a while, quite a lot has changed. It'd be great if you could try Mandriva again before posting comments. For instance, managing remote repositories is far easier than it used to be: you can configure a full set of official repositories from within the Mandriva package management tools. Instructions are at http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Inst a [mandriva.com] lling_and_removing_software#Making_more_applicatio ns_available .

      Well, I haven't tried it in a while.. and

  • I' ve been using mandriva on desktops and servers for years, and the progress has been quite noticeable. Frankly the 2007 version is almost as good as it can be (to my needs), not a single problem with repositories (easyurpmi website), 64 bit system/packages without a glitch.

    Everyone has his own distro preferences, true, but i feel it's important to support such a great work.

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