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Mandriva Linux

Mandriva 2011 Out 156

Posted by timothy from the fond-memories-of-mandrake dept.
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."
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Mandriva 2011 Out More

Mandriva 2011 Out

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  • wrong argument (Score:1, Informative)

    by toQDuj ( 806112 )

    So if I understand correctly, the argument for getting mandriva boils down to: "Use it because it's older than Ubuntu"?

    • They are targeting hipsters?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Use it because it is more stable than Ubuntu. Use it because it's not trying to shove junk packages you don't need, like Ubuntu does. Use it because you have the balls to stray from your mundane little group of popular branded products, unlike Ubuntu users. Use it because it has prettier wallpaper.

      Or, you know...don't. No one really cares.

      .

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Use it because the first thing it does on installation is prompt you to pay for stuff that's free everywhere else. In a world where you get what you pay for, that's proof enough of superior quality and functionality.

        Er, wait...

      • Don't......and btw....everyone is leaving such nice comments on the main Mandriva page. Like hey nice too bad you can't put it on your downloads page. Now their downloads page atm is completely blank.
      • You mean like pushing various web services like what is planned on http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-05/msg00484.php [mandriva.com] For example, rosa sync, a help desk client, etc.

      • Here's why (Score:4, Informative)

        by Giant Electronic Bra ( 1229876 ) on Monday August 29, 2011 @08:15AM (#37240600)

        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.

        • 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...they are still pumping out an excellent distro.

          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!)

          French people + documentation apparently

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Ubuntu fits on a CD and has made some relatively controversial cuts from its supported software lineup to keep the space down. I think you could level lots of criticism at Ubuntu (especially recently) but shoving junk on you is not one of them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mysidia ( 191772 ) *

      I'm not sure they're using it as an argument to favor Mandriva over Ubuntu.... but it is true.

      It boils down to "Use Mandriva because it's more mature".... well, in that respect, you could say "Use DOS 6.0 or Windows NT, because it's older"

      Anyways... if an OS is more mature, and the newcomer doesn't offer a significant advantage, what is the reason to not use the older solution, again?

      Especially when Ubuntu has done some, err.... unwanted things with their GUI :-/

      What did Torvalds say about Gnom

    • I was pointing out why it is relevent to some of us.

      And yes, maturity can be a great thing in a linux distro. Mandriva has around for years for and can easily be adapted for running servers, desktops, thin clients, clusters, and even embedded systems if you try hard enough. Not to mention having been ported at one point or another to just about desktop/workstation platform.

      It grows on you, for those of us that have better things to do than type in sudo all day long, spend time configuring or building a sy

      • Did they actually manage to get the thin client server/client packages working properly in 2011? All I ever found were cut/pasted Fedora packages which were never tailored for Mandriva, so never worked.

        As I use LTSP a modern version would be useful.

        As for the rest, I agree with most of the above.

        • I've mainly used their pxe server for booting eepcs to install mandriva. To be honest with you, I doubt that they've done much work at all in improving it for 2011, especially since thin clients aren't all the buzz anymore. I think most of what your seeing are the leftovers from their cluster projects. I did notice that they have meta packages(tasks) for clustering now, which I've never seen before.

          You'll probably have to manually set up an image to boot. From there though, it looks like urpmi could be

    • So if I understand correctly, the argument for getting mandriva boils down to: "Use it because it's older than Ubuntu"?

      No, the argument is "Use Mandriva because it is more stable, easier to use and works better out of the box." I've tried them all, including Ubuntu, even Gentoo. None come close to Mandriva's usability and administrative tools. And I mean none at all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Ubuntu is a prettified version of Debian, so I don't even think that claim would hold water. Mandrake started off as a fork from Red Hat 5 or so. I still enjoy reading my early raves about Mandrake turning to annoyance and then rants as each passing release seemed to get progressively buggier.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Ubuntu was the THE desktop Linux before others figured out how to spell desktop. To this day Mandriva is a better desktop Linux than Ubuntu. Mandriva has had a massive head start on the desktop that only now some distributions have nearly closed the gap.

      What cost Mandriva user share was the simply fact they had a couple of messed up releases in 2008 and 2009 and they never really recovered the user base. Ubuntu seems to have snatched them up - not because Ubuntu is better, but just because, at the time, it

  • When Mandriva was Mandrake... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @10:36PM (#37238484) Journal

    ...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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by wvmarle ( 1070040 )

      I recall one release of Mandriva that had lots of support requests on the forums for not working sound.

      The problem: by default the volume control was turned down completely! Just turning up the volume solved it. Silly.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MindPrison ( 864299 )

        I recall one release of Mandriva that had lots of support requests on the forums for not working sound.

        The problem: by default the volume control was turned down completely! Just turning up the volume solved it. Silly.

        Whats even sillier - is to release an official distro with such a basic flaw, and call it user friendly.
        Many people this particular distro was aimed at - had NO clue how to use the alsamixer command from the terminal.

        • I recall it was even simpler, that you could fix it from within the default user interface: the volume control button in the task bar. You didn't have to call alsamixer or so. But nevertheless it was really silly and should have never been released like that. And silly enough to be memorable!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          My recollection of Mandrake (before it became Mandriva) is it started off stable and got increasingly flakier with each successive release. Part of that was the ridiculously short periods between releases. It went from version 8.1 to 9 in two months including beta releases. I don't if they did this to drive new purchases or what but I basically gave up on the dist about then since it was obvious that other dists were paying far better attention to usability and quality.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Creepy ( 93888 )

            Well 9 came with SATA drivers, and they were the first major Linux distribution to come with them. I had just built a new PC at the time with SATA and didn't know that Linux SATA drivers were still in beta. I was happy to find a Linux distribution I didn't have to hack to install, and I really enjoyed the distribution, but the move to Mandriva was awkward and I didn't follow it, choosing to move to a different dist (and I went with the difficult to use GenToo source distribution, but not for long - having m

      • This seems to happen to Debian ... a lot.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )

          Knoppix seem to use low PCM settings and higher gain to. Increasing the general volume then will decrease sound quality / make it more noticeable.

    • I loved everything about Mandrake, but had to abandon it because I could never get it to recognize my ethernet card - be it on-board or add-on. So connecting to the internet was a non-starter.

    • ...it was in fact a useful distro, it was compatible with most computers on the planet, all kinds of exotic hardware

      It wouldn't detect the HD on my laptop, and it was nothing exotic.

      At that point I moved on to the next CD on the pile - Dead Rat - and it just worked.

      I've used it and CentOS since. The only problem I have is that they never seem to like my network cards.

    • Having used Mandrake and Mandriva, the problem with the sound system can be put down to two events. The introduction of KDE4 which was pushed out into a working distro before KDE4 was really ready (and no way back to KDE3 which p'ed off a LOT of users). Then there's the introduction of PulseAudio (although one of the developers was most helpful in tracking down bugs I had found which he pushed out patches into the main distro).

      While not the fault of PulseAudio, there are packages that still do not behave ni

      • Skype (Score:2)

        by iYk6 ( 1425255 )

        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.

  • 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

    • Re:Still alive?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @11:31PM (#37238726)
      Please note:
      I've got no beef with the way Ubuntu, GNOME 3, KDE 4 work. If that's your cup of tea then still give Mandriva a try, you may in fact like it.

      Real quick I want to address one thing...

      Also Ubuntu has an LTS option, saves me having to do a complete upgrade so often.

      Mandriva will have an LTS option hopefully by the end of this year. Tour of 2011 [mandriva.com]

      Politics in the Mandriva world have played out to start emulating the Ubuntu release cycle sans the two a year release. Instead we will see a normal Mandriva release once a year with regular patches for 1.5 years after release. Starting at the end of this year will be the LTS line. No word on how often a LTS will come out but 2011 LTS will receive patches for 3 years.

      Any current experience with Mandriva? Are they still good? Worth trying again?

      I would dare say that one of the big things that has held Mandriva back is KDE. Mandriva 2011 supports KDE only, no GNOME mess here. KDE's polish over the several iterations since the 4.0 disaster really shows here in Mandriva. Many things are being addressed and there are plans to make normal GTK+ applications more KDE friendly (like how SuSE has made their firefox integrate into KDE nicely.) The biggest thing I think is that Mandriva understands that a lot of people are getting annoyed with the sudden changes in favorite applications and desktops.

      The standard kicker is replaced with a Mandriva specific kicker that I think is a good compromise between modern and classical application menus. Amarok is not present in this release, instead is Clementine, which is loosely based on the Amarok of 1.4 days. KMail (and everything it brings) is not present either, instead is Thunderbird from Mozilla. LibreOffice 3.4 is used, which I think is the best version out there thus far and the most useful for day to day operations. (side note:) A few Windows users at our company were switched off of Office 2007 to LibreOffice 3.4.2 and have had really great results in their day to day operations; so much so, we may be moving them off Windows altogether. The users only need TN5250 emulation, Microsoft Exchange support, modern web support, and an Office suite that can connect to DB2 and do Pivot Tables.

      Finally, the package manager is what I would call sane for most Linux heads. Yeah it's not dumbed down like the Ubuntu store but I think most people will enjoy what they see here. Overall Mandriva 2011 offers a desktop that I think will rival Ubuntu. With all the compromises that they have made with KDE between new hotness and what we all enjoyed from the Linux desktop pre-Mac OS X copier era, I think this distro will start to fill a ever-growing niche of old school Linux users that enjoyed DE as they were.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Xtravar ( 725372 )

        Mandriva 2011 supports KDE only, no GNOME mess here.

        I'm a huge Mandriva fan. I've been using it for 8+ years in some way or another. And I'm also a huge Gnome fan.

        Will I hate my life if I try to stick with Mandriva + Gnome? Am I better off switching distros?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by colin_s_guthrie ( 929758 )

          You can always try Mageia. There are several people working on both the GNOME and KDE side of things and you should be in very familiar territory if you have previously become accustomed to Mandriva.

        • Will I hate my life if I try to stick with Mandriva + Gnome? Am I better off switching distros?

          That's a hard call. The direction of Mandriva proper is not to support GNOME and I don't think they have a big community supported GNOME like Slackware. You may in the end switch distros if no clear direction for GNOME + Mandriva appears.

          For now they still have packages for GNOME but there again, Mandriva won't support those packages.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          From first-hand experience (been using the 2011 RC2 for a couple of weeks), I can tell you... yes. Switch. Everything outside KDE is half working. What more, they are killing off all the drake tools, so by the next release this distro will be indistinguishable from any other generic distro.

          I was going to install it on my parents' computers as soon as it came out, but the effort (and time... the ISO does not contain any GNOME package, so I would have to download the hundreds of MB again and again) is not wor

      • Mandriva will have an LTS option hopefully by the end of this year.

        And who will maintain that? Every now and then Mandriva dramatically cuts its work force. You can't properly maintain a distribution for 3 years and additionally even release non-LTS versions at the same time without any engineers left.

        Red Hat and SUSE both employ hundreds of engineers. That's why they are successful. How many engineers does Mandriva have left? 5? It certainly can't be that many if they need to drop anything but KPW as available and supported desktops...

        • Re:Still alive?! (Score:4, Informative)

          by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Monday August 29, 2011 @06:47AM (#37240004)

          It certainly can't be that many if they need to drop anything but KPW as available and supported desktops...

          I wouldn't call dropping everything but KDE as proof that they have very few contributors left. SuSE includes GNOME but officially supports KDE, Slackware dropped GNOME long time ago and doesn't include them at all. GNOME 2 was tricky to build and maintain. GNOME 3 is in, "I don't even know" land. GNOME with all of its dependencies, vast array of configuration options for each dependency, and magic order of build instructions for each dependency; does not tend to be easy to maintain a workable tree from source. A couple of people have built build systems that do nothing but build [gnome.org] GNOME. [gnome.org] Thankfully, most builders have given up on their own build systems and have gone to JHbuild.

          KDE on the other hand is a pretty straight forward process to maintain a working tree. You can check it out here. [kde.org] Of course, that's something that the average user isn't going to do but there again we are talking about Mandriva. They have to maintain a working tree of the DE and still include their things. GNOME/KDE aren't targeting a single distro, they are making a DE for whoever. Distro have to take that and add and remove what works for their distro. To do this with GNOME is almost like putting stitches in yourself. KDE is very easy to customize distro-wise.

          Red Hat and SUSE are successful because they have stuck to a single and coherent vision for their brand of Linux, because they have a good sales model that pushes support for their brand of Linux, because they have played major roles within the Linux community in general which attracts community contributors to use and support your distro, and because they have had strong word of mouth within the community.
          Mandrake had that as well, but as you can tell from some of the comments here on Slashdot, that all changed with when they purchased Conectiva. I don't know if they got inflated head syndrome or what, but the quality of software and the number of upstream contributions began to cool quite a bit. Bug reports were not being followed up by Mandriva engineers and the community wasn't taking up the slack either, so bug reports would go on for months and months with no answer. Hardware support issues abounded as not incredibly smart defaults were chosen, the most famous (infamous) example is the decision to ship the distro with the main volume on mute.
          The distro has had its hard core followers and commercial users who have stuck around, but as I noted in my last post, the politics behind the distro have played out into two things: Focusing on KDE alone and better release schedule. Those two things will make it easier for the community and Mandriva to support the distribution.
          Finally, you have to remember that we are talking LTS for their free product. If you are a company you can purchase their "enterprise" Linux which has a different support cycle than the community version. Also, Mandriva has forty-five engineers to date, most of them are in Brazil (which by the way is very KDE heavy country.)

          • If we look at cia.vc and follows the news on who leaved mandriva ( Paulo Zanoni, Xorg maintainer, some months ago, glibc maintainer, some kde team guy ( see http://lwn.net/Articles/441940/ [lwn.net] for the details, quite insightful despites being from one of the Mageia founders ), that doesn't look very good. The last one to leave is Eugeni Donodov, the head of the team after mandriva fired Anne Nicolas, and he left 1 month before the release, which doesn't sound very good. So if there is 45 persons in Brasil, why

            • Maybe you mean "there is 45 persons in Brasil, and they are all working on something else than the distribution" ?

              No I mean that 45 engineers between France, USA, and Brazil. The Brazil comment was made because the majority of the engineers are located in Brazil (not all.) Brazil is a very KDE heavy country, therefore, that may have influenced the decision to go KDE only. Not trying to say anything else beyond that.

              I wouldn't just write off Mandriva completely but they do look, at the current moment, pretty shaky as a distro. A lot of core contributors were shooed off by a lot of bad politics and management. Ma

            • why does all commits look like done by volunteers of RosaLabs

              If comments here are to be believed, then Rosa and Mandriva are owned by the same (Russian) investor.

          • I wouldn't call dropping everything but KDE as proof that they have very few contributors left.

            It's a plain fact that Mandriva fired many employees over the last years. The latest round of large-scale layoffs was in 2010 or so which resulted in founding Mageia by the fired employees.
            Whether dropping GNOME is a result of that or not doesn't really matter in the end: Fact stays that Mandriva has almost no engineers left.

            Red Hat and SUSE are successful because they have stuck to a single and coherent vision for their brand of Linux, because they have a good sales model that pushes support for their brand of Linux, because they have played major roles within the Linux community in general which attracts community contributors to use and support your distro, and because they have had strong word of mouth within the community.

            Ubuntu has a way more chatty community than SUSE. Still: SUSE and Red Hat are financially successful while Canonical and Mandriva are not.
            When an enterprise customer hits a bug in RHEL

      • Amarok is not present in this release, instead is Clementine, which is loosely based on the Amarok of 1.4 days. KMail (and everything it brings) is not present either, instead is Thunderbird from Mozilla.

        +1. Seriously, why are distros just now figuring out that Kmail and Amarok have sucked long enough to make the switch? I dumped Amarok two years ago now and Kmail is a joke. Sadly, the one thing I wish they still really worked on was Kopete but that's pretty much gone the way of the Dodo for the plasma thingy.

  • So what matters over other desktop distributions is installation, administration, and how it look. There is a tour [mandriva.com] 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.

  • Mandriva isn't trusted by the community (Score:3, Informative)

    by Yaa 101 ( 664725 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @10:52PM (#37238554) Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by davmoo ( 63521 )

      Horse shit. I use Mandriva on a number of critical systems, and I know many others who do the same. Mandriva is the one and only distribution I have ever used over the years that I have installed on dozens of systems without even one failure. Everyone's beloved Ubuntu won't even complete installation on a majority of the hardware I've tried it on, and I've had just as much trouble with Debian and Suse. Mageia has had one release. They're going to have to do way better than that for me to trust it for critic

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 ) *

        You had problems with Ubuntu... Debian...SuSE... did you ever try RHEL or CentOS ?

        • Are you joking?
          RHEL and CentOS have so utterly out-of-date packages that many pieces of recent software can't even be compiled without updating the kernel or glibc. I have converted many of my customers to Mandriva after they banged their heads against their precioussss CentOS or Debian.
          On the other hand I use Mandrake / Mandriva since 2004 for everything except embedded systems smaller than my hand.
          • I generally can get just about any hardware/software combination running on debian stable with just a few packages from testing/unstable/backports. Everyone has different tastes though, I'll definitely be taking this new Mandriva for a spin.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by mysidia ( 191772 ) *

            RHEL and CentOS have so utterly out-of-date packages that many pieces of recent software can't even be compiled without updating the kernel or glibc.

            What do you mean "out-of-date" packages? They include versions of glibc and kernel that are not the latest major release, but they are not stale or out of date either.

            These distributions are stable because they maintain binary compatibility within a major release, therefore updating them is safe; whereas on distros that are constantly making major glibc up

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by aliquis ( 678370 )

        +1 here. I won't look what MSI motherboard I have but it's a VIA K8T800 chipset. An Athlon64 3000+ and now only 1 GB of 333 MHz DDR or whatever. One Nvidia 6800 LE card.

        As an OS nerd I've tried lots of OSes but in the end I used to prefer FreeBSD. But then I ran a OS X hack and bought a real mac. The later one failed really early though and I still feel like OS X offer nothing over FreeBSD as far as OS goes. Only advantage is if you need professional music, video or graphics software or want to play the few

        • It is still possible to use a text installer with the ubuntu minimal iso. It is only 19 MB I believe and it downloads the packages as you go.

      • Re:Mandriva isn't trusted by the community (Score:5, Informative)

        by buchanmilne ( 258619 ) on Monday August 29, 2011 @03:27AM (#37239368) Homepage

        Horse shit. I use Mandriva on a number of critical systems, and I know many others who do the same.

        [...]

        I've already downloaded the new Mandriva, will put it on my test system later tonight, and will most likely upgrade a dozen or more servers over the week.

        Long-time Mandrake, Mandriva and now Mageia contributor here ... I would warn you that in the past, a lot of server-related packages were maintained by the community (apache and php being about the only ones maintained by one over-worked employee). For a number of reasons, a lot of those contributors have become disenfranchised with Mandriva, and have been porting their work over to Mageia. Thus far, my packages are still in sync between the two, but recent events have been motivating me to rather consolidate my work on Mageia:

        • New Mandriva employees making significant (bad) changes to packages which are officially maintained by a community contributor, without consultation.
        • Lack of communication with contributor community, with sudden changes to the release plan [mandriva.com] (one month prior to the planned release, and after the original RC date - which is usually when version freeze kicks in - the release was moved out by 2.5 months). This makes it quite difficult for contributors to plan their contributions (e.g. I put some effort into getting my packages up-to-date for the May freeze date - during times when I had lots of other responsibilities - only to have my effort effectively wasted).
        • Lack of commitment to support of development infrastructure - there appears to be little internal support for the development infrastructure, contributors have been doing a lot of the work of maintaining the build cluster, and when they aren't available, it is often off-line for days at a time. In addition, there has been conflict with some of these contributors, so they are now resentful of being the only support for the build cluster.
        • Animosity by the RPM5 protagonists
        • Lack of effort in supporting the traditional (non-Live-rsync-all-files-to-disk) installer, which is critical in any server-focused environment. Apparently it still works, but if there are bugs they probably won't be addressed.

        These issues seem to not be affecting Mageia much, so now that 2011 is out, and I will be forced to decide between Mandriva and Mageia for my own uses, I will probably be upgrading all my Mandriva 2010.1 machines to Magiea, and will probably move all my effort to Mageia and orphan my Mandriva packages (like many other contributors have done). The current focus of Mandriva is not sufficient for my own uses, so I believe my contributions will be of more value to myself in Mageia than Mandriva.

        Note to all users considering Mandriva 2011, note that while an upgrade to Mandriva 2011 should be relatively painless, a later crossgrade to Mageia will not be (due to the RPM5 switch in Mandriva 2011), while a cross-grade from Mandriva 2010.1 to Mageia should also be as painless as upgrading to Mandriva 2011. So, while I won't tell you to ditch Mandriva, you should pause at this stage to decide if you are currently on Mandriva 2010.x.

        • Thank you for sharing this info. (mod parent up!)

          I myself planning to upgrade my Mandriva gateway & laptop (but not my file server, it's Mandriva 2008 with EVMS...).

          I still wonder what to do... My last thought : backup docs and config files of my laptop and make a fresh install of Mageia , check if hardware management is 100% ok and use it a bit before replacing it with a Mandriva 2011 fresh install... check and practice again.
          Then I will decide which distro to run. I hope there will be a significa

        • New Mandriva employees making significant (bad) changes to packages which are officially maintained by a community contributor, without consultation.

          Yes, you are correct. That I think has been the biggest slap that Mandriva has made on the community. There's been some arguing about the point but I totally understand where you are coming from and I really don't blame you.

          It has come to everyone's attention, painfully, that the release schedule needs something more than its current form which is just one shade shy from pure chaos. There is a lot of talk about that, some tentative plans have been made, but there again in pure Mandriva style things *c

      • I've installed Ubuntu on everything from a Geode up to a Phenom II without problems. Sometimes I do installs via debootstrap, but only when the media is too inconvenient to handle otherwise (e.g. installing to a CF card going into a Geode LX dev box that has no optical drive.)

  • 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

  • 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 tr

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      I have similar experiences, but I am downloading it and giving it a spin on the ol VM just to look. I do not want to waste my time rebooting if something strikes me on first impressions

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hazem ( 472289 )

        I'm just curious... which VM are you using? I started using VirtualBox this year to run the Windows applications I need and it's worked fairly well, but with a few annoyances (e.g. unable to burn CD/DVD, can't access creative Zen mp3 player).

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          VIrtual Box, which I have nothing but issues out of whenever I stick a copy of windows on it

    • I tried Redhat years ago and that dependency hell was something I remember well. I'd download a package and try to install it, which would always fail and demand a few RPMs sacrifice, which I'd download and it would go on like that until I gave up and chucked the install in the bin and went back to FreeBSD.

      These days there are plenty of Linux Distros that realize that if they can tell you what the dependencies are, then perhaps they should offer to download them for you.

      • That's one thing I would run into - installing any Linux would either give me the network card or the wi-fi not recognized, or it would give me a package manager that would throw in dependency hell. Which is why I've not found a satisfactory distro to date. Ubuntu was nice, but just wouldn't let me install on a clean drive - I had to have Windoze on it first.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mysidia ( 191772 ) *

        These days there are plenty of Linux Distros that realize that if they can tell you what the dependencies are, then perhaps they should offer to download them for you.

        And these days, Redhat is one of those distros. yum is an integral part of the RPM package system on modern Redhat-based distros.

        And in general... software publishers that provide proper support for the OS will either provide their own yum repository with their special dependencies, or depend only on software that can be installed from a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mysidia ( 191772 ) *

      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.

      Or maybe... you should say 'Nothing really sets Kubuntu apart', it's just another Mandrivel ?

      Mandrivel is certainly an earlier goer to that particular party; it's not as if Mandrivel was trying to create a clone of Kubuntu, since, uh, they were there first....

  • 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!)

  • 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 rele

  • Fucking 10 minutes and 7 seconds until release. You are IT edging and you know it!

    • "Fucking 10 minutes and 7 seconds until release. You are IT edging and you know it!
      "

      What!? The new version of Firefox is coming out next

  • "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 [rosalab.ru] (page in Russian) has taken over Mandriva UI development [mandriva.com], 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 me

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      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?

    • 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.

  • into using Linux as it enabled me to try it in a loopback file before committing to messing with my partitions... back then it was a very fearsome step...

    * 'lnx4win' [freeos.com] for standard graphic installation using Linux for windows. This will create two files on your Windows partition which will carry the Linux installation and swap. Great if you don't want to get into some messy partitioning.

    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 i

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