[Article] Mandriva: The Choice of a New(bie) Generation?

21. wweng_linux said: Linux desktop is already a niche market. It is gonna be extra-hard for Mandriva to get back the lost market share. Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

22. unbob said: Install the free edition and then go to "Browse and configure hardware" in the Control Center, and Mandriva will pull in packages and configure your hardware automatically. Go to the graphical server setup and Mandriva will tell you that your hardware may work better with the closed driver, and will offer to install and configure it automatically. It seems to me (and probably a couple above me) like you haven't been using Mandriva for a very long time. How easy is it to configure the stuff you can do in MCC, on other distros? Filesharing, formatting a usb drive, setting up backups, setting up hardware, configure your firewall, parental control, etc How do Mandriva and other distros compare when you plug in your printer or some other device? When you do that comparison you can answer your question, because "newbies" may need to do stuff other than surf the web too. There are a lot of things I don't like about Mandriva (I use openSUSE) but I still recommend it to someone that tells me they have heard great things about Linux and want to give it a try. Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

23. csmart said: @unbob, thank you for that information. I have re-installed KDE Free from scratch and followed all the defaults (including updates post install) and the system does indeed prompt me to install the proprietary driver when I configure my video device. This did not come up when I tried to configure the card previously on another install. I've updated the article to reflect this. -c Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

24. aborrell said: I'm also a old Mandrake user, and continue to use Mandriva at my desktop. It has one of the best supports for multimedia. Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

25. steonet said: "While the Mandriva Live release includes closed source drivers for hardware such as video and wireless cards, the Free edition does not. Unfortunately for those wanting both closed source drivers and a 64 bit operating system, the Live only comes in 32bits." The "One64 Community" http://www.community64.net/ created two LiveCDs for 64 bit systems (not officially sponsored by Mandriva): one is for KDE and the other for GNOME. The website is in French (but English translation will come soon). Community One64 KDE: http://www.community64.net/telecharger/120-mandriva-one-64-kde4-explanations Community One64 GNOME: http://www.community64.net/telecharger/121-le-bureau-gnome-en-detail Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

26. alejandronova said: What all of this shows is: Ubuntu is the most popular distro, but it has to learn a lot of things of Mandriva. This is about being user-friendly all the time, not only when you do things the way the distro wants you to do them. Small things make the difference, and I would like to state them to fill the gaps in the review. 1. Mandriva uses ifup and wicd to enable wireless connections, instead of NetworkManager. It isn't as pretty, but it enables connections in a lot of scenarios that NetworkManager still can't handle. 2. I'm still impressed by the user friendliness of urpmi. Let's suppose that you want to install evtouch. In Ubuntu, the logical choice for a newbie is Synaptic. When you go away from the GUI and enter the console, you have two confusingly similiar package managers, aptitude and apt-get, and, more confusingly, you are adviced to use apt-get all the time when aptitude is actually better at dependency-handling. But, let's leave that. The issue here is: you must enter the precise package name. And it can be a nightmare with X11 drivers. Was it xorg-input-driver-foo? x11-input-driver-foo? xserver-xorg-driver-foo?. In Mandriva, urpmi handles all of that. If I want evtouch, I simply issue #urpmi evtouch , and watch the system to give me suggestions, or to allow me to install all packages that match my pattern. This is real Linux-user friendliness in my book, not some luser-hand-holding. 3. Problem solving and catastrophe scenarios are easier to solve too. In Ubuntu, I must pray that their "BulletProof-X" work. If it doesn't work, I am sent to hell. The Ubuntu console sucks. Before Ubuntu 7.10, it didn't even had a real console; it used BusyBox, and it was a disaster. It improved a little since then because a sudden smartness attack made them replace BusyBox with bash. Mandriva console doesn't suck. The autocompletion is 400x better than Ubuntu's, and a lot of convenient aliases are preconfigured for me to use. THIS IS REAL LINUX-USER FRIENDLINESS. And, about X... XFDrake can handle every disaster scenario that I've trown at it. 4. The advanced security framework. Mandriva security is simply like a tank. SELinux related features are A BREEZE to configure and enable, through the Mandriva Control Center. The MSec framework allows me to switch between a basic and a hardened profile with a click. Every setting is explained. I haven't seen anything like that in Ubuntu. What is really the worst thing about Mandriva? Its Red Hat Linux roots. Not Fedora. Not RHEL. Red Hat Linux. And with this I really mean that the initscript system in Mandriva is old. VERY OLD. It's almost the same (well, with a pretty boot screen) since Mandrake 8. And you cannot teach the old dog to do new tricks, like booting fast. That's why Mandriva has so many issues with speedboot (they try to speed up the only part of the boot process that SHOULDN'T BE SPEED UP: device recognition, load X, and see what happens). If they decide to scrap the entire boot process and replace it with Fedora's for 2010.1, it would be simply awesome. Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

27. stosss said: This is for the author and the guilty posters. "an Ubuntu" is wrong. So is "a old" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29 http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/determiners/determiners.htm#articles Learn English! Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

28. csmart said: @stosss, you're (incorrectly) assuming that I pronounce "Ubuntu" with a "yoo" sound, which I do not. The correct pronunciation is with an "oo" sound (as in "oo-BOON-too"), which means that my use of "an" is correct. http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/faq -c Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

29. aapgorilla said: @csmart, the fact you are not prompted a codec should be installed in mandriva is because you are running kde and kde apps, which still have no packagekit integration, if you would run the gnome version of mandriva this does happen Posted 7 months ago (permalink)

30. csmart said: @aapgorilla Thanks, someone else did also mention that it works under GNOME. -c Posted 6 months ago (permalink)

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