TuxMachines has a quick look at Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 1. This beta has been quietly released over the weekend; DistroWatch lists the mirrors where you can download. You can see the full package list here, and a screenshot gallery here.
TuxMachines has a quick look at Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 1. This beta has been quietly released over the weekend; DistroWatch lists the mirrors where you can download. You can see the full package list here, and a screenshot gallery here.
It seems that tuxmachines is not responding so the article’s links are useless for now at least.
another “distro” release.
So is there any thing really kind of new from other Mandriva releases? Or is this just kind of a point release?
The link to the article isn’t working, but from what I can read on distrowatch there are no big changes except the switch from KDE 3.3 to KDE 3.4.1, Gnome 2.8 to 2.10.1
and PHP 4.3 to PHP5.
So just new packages, nothing new to be excited about.
<sarcasm>Yeap, except that they are all compiled with GCC 4.
And smartpm is in the works and all kinds of underhood dependencies for the built system have been eliminated, but yeah, nothing new. </sarcasm>
Yes, my cheap promise raid working
I have been using cooker version of Mandriva. I always update my box with cooker atleast twice a week.
As far as I can see, there is no visible difference between 2005 and 2006 except for the fact that packages (GNOME,KDE ..etc) and kernel have been updated.
I cannot find any thing special from Connectiva into Mandriva.
Anybody aware of the new things in Mandriva 2006, please post.
This is why they must have kept it quite
I’ll be optimistic and say that this release will be a success.
donno why but mandriva is really not as appealing as it use to be since the name change!
Man, I wish I could say “That’s ridiculous!”
Unfortunately, marketing is important – if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be one of the most lucrative professions in the world. And the name “Mandriva” simply doesn’t sound cool. Mandrake did. Hell, even Conectiva did. But Mandriva sounds kinda wimpy.
If I were them, I’d come up with a different name for the distribution, such as “Distro X from Mandriva” kind of like Ubuntu with Canonical (until recently) or Fedora with Red Hat (until recently).
To be fair and rational, it’s still one of the most acomplished, quality desktop distributions out there – admitedly, newer distributions such as Ubuntu have took alot of the limelight recently – however, that doesn’t detract from the fact that Mandriva is still one of the best desktop distros out there.
I’ve recently done a very minimal custom install of Mandriva LE2005 – added Fluxbox to it with Urpmi – now I’ve got a light-weight distro centred around Fluxbox, Rox, Eterm, Nedit, Deer Park Alpha 2, Xchat and very little else.
So you can see – Mandriva can be as minimal and “cool” as anything else……
Is there a PPC version of 2006 beta?
Not yet. PPC is done by a volunteer team who work to their own schedule, so only they would know when they’ll start doing betas.
“Yeap, except that they are all compiled with GCC 4. ”
Long after Fedora core 4 did it
”
And smartpm is in the works and all kinds of underhood dependencies for the built system have been eliminated, but yeah, nothing new.”
users dont care
users dont care
Yeah, especially those users who confuse Mandriva with LFS…
Or those people who wish there was a netinstall, which already exists…
ftp://sunsite.uio.no/linux/Mandrakelinux/devel/2006.0/i586/install…
(Floppy boot images in the same dir as well).
ah i wish they had a net install =/
You’re kidding right? Mandriva has been doing net installs for years . . . many years.
> This beta has been quietly released over the weekend
Really, though … aren’t most betas “quietly” released? They are, after all, betas.
In all seriousness: oooohh! Look at the pretty desktop icons? But … uh … why is the icon for “Media” and “System” the same? Why are there four — count them if you dare, friends! — FOUR magnifying glass icons on the Konqueror toolbar? If I click the “up” arrow, does the browser shoot out the top of the screen?
Does the unified menubar make a damn bit of sense?
MP3 and DVD playback is supported out of the box, right?
Yeah, yeah … I rant. But pity the frikkin’ users, for Jove’s sake. Especially those coming from Windows.
Mandriva sucks. The name is so lame, I’ll never use their OS again.
I just can’t bear to say it. I expect it to be marketed as “The Rainbow OS, Now more Gay than ever… Man-Driva!”(with a flourish).
Seriously, they’ll always be Mandrake to me. Would be really sweet if someone just renamed the whole thing and re-released it, like they used to do with RedHat distro when they first started out. 🙂
The latest CVS e17 build on gentoo is the only modern Linux desktop. C’mon GNOME and KDE devs, cut some rasterman code please!
There are e17 packages in MDV Cooker contribs.
Mandrake was a very popular distro for both newcomers and intermediate Linux users, but I have the impression that they’re losing a lot of momentum and mindshare in the last months..coincidentally or not, from the moment they switched their names to the very unfortunate Mandriva.
I know a lot of people who were Mandrake fans (besides myself) but now just feel let down by their very sparse releases, and are turning to Ubuntu/Kubuntu and very happy on that.
Too bad. Mandrake 8.0 was the first distro who made me feel “at home” with Linux (after some frustrated attempts with RedHat and Slackware) but now I don’t see any reason to keep using it, it’s not exciting anymore.
Hey, there’s really useful and specific criticism. “Sparse” releases? They have exactly as much stuff in them as previous releases (or more, since we increased the ISO sizes). Losing “momentum” and “mindshare”? Well, you keep worrying about momentum and mindshare, and we’ll just look after our users, how’s that sound?
Sure, who cares, I am just one more ex-MandrakeClub member who is actually happy to read messages like yours, it makes my decision to spend money in your company even more sure.
Of course there’s no way to measure “momentum” objectively, but one thing I’ve noticed clearly here at OSNEws as well as in other places is that Mandrake doesn’t generate a fraction of the buzz and excitement it used to, on the good old days of versions 7 to 10. I hope Iæm wrong and news MandrakeClub members (or whatever it’s called now) are flocking to your site, but I wouldn’t bet a dollar on it.
One more thing, if you think I’m alone on that, use the “Search” button on the left, and check the comments for the stories announcing the release of MDK beta versions. The was a lot of “wow”, “I love Mandrake”, “this is cool”, etc. Now take a lot at the sad thread you’re in…let’s face it, that’s Not Good.
I used to love Mandrake, spent a lot of money on it and brought some friends to like it too. I would love to go back to it someday, but thanks I am 10x better served with (K)Ubuntu, and as an added bonus I don’t get sh*t back when I criticize them.
My hope is that you seem what to do already, “look after our users”, that’s certainly the thing you gotta do asap, before there are not too many left.
And smartpm is in the works and all kinds of underhood dependencies for the built system have been eliminated, but yeah, nothing new.”
users dont care
I do – after having been stuck in dependency hell in urpmi.
I took down my Mdk 9.2 server a couple of days ago with a 450d uptime because I had to move. Once it ran, it did so flawlessly for over a year, so I can attest Mdk a good base stability even in the server field (where I think they always were underrated). And my home desktop still happily runs a cookerish 10.1.
Yet I’m ready to jump ship for Ubuntu, which I have on an old PowerBook and my work desktop, at least for workstations. Why? I run Gnome plus a bit of KDE stuff, so the experience of applications differs just by the window frame colour – it’s the distro specific features that matter, and my perception here is that Mdk have not managed to get the quality right.
I perceive a difference in the little things which break and break again with the Mandrake Control Center. The ISDN setup (10.0 or .1) once set a wrong card ID (3 instead of 27). No go, and the machine was in a remote place. They brought it to me and I fixed it, but those things seriously break confidence. I didn’t report a bug on this, because clean reproduction would have taken another day, and the perl code was so messy I didn’t get it. Another thing with that ISDN setup was the MSN which was supposed to be in quotes. MCC had quotes in the input field. I wiped them ’cause I thought it was a glitch. Mistake. I got the news from the kernel logs. I lost a lot of faith when I figured out how it was supposed to work, because there was _so_ little attention spent to detail.
Other things break as well. I _have_ reported a bug somewhere between libxine, x11-radeon and v4l, where zapping would partially black out after totem ran. I did report it on “normal” priority, and as far as I watched it, nothing happened. I still have to log out/in on my 10.1 machine. (To give credit where it is due, Götz Waschk normally does seem to do a great job with these issues on qa, _besides_ building the whole Gnome lot).
I could mention more, like how I don’t like the abuse of stock shorewall (and run a clean version instead of using the mcc), open the book of “how x*.conf sucks and it’s not even XML” or mention that printing was generally doing well (likely due to the good karma of Till Kamppeter), but I guess you get the idea. One more thing, though, and that is that rpmdrake is _abysmally_ slow on just main, contrib and plf, compared to synaptic (Breakage teaches you to install in chunks, and the rebuild after those chunks is annoying). That alone would be a tremendous contribution from the Conectiva assets.
Now, in Ubuntuland there is no breakage. Or at least I don’t perceive any. Network interfaces go up and down after being told so, even the wireless ones. On a notebook where this failed in XP. Suspend works, no questions asked. Everything else works, too. On a 5 year old PPC laptop. Packages don’t ask for “libevil.so.666” as dependency. And you do notice that they try hard to get an idea of what is going on. They keep a device database. They track their user base. They are hell bent on ironing out the brokenness. And they’re only aiming in on the post-Breezy release which they want to support for five years. IMHO, the relieving experience of “things not breaking” makes up for the Ubuntu “buzz” that has been mentioned.
From Mandriva I’d like to see such efforts, too, if we are supposed to stay faithful. Tidy up the MCC, work it over for usability, speed, and stability. Get rid off all the kludges in the system with a big spring cleaning. Make it just-bleeding-work. And convince some french politicians to divert 10% of Bull’s subsidies (they’re a thing of the past and get enough cash to float 10 distros) to Mandriva to pay for the whole show.
Rich
Fedora Core quite happily issues DVD ISOs for all its releases (including its test ones), so why isn’t Mandriva doing so? DVD writers are very common, blank DVD disks are very cheap now (and *much* faster per MB to burn than CDs), so having a 3-CD download and *no* DVD download is quite poor in my books. I don’t buy blank CDs any more and I don’t see why I should have to use 3 blank DVDs to get Mandriva up and running.
Of course there’s no way to measure “momentum” objectively, but one thing I’ve noticed clearly here at OSNEws as well as in other places is that Mandrake doesn’t generate a fraction of the buzz and excitement it used to, on the good old days of versions 7 to 10
Yes, I’d agree with that and I’ve noticed that aswell – however, I’ve also noticed a considerable amount of anti-Mandrake FUD over the last year or so, bordering on outright fabrication of some of the supposed shortcomings of the distribution – it seems to have become “fashionable” or even “acceptable” for individuals to excessively falsify or exagerate their supposed problems with their Mandrake distribution. It actually reminds me of how some individuals clearly give false or overly-negative descriptions of their experiences with Windows.
That’s not aimed at you at all btw – it’s just a “phenomenon” that I’ve noticed over the last year or so regards some people’s descriptions of Mandrake.
I’d agree that it has lost some momentum and buzz for a whole variety of reasons….. , but to be rational and fair, judge it relative the the vast majority of other desktop distributions out there – in that context, it’s still one of the best distributions out there
Yeah I noticed this FUD increase too, which is sad. Maybe somewhere between the name change and the slugginess to support KDE 3.4 (reminding that MDK was pretty much the leading KDE-based distro about that time), people just lost the simpathy for them.
I’m not a Mandrake-hater, despite my flamed last 2 messages, but I just got a bit pissed off with the “stuff your momentum talk” answer I got. OTOH I’m happy I’m not the only one who feels that way. I have a lot a Linux-user friends and most of them are jumping from MDK 10.x to either Suse or Ubuntu, and I don’t see much people jumping on the other direction, so if I were Mandriva I _would_ be worried about that, every small market it’s a very tough market since 0.1% up or down could make a difference on being on red or blue in the books.
I have a lot a Linux-user friends and most of them are jumping from MDK 10.x to either Suse or Ubuntu, and I don’t see much people jumping on the other direction, so if I were Mandriva I _would_ be worried about that, every small market it’s a very tough market since 0.1% up or down could make a difference on being on red or blue in the books.
I’d agree with that in part – Mandriva does need to keep an eye on the “mindshare” issue and community “coolness” factor – they’re all part of the jigsaw.
I used to love Mandrake, spent a lot of money on it and brought some friends to like it too. I would love to go back to it someday, but thanks I am 10x better served with (K)Ubuntu
I’ve never paid a penny to Mandrake over the last 3 years but have been using it quite happily – Mandrake’s always produced a distribution that you can download for FREE – much like most other distributions.
Currently Mandrake heads the 10 most popular downloads at LQ ISO – fair to say that they must have done something right.
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/
I used to be a dedicated Mandrake user. A few months ago, I was hanging around, wanting KDE 3.3 rightnowthisminute, and my new box needed Linux. So I tried SuSE 9.2… And I’m liking it, to be honest. It’s got a few minor problems, but it doesn’t have the Mandrake issues:
a) A few minor things just *not* working in one release when they did before, and haven’t been heavily updated/altered. They just break.
b) RPMDrake… It still sucks. Why did they dump a perfectly good package manager for this?
c) No server config wizards and control outside of the expensive versions. No really. We’re Linux users. We had Apache before we had desktop applications and we’d kinda like a GUI configurator rather than have it withheld from us. It’s about time.
Honestly, Mandrake is still far faster than SuSE (really slow in places
), but it’s the niggles that eventually put me off.
In a year or so, I’ll head back and see what they’ve got with KDE 4, though. Should be fun
FYI… I’m not really bashing them that much. Just highlighting a few things and hoping that they get them sorted. I was a user from 7 to 10.1, and I’d like to be again.
# urpmi drakwizard
# drakwizard
There’s your server configuration wizards. At no point will this process ask for your credit card number.
What’s wrong with rpmdrake? (And what ‘good package manager’ did we dump? It’s _always_ been rpmdrake. It was redesigned a few versions ago, but…)
I’m glad I’m not the only one to think that they name is really awful. It reminds me of:
1. A tropical disease. “Our tour group had to cut the trip short because of an outbreak of Mandriva.”
2. The name of a punk band. “Mandriva used to open for the Sex Pistols.”
3. Something you don’t want to get too close to. “I had to check out of that hotel. When I got to my room, there was Mandriva all over the carpet!”
Seriously, these companies should put at least _some_ effort into naming. It’s like they didn’t ask anyone what they thought at all…not a very good quality in firm that strives to enhance user experience.
And like some of the others posting here, I’ve found Ubuntu to be a better distro. And it seems like they gave a little thought to the name, too.
Mostly because we’d have to QA the DVD release separately from the CD release, which slows the whole process down. You don’t have to use three DVDs; there are several scripts floating around which will convert a set of CD images into a working single DVD image. There’s some threads on the Club forum with these scripts in, if you’re not a member, check Google. Or you can simply get the small boot image, boot.iso , and use it to install from the .iso files directly, no need to write them to anything.
> Mostly because we’d have to QA the DVD release separately from the CD release, which slows the whole process down.
But my point is that Fedora do take the time to do this (even with their test releases) and still seem to have a breakneck pace to their releases (admittedly, they’re finally slowing down their release schedule, which is a bit of a relief to be honest).
> here are several scripts floating around which will convert a set of CD images into a working single DVD image.
Which you could use yourself and post up an “unsupported” DVD version if you don’t feel like QA’ing it (or, perhaps, delay the QA and then move it into a supported tree when the QA is actually done).
DVD’s of distros are becoming the norm nowadays (because of cheap drives/media and the fact that many distros won’t fit on a single CD any more) – even Knoppix is now available on DVD. I’ve personally given up downloading multi-CD distros and I’m sure I’m not the only one out there…
I still think this is a very trivial thing, and it’s only beta 1, for pete’s sake. There’s always a DVD ISO of the final release. If running a script or installing from disk is too much effort for you, go ahead and skip the beta, then get on with your life.
First of all, I am a long time Mandrake user since 6.0 and have always been happy to run in on my servers and desktop. I currently deploy one version or the other of Mandrake on 70% of my company’s desktop.
I have evaluated, tried and switch to Fedora, ubuntu, NLD , CentOS, Xandros but always come back to Mandriva/Mandrake and I do pay for them via Mandrake’s webstore, (even though I rarely ever use the support option). I have to say there are steady improvement in the distro and the current LE 2005 release is a lot more stable than before.
Why am I posting this? well, it seems like someone from Mandriva is here and I hope this would be treated as some feedback to be dealt with. The following are some real problems I got from my deployment, (extracted from support request logs )
One thing about Mandrake is, there’s always something broken and some packages/features exist with the last version seems to disappear completely which make the cost of helpdesk support high ( increase support call from user), just two days ago, some user complaint that they can’t print because they cannot access www cups admin screen. We later discover that that script is somehow been taken out from LE 2005 with no apparent replacement for user to restart a printer after a network printer has stop for various reasons (for some reasons, it seems to happen a lot). We also got a lot of complaint on non-detectable usb drive which was taken care of by disabling usb 2.0 support, NLD did this right out of the box.
We conduct a trial to deploy NLD in one of our offices, some people like it solely because it “somehow look nicer and professional”. In contrast, sales guys absolutely refuse to install LE2005 on their labtop, because it “look like and toy and kind of scary”. I hope with Joseph Cheek onboard this will change. (BTW, I have always like Desktop LX, but the lake of certain packages out of the box and the per seat cost is always one of the thing that held me back).
Another issue with Mandriva with my current deployment is printing and PDF handling, I know this happens accross a wide variety of distro and is more like a general complaint. But, someone should really fix this… For some strange reason, printing to some printers (in my case, Ricoh and Brothers) seems to produce some strange problems, large print job would just hang or only half a page of each page will come out. I cannot duplicate the problem with NLD though. With PDF, many PDF just refuse to be printed even though it display perfectly fine on screen. Some of the this problem actually has to do with kghostview. Seriously, it’s too much to ask ordinary user to try all 3 pdf viewer to see which one that print. (or ask them to attach the file on Kprinter dialog box). It doesn’t help when Acrobat 7 cannot be installed properly on Mandrke 10.1 ( I am not faulting mandrake on this one, like I say this complaint is more generic base on my experience on Linux desktop deployment, not to mention adobe actually expect ordinary user to type in lpr command to print).
Another thing about Mandriva I would really like to have is to have a nice smb browser like Xandros and Lycoris, as of 10.0 and 10.1 smb4k is really buggy and breaks all the time, ( and same goes for Corporate Desktop 3.0). Although from what I can see from the screenshot of 2006 beta is this is currently available. I know some people would say, this generally works with smb:// command in konqueror, but this share is not mounted and user who try to save their files in openoffice would have to look for their share in some kde tmp directory. ( to be fair, no distro I tried currently solve this problem). Transparently accessing a network share currently is really a problem for us right now, and we are using a combination of nfs and autofs but managing the acl can be a nightmare sometimes.
A lot of these would be easily dealt with by season users. However, keep in mind that I am talking about complaint lodge by ordinary users here and to be frank I have to agree with them that this is a real problem. After all, if it takes too much effort to just do printing, user would wonder why they wouldn’t just stick with windows, ( or in my current case, users would just connect to a WTS just to do pdf printing).
We rarely take anything out of main unless it’s no longer used or has been replaced by something else with equivalent or superior functionality. Not sure what your problem with the CUPS web interface is: http://localhost:631/ appears to work perfectly well on current Cooker, I didn’t do anything special, just typed in that URL after reading your post.
2005 LE was, as all the release PR and other stuff said, meant to be a release for enthusiasts, not businesses. Hence the CrazyTux (tm…not really). Besides, it really, _really_ isn’t all that much work to change it.
Between smb4k, smb:// on GNOME and KDE, and the Samba mount wizard in the MDV Control Center, I’d say we have SMB pretty well covered. Note that anything that supports KDE or GNOME VFS systems will be able to save to / load from a smb://-style location in those desktops; you obviously cherry picked OO.o as an example because it doesn’t support either. KOffice would happily save to smb://somewhere.
What’s the problem with Acrobat 7? We have a package of it in our commercial packages section and it works fine (so long as you don’t use Chinese / Japanese input, which is a known bug with a workaround), and AFAIK installing from the RPM Adobe distributes works OK too.
Like I say I am mainly focus on user issues. Off course it isn’t too hard to type in http://localhost:631, what I meant was it confuses regular user. FYI, /usr/lib/cups/scripts/cupsWebAdmin is the file I was refering to. It helps for regular user to have point and click rather than type. In Mandrake 10.1 and before there was a nice little entry in the configuration section called www cups admin tools. it is missing from LE 2005. If it has been replace with something better, please point me to the right direction.
I agree with you that it wasn’t a lot of work to get rid of the penguin, all I am saying is, it make bad first impression on some people (personally, I don’t care one way or the other).
I’ll admit I have not explore using the MCC mount point, does that require password to be stored? As far as openoffice goes, well, I did not cherry pick this, we decided on openoffice.org back in 8.1, and it is the only one we are aware of that works on all 3 os we deploy in the company. (it had worse bugs then, such as not adhere to umask and gid settings). One thing about smb4k though, it crashes too often, and one thing I always hate is it store password, (I know user has a choice, but moving users from windows to Mandrake often produce the complaint that they have to enter password too often to access a share). Problem with the current state of ALL linux distro is, unless you are using autofs + nfs, there are no easy way to point and click to a share, open a file in oo.o and save it back to the same share without too much hassle and effort. To some this maybe pretty simple stuff, but for people who have to access network share all day long, opening and saving files, this slows them down.
With acrobat 7, we always get a segmentation fault during run time (as of 10.1 never tried to LE) and we do have chinese language support install on all system because we are a in a country which chinese language is one of the main business language. I am not aware of the bug you mention though. (speaking of which, Mandriva shold work on the simplified chinese fonts display, it often turn out much uglier than other distro and often have missing characters).
Oh, yeah, someone mentioned on Cooker list the menu item had disappeared, I never use it and that’s not my responsibility so I didn’t follow it too closely, but I guess someone’s aware of it. Using the MCC wizard to mount a Samba share mounts it in the traditional way, by adding it to fstab where it will be mounted by mount -t smb, so it can be persistent and it will store the username and password if required. You can always do this operation manually, of course, I’m surprised you didn’t do that already
. No need for autofs if the share is always available, just have it mounted at boot time by putting it in fstab.
Since you have Chinese input you’re running into the known bug with Acrobat; it doesn’t happen if you don’t have a Chinese / Japanese locale defined (and consequently have SCIM loaded), which is why it wasn’t caught sooner. Fortunately there’s a fix. Edit the file /usr/lib/Acrobat7/bin/acroread (it’s a plain text file) and add these two lines right after the second line (which should just be a # symbol on its own):
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
export GTK_IM_MODULE
save the file, exit your editor, and you should find Acrobat now works. The problem is that due to a compiler mismatch, Acrobat will not work with our default input method for CJK locales, which is SCIM.
Thanks for the tip on Acrobat 7.
With regard to mcc and samba mount, I have checked it out. However, I think there’s still the following problems.
1) password are stored, not too comforting for admin, especially if you have a ‘well-defined’ security policy already in place, (normally dictated from someone higher up)
2) Whatever username and password being entered at mcc, will only reflect access right of that particular user. if you have more than one person who share the same workstation or simply having a few roaming users, this will quickly turn out to be a nightmare since everyone should have different level of access right.
Over the years I haved tried pam_mount etc…(there was another one which name I can’t remember now). wasn’too happy with it as well. Guess there’s this long wait till nfsv4 is production-ready.
Any changes from Lycoris in there? I didn’t see any in the screenshots, did anyone else?
I don’t intend to actually try this release until it appeals to me, but if anyone else would like to tell me how it’s improved rather than simply showing me screenshots that look like any other version of MDK, I’d be glad to hear it.