Submitted by The RC2 release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring (code name Estephe) is now available. This RC2 version provides some updates on major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26, X.org server 1.6, and kernel 2.6.29. This RC2 version proposes also nearly all of the 2009 Spring design. This version will allow you also to dump in a very easy way All available One hybrid isos on a USB key and then install Mandriva Linux on netbooks.
Why should anyone choose Mandriva over Ubuntu? I really have no clue. What makes it different or better?
Firstly Mandriva is a KDE distribution.
Secondly ease of use, my first pleasant experience with Linux comes from Mandriva (Then Mandrake). It has some nice graphical tools to help you set it up etc.
I have to say I now use Ubuntu but I’ve got space on my hard drive for another OS I might well try Mandriva again or maybe the latest Opensuse.
So many distros so much choice.
Edited 2009-04-07 15:55 UTC
Mandriva is most certainly NOT a KDE distro. It was at one point but that is long in the past. I run Mandriva with GNOME exclusively. Mandriva also works great with XFCE.
Mandriva is a desktop neutral distro.
Perhaps. Saying that makes as much sense as to claim that Ubuntu is a desktop neutral distro, because of Kubuntu.
Edited 2009-04-09 01:38 UTC
Kubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu and as such they are not equal.
Mandriva is one distro with multiple desktops. My point was that Mandriva does not treat KDE better than it does GNOME, nor vice versa. Ubuntu is biased pretty heavily towards GNOME.
My other point was that Mandriva gives users choices with regard to desktop. Mandriva is shedding the KDE only stigma and as such I was just clarifying that fact.
It’s more user friendly.
Why should anyone choose Mandriva over Ubuntu? I really have no clue. What makes it different or better?
The tools and utilities, available packages, the look-and-feel and so forth? I have tried Ubuntu, I did try to like it, but I just couldn’t. Not to mention that I always had some issues with Ubuntu, either it crashed on me all the time, or sound didn’t work, or it screwed up some configuration files I had altered or so forth. Mandriva just works a whole lot better for me.
That said, I hope 2009.1 final arrives soon ^^
I have not long installed 2009 One on my Satellite, after having experimented with SimplyMepis 8.0 and Linux Mint (the latter based on Ubuntu).
Simply Mepis would not allow me to use compositing out of the box (and it seemed to be such a new release that I didn’t find much out by Googling), while Linux Mint would not even boot fully (dropped into a console – I checked the media, no problems in those terms). In comparison, Mandriva did the lot straight off the bat.
I also have tried to like Ubuntu (the forums in my experience are populated with a friendly bunch) but like others say, there’s always something pesky about its hardware support.
I was recently disappointed to read that Mandriva was running into problems – I hope these have been overcome because it sure is a handy distro for first-timers.
Mandrake was one of the first distros that struck a balance between user-friendliness and bleeding-edge.
As mentioned by others, they had graphical tools for things that were done by editing config files by most
distros at the time.
What isn’t often mentioned is that their tools would work
from either console or X. If you were in console mode and ran harddrake, you’d get an Curses-like interface and
if you ran the same command from an X-term, you’d get a graphical tool.
This is shaping up to be an excellent release.
KDE 4.2.2 finally begins to really show stability and the huge potential of KDE has now materialized. For me, there is simple no other desktop, free or proprietary, that matches its elegance and flexibility.
Mandriva really should deserve a lot more credit for bringing about the linux desktop revolution. Not only have the been pioneers of key components of the linux desktop, but they continue to put in excellent work. I encourage anyone who wants to see how great a free OS can be to try this release once the final version is out.
Only try this RC if you can live with some bugs.
Later.
My laptop is currently running Mandriva 2009 (Fall). I want to upgrade it to the new one. This is the RC before release and in their wiki, they still don’t advise upgrading (I don’t want to do a fresh install).
This just annoys me. RC means Release Candidate, it should be as good as final.
Has anyone tried upgrading?
I agree, If its not 100% featute complete its BETA !!
I am still searching for the “right” distro for my Asus 1000HE. Under Windows it gets 8+ hours of battery life. So far I have tried Ubuntu NBR, EeeBuntu 2.0 and Moblin. I have also tried all kinds of kernel hacks (hpet), acpi stuff, EeeApplet, Eee Control, etc. The only distro so far that had given me a good battery life is Moblin, but it WAY too alpha for me. Any reports on battery life and Mandriva? Battery life and portability are the whole reason I bought a netbook. I hate giving up 2-3 hours of battery life just to run Linux.
I am still searching for the “right” distro for my Asus 1000HE. Under Windows it gets 8+ hours of battery life. So far I have tried Ubuntu NBR, EeeBuntu 2.0 and Moblin. I have also tried all kinds of kernel hacks (hpet), acpi stuff, EeeApplet, Eee Control, etc. The only distro so far that had given me a good battery life is Moblin, but it WAY too alpha for me. Any reports on battery life and Mandriva? Battery life and portability are the whole reason I bought a netbook. I hate giving up 2-3 hours of battery life just to run Linux.
I hear you. Linux was not built with power-saving in mind, it was slapped on afterwards, so it’s still quite raw and needs a lot of work. Especially if you ever want it to Just Work (TM) without much (or any) user-made configuration.
But, have you changed the hard disk sleep timer timeout? The command id “hdparm -S somenumberhere” (check man page). And http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/ might be a useful site for you. Can’t you help more than that, I don’t own any laptop or netbook :/
I will give it a look see, thanks for the suggestion. I am open to other suggestions as well.
The work for this is just coming out now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_4#KDE_4.2
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/desktop.php
Powerdevil and the power usage reductions in KDE are only available in KDE 4.2 or later.
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/screenshots/powerdevil.png
Edited 2009-04-08 00:23 UTC
Running KDE 4.2 should help to address this issue. KDE 4.2 made specific design provision for extending battery life on netbooks, notebooks and laptops.
I’m not sure that it would matter exactly what distribution it was that you used, though.
There are significant improvements in the kernel of late, so any distribution that ships with 2.6.28+ or preferably 2.6.29 will also improve battery life, and give you a welcome performance uplift as a bonus.
The only current distribution that implements KDE 4.2 right now that I know of is Arch Linux with KDEmod. The Chakra project is a LiveCD GUI installer that implements this, but the Chakra project itself is still in alpha. I am in the process of installing this on my ASUS EEEPC 1000H right now, but it is not for the skittish. The USB image of Chakra failed, so I have had to go via the bare-bones USB image of Arch 2009.02 and then manually install KDEmod. Not recommended … but possible to do for those with patience enough.
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05336
Arch is, however, optimised for i686, and it does have a very slick version of KDE 4.2 in KDEmod. This can probably be considered as the performance leader, and it is quite viable to run it on a netbook.
Mandriva is generally a very good implementation of KDE. I will try this RC2 when I get a chance.
Kubuntu 9.04 beta is promising, but KDE is a bit of a second-class citizen for Ubuntu, so this distro lacks a bit of TLC. Nevertheless, it does work on a netbook.
Fedora 11 should be good … but the hard disk installer of the recent RC LiveCD of Fedora failed, so I could only try it as a LiveCD, and therefore I can’t comment on its relative performance. Since netbooks do not have CDs, I haven’t as yet been able to run this on a netbook.
I personally don’t like SuSe (mostly because of YAST and RPMs), so I haven’t tried OpenSuSe 11.1, and so I have no comment on it.
Mint has a KDE 4.2 variation as a release candidate, but the kernel they are using is a bit older. It still might be worth looking at when they release it though.
Keep in mind though that OpenSuse, Fedora, Kubuntu, Mint and Mandriva which have KDE 4.2 are all still in pre-release stages.
Edited 2009-04-07 23:45 UTC
KDE also apparently has a plan for a specific version of plasma designed with netbooks in mind.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/04/plasma-on-netbooks.html
They are targetting KDE 4.4 for this, so it should be available in January next year.
Interestingly enough, while KDE has now gone to a six monthly release cycle, and it is GNOME which is now thinking about going through a difficult transition stage:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3814021/
You can almost imagine that Shuttleworth is wondering here if he backed the right horse.
Well…since he decided to utilise the strength of Debian as the base, he didn’t really have much of an option on that front. Back then, the licensing for Qt wasn’t quite where it needed to be, so KDE wasn’t applicable. That’s all changed now of course, but once they started down that road the die was cast. It’ll be interesting to see if Kubuntu can mature enough to give it some serious competition. Personally, I don’t see it happening but we live in hope…
Meanwhile, KDE4 is just now coming in to Debian Sid. It is creating some anxiety for the Siddux distro, which is based on Debian Sid.
http://sidux.com/
But, for the large part, despite some anxious moments such as that, KDE 4.2 has now stabilised and it works, and works well. Performance now is great. The hurdle of the major change represented by KDE 4 is now largely behind it, and KDE 4 is very much where the innovation on the desktop is all at right now … despite the hype over Windows 7.
Meanwhile, as Shuttleworth notes, a similar sort of upheaval is required for GNOME to stay relevant, and it has all that ahead of it now …
For GNOME, there is also the additional problem of external parties apparently trying their absolute best to saddle it with Mono dependencies.
If Shuttleworth is indeed irrevocably backed into a corner, and the die is indeed truly cast … then he has a real problem coming up.
From his words though, and his praise of the KDE team … I’m not sure that he hasn’t got an “escape to KDE4” route all planned out already.
Edited 2009-04-08 05:01 UTC
There is a Plasma based network-manager which is in development; hopefully it will be ready to be shipped with KDE 4.3 or maybe KDE 4.4. It would be good though if KDE made the shift from KHTML to webkit and take advantage of the huge amount of work Google and Apple have contributed to the project.
Know that Chrome is coming to Linux but I’d sooner see a native KDE browser using the webkit core so that there is the benefit of having the latest and greatest webkit improvements whilst at the same time having a browser that fits into the rest of the system and takes advantage of the shared KDE services like spell checking etc.
Although this article claims that the plasma-based network manager would not be available for KDE 4.2.0
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/01/kde-networkmanager-…
I have in fact already used it, either on Arch KDEmod or perhaps I saw it on Kubuntu 9.04 beta. I therefore believe it is already in KDE 4.2.2. Hence, AFAIK it should be available in this version of Mandriva.
Edited 2009-04-08 02:04 UTC
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1_What%27s_New#Netbook_friendl…
My own tips for running KDE 4.2.2 on a netbook:
(1) System Settings – Advanced tab – Nepomuk & strigi – turn them both off.
(2) System Settings – Appearance – Fonts – force the display to 96 DPI setting.
(3) System Settings – Display – turn the desktop effects off.
(4) Right-click the desktop and select Appearance -> Desktop Activity -> Type -> Folder View. This gets you a “traditional” icons-on-the-desktop behaviour.
More here:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3806256/KDE-42-Te…
Edited 2009-04-08 04:32 UTC
I am running Mandriva 2009.1 RC2 right now on my ASUS EEEPC 1000H as I type this in Firefox 3.08, connected via wireless LAN with WPA encryption.
Installation was easy as … I downloaded the KDE One liveCD iso, for europe1 (because that one had the en_AU locale on it), and then installed it to a SDHC card using the dd command as suggested on the Mandriva homepage. I then plugged the SDHC card in to the ASUS EEEPC 1000H netbook, then rebooted from the SDHC card and away it went.
Installation to hard disk took about 20 minutes.
No problems so far. Given the modest performance of the Intel graphics chip on the EEEPC netbook, as can perhaps be expected KDE4 is a bit sluggish when running on batteries at the 800MHz power-saving CPU speed, but it is absolutely fine at normal speeds. Other than that, everything else is working just fine so far out of the box with nothing to configure.
Edited 2009-04-08 13:50 UTC
I have FINALLY found a Linux distro that really does “Just Work (c) (r) TM” on my wife’s Aspire One!
Installed it last night, EVERY piece of hardware is detected, the wifi adapter doesn’t lose it connection randomly (Unlike Ubuntu 8.10/9.04 and it’s derivates like eeebuntu, crashbang, etc), it boots very fast compared to any distro i’ve installed on it before and it’s KDE4 is rock solid and VERY responsive too.
The config tools are very nice and work very well, the repo’s are quite comprehensive too. They even have UADE, which feeds her Chiptune addiction quite nicely. lol
Her comments on the look and feel of it were (and I quote) “Ooh, very socialist!”
Top marks Mandriva! You have TWO converts now, and potentially many more as I shall be recommending it to anyone who asks which distro they should try. I might even put my hand in my pocket and buy a copy or three.
Linux Mint has just announced a new KDE release.
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=731
http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_felicia_kde_whatsnew.php
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05416
Linux Mint, of all the “top 10” (by popularity) Linux distributions, may surprisingly be the first one to announce a KDE 4.2 release!
I haven’t tried this release, so I cannot comment on its stability or performance, but I do note that Linux Mint is normally pretty good in those respects.