Featuring a 2.6.11.6 kernel, Firefox 1.0.2, The Gimp 2.2, GNOME 2.8.3, KDE 3.3, gcc 3.4.3, openoffice.org 1.1.4, Mandriva is striving to be the operating system of choice not only amongst Linux users, but computer users worldwide – both consumer and enterprise.
Mandriva 2005 Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’m still curious about this XBOX support they mentioned:
http://www.mandriva.com/company/press/pr?n=/pr/products/2552
So far we’ve not had propper drivers for the video chipset on the XBOX, as it is something between a GeForce 3 and 4. Hopefully this will allow hardware acceleration among other things.
No KDE 3.4?
It has some backports from 3.4 though, like kpdf.
Well, I’m sold! Features that aren’t available anywhere else.
Mandrake/Mandriva opted for longer, “safer” release cycles, therefore it’s not the distro for the latest & newest app versions anymore. Might be bad for the geeks, but then again those are not the kind of people who would pay for a Mandrakeclub membership anyway, and are there are tons of distros to play with the latest KDE stuff (such as Kubuntu, just to mention one).
Now I just hope Mandriva develops a decent, unified GUI for URPMI, with some EasyURPMI-like functionality built-in.
kpdf has been around for a while lol
Mandriva, created in 1998
Intresting. It should be something like: Mandriva, a new name for a MandrakeSoftware company created in 1998.
I have been a mandrake user for years, and finally dumped Windows when 10.0 came along.
The pinnacle for mandrake was 10.1, which is what I am running on this PC now.
It is true that mandrake are not at the cutting edge as far as package versions go… maybe thats because some people like their PCs to actually WORK !
The problem seems to be caused by Microsoft…. people think a bigger version number will always be better than the version before, and they go out and upgrade straight away.. and get buggy software into the bargain.
MacOS users are also like this, how many of them will be tiger in the first week of release, because it WILL be better as it is newer ?
Truth is, people who do work like STABLE versions of software, stuff that is rock solid and not liable to die and take their data with it.
I installed the free FTP version yesterday, on a Windows XP IBM ThinkPad A31, downloading everything except the servers (13 boxes selected in the sofware choice panel, thus). First of all, DHCP didn’t work from the network install CD (I’m on a home network with router and ADSL Internet connection), so I had to choose static IP; then, the software installation went smoothly, with no problems, and after approximately 3 hours or so the computer rebooted into the usual Mandrake KDE desktop, as usual. At least in my language of choice (Italian), the 2005 Limited Edition hasn’t been updated on the documentation front, so it says “Mandrake” instead of “Mandriva” everywhere (welcome screen, etc.) – not a big deal, anyway. Everything works well, as in previous versions, except for the TV tuner control panel (which hangs when opened, maybe because there’s no TV card installed?) and for WebDAV, which – after automatically installing the necessary package – doesn’t seem to work to access my .Mac iDisk. The usual KDE and GNOME glitches remain: for example, the icons don’t remain in place after a restart or re-login in KDE when they are set to automatically align to the grid, and devices created on the KDE desktop appear as blank icons in GNOME, and so on. On the positive side, suspend to RAM works flawlessly in KDE for my laptop model; but the beautiful KDE startup sound sometimes comes to the desidred volume (selected and memorised in KMix) only at the end of the melody: strange…
All in all, rather good – but the name “Limited Edition” really applies, here, because of some things that don’t work as they should and of the mostly “old” documentation, etc.
BTW, I hope Mandriva 2006 will have a new, more modern “Galaxy 3” theme… 🙂
kpdf has been around for a while lol
Yes, but version 3.4 of kpdf is brand new. And much improved. In fact, it is one of the most noticeable improvements in KDE 3.4, which was why it’s inclusion is important enough to mention.
The mascot that appears in one of the screenshots doesn’t look professional to me. It’s as if a kid sent a linux rendition of Donald the Duck to Mandriva designers.
Mandriva shares trade for 7.95 euros. Isn’t it too high for a company that struggles to be profitable ?
“7.95 euros. Isn’t it too high for a company that struggles to be profitable ?”
Perhaps, if they were struggling. They are currently one of the most (and only) profitable Linux companies in the world.
Perhaps, if they were struggling. They are currently one of the most (and only) profitable Linux companies in the world.
And only…
Profitable “linux” company: Novell
Another one: Red Hat
Check the stock market Mandrake/Mandrive nowhere…
“I have been a mandrake user for years, and finally dumped Windows when 10.0 came along.
The pinnacle for mandrake was 10.1, which is what I am running on this PC now.”
I am not too happy with 10.1 which I fairly recently upgraded to from 9.1. It doesn’t automount my flash key and even though it recognizes it (Lexar Jumpdrive), but then it times out. Futhermore there are lots of problems with urpmi I am having a lot of dependecy hell problems which I have had to sort out myself.
I am thinking of changing to Ubuntu and see how well apt-get and synaptic work.
They have a package for ghemical with mpqc which is vital for me so I reckon I will give it a go.
“Check the stock market Mandrake/Mandrive nowhere…”
It’s a french company and it’s listed at euronext.
Yes, there are other contries apart from the US, and also other stock exchanges than NYST…
I tried to do one CD install that fetches packages from the net, and unfortuntely installer was not so userfriendly. For example it does not show what speed it is currently downloading packages with, and what’s worse, it does not give any progress bar, say to see how much is left to download. So you just sit there and watch that dull screen and wonder how much till it’s done.
Other than that, the installer is simply the best in linux world. Automatically mounts all found partitions (hear that ubuntu), automatically detects location from keyboard layout and is is very very fast. Also they are using aspell 0.6 that has far more spellchecker dictionaries, which is a plus for me.
With all respect but i don’t think the corporate industry is waiting for Daffy Duck to show up after initial boot.
Mandrake wasn’t a star in style but this doesn’t the quallity the OS itse4lf has.
I really really like the new release cycle, and the new policy to use “mature” versions of software. It’s already been said, always getting the very latest releases of stuff often leads to bugs. Then Mandriva throws in all their little enhancements (like the great installer, MCC, rpmdrake, the new loopback on the installer, KDE 3.4 to 3.3 backports, etc) to produce an all around polished, stable, fast, easy linux system.
Personally, I’ll be waiting for the first release (or perhaps second) that starts incorporating some of the Connectiva technology. That should be very interesting, and should make this already outstanding distro even stronger.
Looks very very good.
I checked it out, install is still weird and it would not run on my Laptop where previous versions always have and any other distro does.
Besides, when a suse announcement on slashdot gets 100+ comments in 10 minutes and a mandriva announcement gets 20 comments in 3 hours you know which distro is in trouble.
mandriva.. I still cant get over it. I refuse to call it that. itll be “mandrake” till the day I die!
Goofy said “With all respect but i don’t think the corporate industry is waiting for Daffy Duck to show up after initial boot.”
Arakon said “the choice of mascotts isn’t helping with that image much ”
I must agree with you, but it is imperative to remember that Mandriva 2005 is a limited edition release. It is the release that hobbyists and enthusiasts will use on their personal desktops. The official supported version is still Mandrakelinux 10.1. Companies looking for a Linux vendor will not use Mandriva 2005, they will use Mandrakelinux 10.1 or the upcoming Mandriva 2006. I trust that Mandriva will develop a consistent professional branding scheme in time for the 2006 release late this year.
Certainly SUSE (Novell) is one of the most professional-looking Linux distros out there: the 9.3 LiveDVD is fantastic! And the new included OpenOffice.org 2.0pre (Novell edition) behaves correctly, too, from a visual point of view: in KDE it has the KDE look, in GNOME it has the GNOME/Ximian look.
It would be cool if the next “real” Mandrakelinux, i.e. Mandriva Linux 2006, could become even better than SUSE LINUX 9.3, on as many fronts as possible: we’ll see, eventually…
yeah, because everyone knows Slashdot geeks are the world’s most profitable market. Most of Mandriva’s users have never been there…
Please forget about ‘corporate’ this and ‘corporate’ that, this release has nothing to do with corporations. It’s for Linux users, pure and simple. We have different products for corporations. They have no crazy penguins. Having said that, I thought the penguin was supposed to have died, so I don’t know what happened there. It used to be on the desktop as well during the beta cycle, that was removed, but it stuck around in the lilo and bootsplash images. oh well. BTW, in reference to the original review, you can get a lot more bootsplash themes to choose from by installing the bootsplash themes package, named…bootsplash-themes.
sorry, forgot the important part
. try hitting F1 at the first install screen and on the kernel options page you get, type ‘linux noapic acpi=off’ and see if that helps. If not, please file a bug report with a list of hardware in your laptop, and maybe we can get it working…http://qa.mandriva.com/
I don’t think we have any XBox ‘special sauce’, unfortunately. All XBox support means is we’ve worked with the Linux-on-XBox folks to make MDV work pretty painlessly on the system and include all the XBox necessary stuff, like tweaks to the installation routine and a kernel built with the appropriate patches for the machine. So if they don’t have hardware acceleration going yet, we don’t either.
The “only” was to be used as “one of the only” including both Redhat and Novell. BTW, Novells Linux business has NOT be profitable.
“Besides, when a suse announcement on slashdot gets 100+ comments in 10 minutes and a mandriva announcement gets 20 comments in 3 hours you know which distro is in trouble.”
Are you kidding? Now we are basing companies “being in trouble” on the number of comments on OSNews??
I’m curious as to how their ftp servers and/or various mirrors are holding up, especially with new help from Conectiva. I finally got sick of not being able to find a good mirror to connect to and I left Mandrake behind for the latest Kubuntu. I really enjoy being able to download new software at around 300k/s, whereas I was lucky to be able to connect at all with Mandrake. I tried several mirrors in the states and France, but couldn’t get a stable connection when the control center tried to install stuff. I really liked Mandrake and so I hope they’re doing well with this merger and new release system.
Everytime there is a Mandrake announcement, there is a huge stream of trolls that come here and just spread pointless drivel. How about you go back to your homework?
Mandrake has a corporate desktop for corporations.
I value the fact that Mandrake is moving to a predictable and less tiresome yearly release cycle and think that the recent merger with Conectiva holds a lot of potential.
As far as innovation, and I post this merely as a historical note, Mandrake was the first distribution to offer journaling file systems and the first one to give you a choice of them during installation, the first one with a decent GUI installer that could resize NTFS partitions or setup RAID and LVM volumes back in 1998, the first one to include CUPS as the printing system, one of the first ones to care about the Linux desktop and to ship pre-instaled desktops on HP hardware back in the day and on and on.
Stop spreading misconceptions and innuendo. The Linux community needs to come together. Even if Mandrake is not your desktop of choice, you gain nothing by spreading lies about it.
[i]”Are you kidding? Now we are basing companies “being in trouble” on the number of comments on OSNews??”[i]
Good point. Mandrake/Mandriva has never been well liked by a large portion of the posters at OSNews – it’s not “leet” enough.
Some MDV mirrors have always been better than others. The mirrors aren’t getting really heavy load right now, although they probably will once they get ISOs for the public ISO release. Personally I’ve always found club-internet and anorien to be the two best mirrors. All the ones in North America are pretty poor.
btw, if you know where we can find a generous millionaire to bankroll our bandwidth bills like Canonical have, just say the word.
> the first one with a decent GUI installer that could resize > NTFS partitions
I’ll second that. I tried MDK, liked it a bit, used other distros. Still keep a 9.1 and 10 ISO around for the *great* ntfs resize feature and implementation.
Started trying to use it back at release 7, and it worked about as well as any othe distro that I had tried at making friendly with my ex-windows box. MDK 8.1 had me thoroughly hooked with it’s fairly logical install and nice sets of bundled apps, and I abandoned the MS universe almost entirely. In the 9s, I got a bit concerned. Mind you, I had been using the same PC on all these releases, and I tended to do a fresh install after backing up data. Suddenly, hardware went undetected (printer, monitor, etc.) and I grew disenchanted with a product that boasted all these granular improvements, but was getting unfriendlier by the moment with my old box. I finally knucked under and tried Xandros 3. It was one-third the install time, 100% hardware detection (including my digital camera, printer, and thumb drive. I DL-ed and installed Mandriva LE 2005 (I’m a club member), and immediately uninstalled it. The exact same problems cropped up, ones that I hadn’t given a though to in Xandros. I used to be a big cheerleader for Mandrake, but I just haven’t seen the linear progress that I would desire for subsequent releases. Mandrake may be moving forward, but It’ll have to do it without me.
I tried to do one CD install that fetches packages from the net, and unfortuntely installer was not so userfriendly. For example it does not show what speed it is currently downloading packages with, and what’s worse, it does not give any progress bar, say to see how much is left to download. So you just sit there and watch that dull screen and wonder how much till it’s done.
Go for a walk, while the computer is working, perhaps? Seriously. Your PC can work alone quite well. You don’t have to watch it all.
Well i m a pure Mac user for years. And i have much space for linux in my mind n hart. i don’t like Windows for its many resences as u konw virsus or errors n secorty, so i wana tell the linux devepers n compmanies who develping the linux’s os’s who can i or some on els use the linux because the mac os x or windows xp sp2 providing the many options n softwares for user like “me a graphics designer n i m so much like adobe photoshop and macromedia freehand how how how can i use linux when the linux os’s like redhat suse mandrake or many falvours have no storng suport the graphics softwars. let me tell u 1 thing clearly that no on linux success in the market.
then the storng suport to run the windows softwars or mac softwars run on linux. well very last i intall mandrake 10.1 and after suse 9.2 the os envorment are good graphics are good internet suport is very good bus still need to work on graphics softwares suport n multimedia or dvd suport.
i m thank full the mac be cause they make a best os for user’s named Panther n now i m looking for Tiger n new linux flavours too. Thankz
“btw, if you know where we can find a generous millionaire to bankroll our bandwidth bills like Canonical have, just say the word.
”
Adam, I see you posting for Mandriva (Mandrake) quite a bit. It has never been clear to me if you are an employee of Mandriva of not. Could you please clear this up for me one way or another?
Thanks
Garret
I work for MDV as a contractor, mainly doing proofreading and copyediting. I think I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in the comment threads here, but it’s easy to miss
Thank you.
I am happy with Mandrake 10.1. But sometimes doesn’t agree with their package selection. No firefox.. No Thunderbird… They should concentrate on it in coming issues..
I was surprised to see the change of name ‘ Mandrake ‘ > ‘ Mandriva ‘… Why that happened?… Any one know that???
Is the real MANDRAKE – THE MAGICIAN came against it???(-
Firefox and Thunderbird were in contrib for MDK 10.1. At the time of 10.1’s release they still weren’t quite at v1.0 so it was considered premature to have them in main (and there were issues with conflicts between them and the mozilla package and several packages that depend on things provided by mozilla, like NSS). For 2005, Firefox is the default browser, and Thunderbird is in main I think (though it’s still not considered mature enough to be the default mail program; that’s still kmail or Evolution depending on environment).
Why the switch to FireFox and Thunderbird instead of Mozilla Suite. I have used Mozilla Suite as well as the FireFox/Thunderbird combo. Mozilla suite is, I find, more full featured. Am I missing something special about FF/TB or is Mandriva simply jumping on the FF bandwagon?
Sincerely
Craig
http://www.titan-data.com
Mandriva is born old. Ubuntu, Suse and other distro are shipping with kde 3.4 and gnome 2.10. Plus, Ubuntu is free and has apt-get natively (yes, you can run it on mandriva too, but you got the concept
). In the ende, I can’t see where mandrake can prevail. It’s strange, because in the past mandrake used to have the latest and greatest.