“In this article I describe my experience with Mandrake/Mandriva and try to explain why it suits a starter in Linux and is still a usefull distro when you get more experience.” Note that ReviewLinux.com has adopted a very confusing way of browsing through the article: you need to use the tabs on top.
Too bad that some people can’t help critizing it because it is still for me the number one.
Yep, on balance, it’s still one of the best general-purpose desktop Linux distros out there.
I have to agree. Mandriva still rocks !. Its an excellent distribution. I use it for daily computing needs. I am particularly impressed with the number of RPM packages I can install with urpmi. It is simply awesome.
i learned how to use linux by mandraking my way through it. while i know use debian i will always hav a soft spot for mandrake
with a ibm thinkpad and belkin pcmia card with limited edition 2005 i was able to go online at bread company, panera. so i gave my win98 disk away.
warning: sometinmes it helps to place the card in after logging in and sometimes not???????! kopete started scaring me by not accepting my passwords, so i installed gaim and that worked. is it me or panera or mandriva???!
javajazz
I’ve gone through a lot of distributions, and for a while Mandrake seemed to be going downhill, but in the last year or so it’s gotten better again. I’m using the 2005 Limited Edition for now, but when 2006 is released I’ll probably order a PowerPack.
I’ve been a distro junkie over the last few years. In that time, Mandrake 10 PowerPack was one of my favorites. It’s very easy, fast, stable, has a great look-n-feel, and has tons of software that’s very easily installed.
I’ll probably check out Mandriva 2006 when it comes out.
As my server and sticking with it.Cant wait till 2006 edition released.
Had an experience with a Mandriva, sir? Suit you, sir!
Is that your preference, sir? Ooh, Suit you, sir!
Did it work on your hardware, sir? Suit you sir, ooh suit you.
Remember guys, you can do excellent custom installs with Mandriva – you can comfortably strip it right down to around 500-600 mb and have little more than IceWM, Firefox, Eterm, MCC, XChat, NEdit, VIM etc – in addition, using URPMI you can easily add Fluxbox if you prefer that to Ice etc etc.
Mandriva is better than the eternal unstable Fedora and now it is the best linux distribution for people who prefer rpm-based distributions.
I am looking for a second distro to dual boot with Debian, and indeed, Mandriva is one of my fav candidates for that position. Certainly my fav isn’t SUSE any longer: some “features” and bugs of 9.3 were for me the last straw, the end of a long love affair.
As to Mandriva it is very promising, but it has still quite some way to go before it can compare with Debian on equal terms.
I can’t install their last beta because it hangs when partitioning.
So last night I reinstalled 2005 LE with the idea to upgrade it to 2006-0.1.1 from the web.
The upgrade went reasonably well, except that it deleted some essential Gnome packages because of dependency issue. Fair enough, it is only an early beta.
What didn’t please me was that the procedure was long and tedious, far from the simplicity of an “apt-get dist-upgrade”
Also the kernel wasn’t upgraded, so I installed the new one manually, but URPMI didn’t take any step so that my system would automatically boot from my new kernel, something that with apt I take for granted.
And finally I found setting up an ADSL connection far from newbie friendly (for a distro which wants to be just that)
“Also the kernel wasn’t upgraded, so I installed the new one manually, but URPMI didn’t take any step so that my system would automatically boot from my new kernel, something that with apt I take for granted.”
Yes, Mandriva does not touch your kernel while you are upgrading packages using urpmi. It is a good idea since one may be running a customized kernel compiled on one’s machine.
If you want to upgrade the kernel, do “urpmq kernel” to find out the kernel version available. If you feel like upgrading, do “urpmi kernel” explicitly to upgrade it.
Thanks. In all honesty I don’t know Mandriva as well as I do Debian.
my first successful linux install was mandrake and while i don’t use it now and haven’t for some time… i would say that it is pretty nice for an rpm distro. I’ll have to give Mandiva 2006 a shot on my my spare comp
I believe a lot of Perl users like Mandrake^h^h^hiva because many of the built-in GUI utils are made with Perl.
I like the tabs it’s more logical then just clicking the
next link.
I’ve tried Redhat, suse, gentoo etc. and Mandriva is the best distribution by far with a nice balence of easy to use, good package management and good support community.
it even runs beautifully on my centrio laptop with wireless networking.
I like Mandrake very much. I used to work on it (10.1) at home, I customized it up to my expectations (external XFce etc.) and, though I work now on WinXP (damned Adobe…) I can honestly say Mandrake is the best enviroment “just for confortable work” I have ever found.
Mandrake at the time would never package maintenance releases of things like kde or openoffice or mozilla, contrarily to Suse, and instead liked to rely on voluntaries to provide the packages. The corporate answer was to wait for the next release of the distro.
As a paying club member, I found that unacceptable. Other than that, It was a great distro, with a great community but an overwhelmed and at times arrogant company. Their refusal to provide install/uninstall functionalities on the same package list (as it was before) was against a lot of negative feedback from club members. Debian and soon Ubuntu it is for me.
http://download.kde.org/binarydownload.html?url=/stable/3.4.2/Mandr…
I have been trying to switch from Mandrake to Debian for almost 1 year now, everything would be OK, would there not be the issue of getting CDs out of the drive.
In Mandrake, no matter what I do, I ALWAYS get the CD out of the CDROM drive when I push the eject button.
In Debian, I need root rights to unmount the CDROM, once Konqueror has executed a read access on the mounted (by the user) CD.
I submitted a bug report about this already with the first test-install I did a year ago, but Debian does not add the supermount patch to their 2.6 Kernel which would be a way to solve that problem. I understand that Debian stable should be exactly that: Stable. On the other hand, it prevents me from using Debian on my home desktop, because if my girlfriend inserts a CD she later cannot get back out that is a catastrophic failure of the computer (to her). So I will be staying with Mandrake fore a while longer, until Debian resolves that last issue for me.
While it’s safe to say that Mandriva has had it’s fair share of problems and annoyances, it’s still a good, user friendly distro, with the user in mind. Still, the installer with version 9.0 was still my favourite, because you could go back to any stage in the install process, like changing your mind about language or package selection, which these days wouldn’t be possible.
I hadn’t used Mandrake since 9.2, until recently installing Mandriva 10.2 on a computer for one of my bosses as a taste of linux. It works pretty good out of the box and all the hardware seems to be working everything perfectly on his laptop. But after browing around it and trying to install various apps he will need, it really feels like it has been really stripped down and become less configureable. It might be my imagination, but there seems to be less options for configuring things and less variety of packages to select from on the 3 Insatllation CDs. There are less games, less windowmanagers (no enlightenment or fluxbox), koffice isn’t even on the install disks. I know that these can be downloaded elseware, probably can be downloaded from the Mandriva Club and they probably come on the CDs if you order a copy of Mandriva, but if I’m introducing somebody to linux, I would perfer that the default CDs were more like the 9.0 CDs with more options in the packages to choose from. I like giving newbies something to chew on before they decide to take a dive and actually pay for a distro.
I cut my teeth with Linux running Mandrake. In fact, a few months ago I was on a mission to setup up a web filter for work. I looked over all of the commercial Windows applications, and after showing the price to my bosses, I was told no way. So, I did some research (I’m still fairly new to Linux), and found out about squidGuard. So, I threw Mandrake/driva 10.1 on an old Win 98 box, setup Squid and SquidGuard, running transparently, with about 70 machines hitting that box, and I never have any problems with it. Cron is setup to generate reports every morning before I get to the office, and it never faulters. In fact, with the exception of power failure due to a hurricane, it has been running for about 90 days straight without having to restart it.
I still run Mandrake 10.1 on my laptop, but have since gone to SUSE on my desktop because it’s hardware detection works better with my hardware, but I always recommend Mandrake to anyone that’s interested in giving Linux a try.