Submitted by Beta versions of Mandriva 2007 have been appearing for a while now and the final release is coming soon. This short review covers the key changes introduced in beta 2. “Except for the software update which has been awaited by the Mandriva fans for a long time, there are no revolutionary changes or something that could put Mandriva 2007 in front of the competition. Still, not many distros provide such easy installation and configuration process. In Mandriva, almost all works out-of-the-box (including an MP# player) or network setup. And this is the reason I think Mandriva can be still recommended for the newbie users.”
Madrake was my favorite a few years ago, but for the newbies & Windows converts, nothing beats Xandros. I’ve been playing w/Suse, Ubuntu, and Xandros during the past month or so, and while each has it’s own “issues”, the Xandros demo I downloaded is more like Windows than any of the others.
Perhaps this is a good idea for windows users who know Windows reasonably well and are moving to LINUX BUT….
I’m not sure like windows=newbie friendly, user friendly, or anything of the sort.
While Windows might be simpler in key areas, Linux has it’s own advantages.
Not to mention, set up someone’s grandma with ubuntu/fedora and xp home and guess which one they’ll use? Which one would actually be easier to USE if things are set up for them? You might be surprised.
? That is good IF someone is wanting a windows clone from linux. I always found mandrake to be very competent without being too much of a clone. I think my fav release was 8.2, seemed really good and solid for me. Since then I have been less and less impressed personally, nothing wrong with them just desired something different.
http://polishlinux.org/reviews/mandriva_2007_odin/gnome_mandriva_co… should be changed to http://polishlinux.org/reviews/mandriva_2007_odin/gnome_mandriva_co…
Fixed. Thanks for info.
quite superficial … and not really descriptive of any of the “key changes” that went into beta2 .. at all ..
noticed a few problems so far. Important one being.. urpmi and rpm randomly segfault when used through a chroot – making it difficult to restored a broken system without using mandriva’s own CD
Mandrake used to hit the distro sweet spot:
* good hardware detection and support (eg nvidia, 1680*1050 notebook displays, printers working first time, easy driver and firmware support for ipw wireless when other distros didn’t work, hdd dma was set up correctly before other distros did, xfs filesysem before many others did … )
* good software selection – mostly recent software with frequent updates – and a (semi-official) repository with a wide range of tools, from R-base to scilab, from blender to scigraphica (not many did that one). oh and of course playing mp3, dvds and internet media fles was easy. the problem with fedora is that there are more than one group of repositories and they conflict badly and no-one wants to endorse one over another. the core repositories are not useful for additional applications or extended drivers or multimedia support.
* for those that liked it – i586 compiled software – what proportion of home desktop users are using 486s or 386s? i know this is a subtler question than it first appears but why cripple yourself. i’m using fedora 5 now and its fast but mandrva was snappier.
sadly mandriva/mandrake was neglected and quality fell. its software feel out of date and its repositories started to fail too often. and they never really hired a graphic designer to sort out their themes.
i would love to run an i586/i686 linux distro with cutting edge and frequency updated software, using a small set of semi-official repositories that provided useful apps, … and i’d love for mandriva to jettison all that mandrake-club stuff – forget it, its a pain and was never well administered. just stick to selling boxes with printed manuals – it works!
moving to smart or apt would be great too.
another clever move would be to unify the plain and -devel packages into one so you neer have to go chasing the devel headers and libraries again… i just checked dell’s website and their desktops have 650Gb hard disks.
i used mandriva for many years … but this year i swicthed to fedora to provide me with a stable environment – after all i don’t want to worry about the OS – it should worry about me!
sadly mandriva/mandrake was neglected and quality fell. its software feel out of date and its repositories started to fail too often. and they never really hired a graphic designer to sort out their themes.
They launch a graphic contest to ask community to provide theme, seems that not so many people do proposals :
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/Main/ContestSummer2006
i would love to run an i586/i686 linux distro with cutting edge and frequency updated software, using a small set of semi-official repositories that provided useful apps,
You can use cooker ( it’s like debian unstable or Fedora Core release ). Or use a stable version with a media jholding backports : http://www.seerofsouls.com/rpm2006.html
moving to smart or apt would be great too.
There’s no point. You can use smart and apt4rpm on Mandriva ( rpm are available ) with urpmi hdlist.
But urpmi is doing also all that you want. If there’s a problem, 99% of the time it’s a packaging bug and thus even smart or apt will faill ( they can’t guess dependencies ).
Last but not least most Mandriva tools are in perl whereas smart is in python.
“””for those that liked it – i586 compiled software – what proportion of home desktop users are using 486s or 386s? i know this is a subtler question than it first appears but why cripple yourself. i’m using fedora 5 now and its fast but mandrva was snappier.”””
Why, oh why won’t this myth just die? 😉
There are two main factors when it comes to compiler optimizations. The instruction set used and the type of processor that is optimized for. Most 32 bit x86 distros optimize for i686 or P4. They use a 486 or 586 instruction set. This allows the software to run on 486’s but to be best optimized for modern processors.
The difference in performance between using newer 686 instructions or not is quite minimal. Generally on the order of about 1%.
Also, unless you have a pentium 1, optimizing for i586 is about the worst thing you can do. The pentium 1 had unique optimization requirements not shared by any other processor. Code optimized for it will likely run *slower* on modern processors than 486 optimized code.
Also, processor specific compiler optimizations are largely over-rated. And something of a black art. If you are seeing a performance difference, it likely has some other major cause than the choice of compiler optimization.
If you run your own tests, you will likely find that the differences are not nearly what you might expect. And will likely run into surprises. At least that’s what I always find when I experiment in this area.
e.g., last I looked Fedora was optimizing for P4 because P4 not only performs slightly better for P4s, but is a slight win for Athlons, as well, beating out code “optimized” for Athlon.
Edited 2006-08-30 14:15
Jesus… and you thought Mandriva couldn’t get uglier…
I’ve been using Mandriva 2006 Free and Slackware as my Linux distributions of choice. They are both stable and never fail.
They both do the work I need for them to do as either a desktop or a server.
“… and you thought Mandriva couldn’t get uglier …”
We are talking about a theme … correct?
I know its not the most popular distro, but its certainly my favourite. I hope it keeps going.
First of all, I have to say that I this continuous “XXX is a distro for the newbie” statement I read here and there is ridiculous. Sure, Mandriva is a great distro for newcomers but it is also (!) a great distro for experienced users who are sick of downloading a new iso image every six months. I would compare Mandriva more to RHEL (in design). Easy to set up, well tested, very stable and comparably up-to date with its packages (as up-to-date as you can be with a 12 months release-cycle). Sure, in six months, people will complain “Gnome is outdated, it is only 2.16 while we have 2.18 already”, but I couldn’t care less. The differences are minimal and compare the 12 months you wait in RHEL, Mandriva, Debian (stable) to e.g. Windows or OSX. Mandriva is still a very up-to-date distro.
Rhythmbox: One test compared Amarok, Rhythmbox, Banshee and other media-players recently (dunno where I read the review) and Rhythmbox was still considered the best overall-solution. I prefer to use a stable and working Rhythmbox to a broken Banshee. Why do some people automatically think that old projects must be inferior to newer projects?
I cannot understand some people. First they blame Mandriva for years shipping some broken but bleeding edge apps, later they blame them for shipping a stable distro that just works. Grow up. Mandriva is about stability/quality and every distro should be about it. And a high quality distro is necessary for people who use GNU/Linux as a workstation in their job. Experimental, always-broken distros are nice to tinker with – if you don’t have to rely on the machine day in and day out for mission-critical tasks. But if your job depends on it, “hobby-distros” like SymphonyOS or BLAG are a no-go for me.
The review makes the assumption that K3B ain’t there. Well, it is not included on the Gnome-only 1CD Cooker snapshot. Use the KDE version and you have K3B. Use the 3 CD release and you get k3B. And even if you use the 1CD Gnome version, one “urpmi k3b” is all you have to launch in order to install it from the easyurpmi mirrors.
The look: This is still a beta release. We will not see the final design until they freeze cooker. But even then, stability and quality is again more important for me than a fancy default theme. And I appreciate that they never tried to copy the Windows or OSX look but stick to their own philosophy.
Desktop-search: Beagle is available. Install it if you want it. It was already available with the 2006 release.
Mandriva 2007 can be the distro to beat if the hardware detection remains top notch, if they iron out the last bugs. Sure, some people will always complain but you cannot please everyone. For me, it was a long Linux journey with all big players included. RedHat/Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, Yoper, Debian, Mepis, Zenwalk, Ark, Solaris, BSD, … and I went back to Mandriva. It is stable, it works and allows me to do what I have to do.
One thing I like about Mandriva: It boots even faster than my Arch box and uses less ressources on my systems. So why should I ditch Mandriva and replace it with another distro? I don’t see a reason for such a move in my case.
The only thing I dislike in Mandriva is that it does not come with a simple way to find and add repositories, and people need to go to easyurpmi site to find them.
I am still using LE2005 and sometimes a repository goes down, and the error messages when I try to install a package says nothing usefull. If that kind of things become solved, would make Mandriva near to perfection, because it has the best installer I ever tried, with simple partitioning and hardware detection, a very good Control Center for system configuration, and urpmi and RPMdrake needs a little work to be perfect.
I was wondering How I would go about getting official mandriva packages and updates and stuff? Not necessarily with the beta though. I kinda thought you needed to use urpmi to do any of that sort of thing but I would want an official repository. Is there any such thing? I was thinking mandriva kiosk and mandriva online might be what I need. If you know, can you tell me? thanks
http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
Go to that site, set up software mirrors as explained there and update your box. The mirrors are synced to the official Mandriva servers thus all packages you download are official updates (except the PLF stuff of course that are from … you guessed it, PLF). I use it since many years happily.
We are talking about a theme … correct?
Correct. The default theme…
I mean, what’s the deal with this new blue tone? Mandriva already was way too blue, now they’ve just made it worse using a very strange kind of blue.
Just take a look at rhythmbox and those stripes, it looks ridiculous:
http://polishlinux.org/reviews/mandriva_2007_odin/gnome_rhythmbox.p…
Oh, and the selected song (“Bluemars”), you can barely read the song’s name, because that blue doesn’t contrast nicely with white.
I mean, just leave the blue it was before and that’s fine, just don’t make it worse.
The new ‘tangoified’ icons, though, are beautiful. That’s a good thing.
But that blue all over the place…
The theme comes in different colour shades. A strong dark-blue, cyan, grey and yellow. If you don’t like the cyan version, use the dark-blue or grey one.
The theme comes in different colour shades. A strong dark-blue, cyan, grey and yellow. If you don’t like the cyan version, use the dark-blue or grey one.
Are you kidding, the first thing i’ll do is put Clearlooks on it. That’s not my point. I’m thinking about “how Mandriva looks to other people, specially new users who unfortunately don’t know Clearlooks yet”.
Is it a trend? I mean, in the past release they put a “stoned” penguin in the bootsplash and desktop background! Jesus! It was, to say the least, scary! Now this new uglier theme… so, is it an effort to make Mandriva Free look ugly?