Submitted by A short review of Mandriva 2007 RC2, outlining the new Xgl/Aiglx and Compiz 3D desktop. “This has to be the best live CD I’ve used, let alone the best Linux desktop. The new features like the 3D desktop are stunning and hopefully will increase productivity (once I’ve gotten over the excitement of it all), and the new Ia-Ora theme will keep me happy for a long time to come.” Update: Mandriva has announced the immediate availability of Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 with virtualization features.
Thought it might be a good idea to try the livecd on my Gentoo box here to check out if XGL is worth the trouble. Unfortunately it took 5 minutes to work out which image I needed and I gave up trying to find the actual iso to download. Would be quicker to install it myself in Gentoo with a friendly Wiki Howto from http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Index
than to run around in circles with Mandriva. You must be kidding right?
Here is one of the Cooker Mirrors for Mandriva:
ftp://anorien.csc.warwick.ac.uk/Mandriva/devel/iso/2007.0/
Alternatively you can use the same .iso that I did from ftp://anorien.csc.warwick.ac.uk/Mandriva/devel/iso/2007.0/One/mand…
You do not have to edit any files at all to get Xgl/Aiglx going on Mandriva. Just check the button for Xgl or Aixgl then you’re done!
Keep in mind Mandriva is the only distribution that has translations for both Mandriva tools and common apps for most languages; thus, you would see many different ISOs for different languages.
And if you do not have 5 minutes to read the REAMDE or Release file then I’m surprised you use Gentoo. It is a great community, don’t give it a bad name.
Edited 2006-09-19 14:12
No complaints about your community. I don’t use Mandriva so your button checking to enable XGL means zip. What I was getting at in the comment that was removed by a moderator (Thanks for that. I didn’t think it was anywhere near as offensive as my others) was Mandriva makes it less than obvious to download a simple ISO. Even Gentoo makes it easier to download an ISO. And yes, why can Mandriva allow binary drivers and Kororaa not?
The link is apparently down.
Fortunately not, however unfortunately my bandwidth is quite saturated. So.. it’s just slow. Hopefully things will speed up a bit over the next 24hrs.
Thanks for the patience.
So why is it OK fro Mandriva to bundle binary 3D drivers wih their LiveCD and not OK for Kororaa to do the same?
Or are we just waiting for the socially inept to start threatening Mandriva too?
You can choose to get the free versions of mandriva, and they have no binary drivers or software. Only when you purchase the One CD or Powerpacks do you get the binary stuff built in. That way you’re given a choice
We don’t charge for One. For 2007 we’ll have these editions:
2007 Free – the traditional free 3xCD / 1xDVD edition with a conventional installer and all free software.
Discovery / Powerpack / Powerpack+ – the boxed editions for beginner, regular and SOHO users, as normal.
Various One editions. Just as with the betas / RCs, these will be free, there will be KDE and GNOME flavours, and some will have non-free software. They will all be free as in beer.
This marks the first time we’ve done a free-as-in-beer release that contains non-free software. We figured it was a good idea, to give nvidia / ATI users a chance to have a live CD with 3D effects working all out of the box.
Thanks for the clairification AdamW. It’s great to see a free release with non-free software.
I downloaded the 2007 RC2 DVD and the One RC1 CD.
All I can say is, Wow!
I’ll even get to play with the 30-day server too.
🙂
“Only when you purchase the One CD or Powerpacks do you get the binary stuff built in. That way you’re given a choice
”
I still don’t understand.
Why is it OK for Mandriva to bundle the binary drivers with their CD (Paid for) but not Kororaa (Not paid for).
I honestly don’t see what the difference is.
…and I must say it’s amazing and very polished! So far so good (if it proves to be stable enough it’ll gain the main partition on my PC
No way I could use Vista on this box for anything like this, heck these effects beat anything I’ve seen before on any OS (yes even Mac OS X)
This comment troubles me. The old heap of shit that I run Linux at home on can’t run any of the latest shiny GUI stuff so I’m going purely by news that I read about it.
The new graphics capabilities available in Linux look impressive but are they as usable as they are in Mac OS X? For instance, I can drag something (a file, some text etc.) from one window, hit F9, hover over the destination window, the window automatically raises after a second or two, and then drop the thing (file, some text etc.) onto the destination window. While being able to see all the windows is a useful feature, is that all it does or does it also provide other enhancements?
Plus, from what I’ve seen of Mac OS X’s virtual desktops implementation, you can drag windows from one desktop to another while viewing all desktops. Can the new Linux graphics features do this?
I’m not trying to flame here. I just hope that these new fancy features are implemented so that really useful features are made available to the user and that they are not just implemented for fanciness’ sake.
both of what you describe, while related to graphics, are more in the realm of usability, and for that it comes down to the individual desktop system used.
…you can drag windows from one desktop to another while viewing all desktops…
I’m not really sure why you would want this – the idea seems to be to look at all four or so desktops as one quarter of the screen each, and then move windows around in them. They would have to be very complicated indeed for this to be worthwhile, surely?
What works very well in Linux as is, and in versions which would probably run on your old box, is for instance the Gnome workspace switcher. You have tiny icons of each window down in the taskbar. Then on each icon for a workspace, you have icons of the windows, and you can move these from one to the other.
Works fine. Takes up almost no screen space. I think KDE works the same.
Mandriva is a steaming hot distribution. I’ll have to check this babe out once the Gold master is released.
I tried an earlier beta but it seemed my USB mouse wasn’t being detected at startup. I had to configure it everytime I booted the LiveCD.
Thom, couldn’t you please give the CS 4.0 release its own article? It’s a major product release and it’s a completely DIFFERENT product from 2007. I don’t think it deserves to be just tacked on to the end of a review of a 2007 release candidate.
Thanks for the patience everyone.
My screenshots are now remotely hosted, and everything is back to running normal.
The site was down/slow from 10:30pm AEST (UTC +10) to 2:00am (~3.5hrs). If you tried during that time, please try again.
simply put: mandriva 2007 is really impressive ..
First of all. Mac OSX is not an example of usability.
It probably is a good example of easy learning curve, but if you get used to work with KDE, jumping to Mac OSX makes you extemely nevious.
KasBar, multiple desktops, sticky windows, windows without borders, windows on top, konqueror’s hability to embed ftp, sftp, http, file browsing, smb, kpdf…, kwin EXCELLENT implementation of BeOS like windows bars, kicker’s pager ability to move a window from one desktop to another, and easy ALT+F2 or “Run Command” applet way to call applications by typing it’s name are some of the options that become necessary when you get used to them.
The only thing i don’t like of Mandriva’s cool 3D environment is that Compiz removes lots of this functionality, because Compiz in no way compares to kwin in usability.
Hope compiz fork moves this beautiful windows decorators forward, so we can use it without loosing functionality.