Submitted by Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring RC3 ‘Beijing‘ is now available. Beijing features fixes to all major bugs in previous betas and release candidates, the final version of GNOME 2.18, and the full feature set intended for the final release. Both traditional installer-based Free editions and combined live/install CD One editions are available. Please consult the release notes for more information.
Nice too see such a user-friendy robust distro update.
I use it on my notebook, it is working smooth right after installation. Even wifi worked nice out-of-box.
Nice work Mandriva team!
Does Mandriva RC3 handle wi-fi any differently to other leading distros (say SuSe)?
The reason I ask is because I know of a few people who were having problems with wifi cards and Linux (to the point where they were even advised to wrap some Windows drivers!). After further digging I recommended BSD (mainly due to the easy in which I’ve configured both wired and wi-fi networks) however this wasn’t an ideal solution if Linux was your preferred *nix OS.
Alot of the problems exist centred around the ipw* drivers, and the fact that ipw3945 relies on a userland demon which can’t be shipped with their distros. There is a new driver in development which corrects it, and uses the Linux wireless stack rather than the Intel made one.
As for the issues you experienced, what type of wireless card is it?
It wasn’t my systems (and I’m a BSD guy) so I couldn’t say for sure, but I think one was built into a laptop and the other was a generic Link-sys chip.
Edited 2007-04-02 13:32
Ah, the run of the mill piece-o-crap Broadcom; If there was ever a company that screwed over its users as badly as Ati, Microsoft and Adobe, it would be them.
Refusal to provide specifications, either under NDA or open agreement – really tells you how much they care about their customers when the make decisions like that.
Edited 2007-04-02 13:51
notwithstanding that, Broadcom chips tend to work fine with ndiswrapper, and the free driver (bcm43xx) is making great strides; with recent kernel versions, it supports the most common Broadcom chips very well. Of course, you do need to get the firmware, which can be a bit of a pain. A Google search for wl_apsta.o can work wonders there.
ipw3945 chips will work out of the box in non-free editions of 2007 Spring (the paid editions and the freely downloadable non-free editions of One); I know because there’s a Dell with an ipw3945 sitting right next to me, I just booted Spring RC3 non-free One on it, and it worked.
We have our own tool for configuring wireless network roaming – drakroam / net_applet. In our opinion it’s more capable and advanced than, e.g., NetworkManager.
Obviously we rely on the same basic drivers as any other Linux distro, we do take as much care as we can to package them so they work. Spring is based on kernel 2.6.17, but there is also a contributor-built 2.6.20 kernel in the contrib repository (kernel-tmb), so if your card is only supported by post-2.6.17 kernel versions, you can use that. (I use it with the Broadcom chip in my Lenovo). Non-free firmwares (which are necessary for most drivers) are available in all the commercial editions of Mandriva, and also in the non-free versions of One; for the free versions of One and for Free, you will be able to get them from the non-free repository after release. http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removin… has instructions on setting up repositories.
Probably the best thing to do is just to give it a shot. Grab a non-free edition of One, boot it, and see if the wireless works. One has the same wireless support as any other edition of the distro, so if your wireless works there, then you’re fine.
… does Mandriva use GNOME? I always thought they were an ardent supporter of KDE?
Mandriva always used GNOME, just not by default. Right now, there is no difference in terms of support between both of them. There are two isos for each desktop.
Mandriva has always supported KDE and GNOME equally. Both desktops are in our central set of supported packages (main). You have always been able to choose between KDE and GNOME (or install both) at install time. Since we started providing One CDs, we have provided both KDE and GNOME versions of them.
You would not want to use Gnome as a Mandriva user.
Why not?
I can attest to the polished quality of the Gnome version that Mandriva ships. I’m using it all the time myself.