Submitted by “After making a lot of progress with Mandriva Linux 2007, I thought perhaps Mandriva had turned over a new leaf, and was using that release as a starting point for an overall better quality operating environment. I was totally wrong. Both the PowerPack Edition and Discovery/LX have slid so far back with version 2007.1 that I have serious doubts as to the future of Mandriva’s viability as a commercial desktop operating system.” Read more at SoftwareInReview.
Mandriva Linux 2007.1 PowerPack, Discovery/LX 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 got my start in Linux with Mandrake (now Mandriva) and I have fond memories of the distro. But they always seemed to wander around not quite knowing who their target market was or how to get there.
As they spun their wheels other distros came on the scene and supplanted them.
Madriva’s days may indeed be numbered.
Ditto here. I remember asking my PhD EE brother-in-law which distro to try when I became interested in Linux 2 years ago. He recommended Mandrake. I had a ball with it early on but gradually became disgruntled when I encountered severe lockup and numerous bugs/issues. So its sad to see it continue to decline QC/QA wise.
“Madriva’s days may indeed be numbered.”
I doubt that their days are numbered. I think that Mandriva is still a very good distro (spring 2007 is a better release than some distros released recently). The only problem with Mandriva is that it does not seem to reach out to the community as much as other distros. Reaching out to the community a bit more would get more users and developers involved in Mandriva.
Yep, I moved on as well, a couple of years ago. This article just serves to remind me why.
Does Discovery 2007.1 still have the legal LinDVD DVD player and Cedega?
I’m interested in buying it for legal solutions that I can transfer to Fedora. I’m not really interested in Mandriva though.
Lets just say I have those things in Fedora already but wish to make them legal by buying a cheap copy of Mandriva. 🙂
Oh and I also plan to buy the Fluendo codecs for legal audio codec support. 😀
Please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trolling or slighting you…but:
Why would you want to make your MP3, DVD and WMV/A decoding “legal?”
Personally I have no interest in supporting the jack-booted patent thugs that own the distribution rights to any number of overly ubiquitous and technically dated and inept audio/video codecs.
Ditto Box,
I want the peace of mind that comes with running legal Linux software in the United States. Technically, any other way is illegal in the USA and several other countries.
Think of it this way:
What chance does Linux or any other Unix OS (besides OS X) have at gaining widespread acceptance if basic things like watching DVDs or listening/watching to music/video in WMA/V, MPEG2, etc. formats cannot be or arn’t done legally?
The DMCA act, MPAA, so on would put their foot down very quickly. Patent lawsuits could follow and affect users.
It could get very ugly fast if Linux was in any dominate position on the desktop.
Edited 2007-04-26 22:07
Besides,
$39.90 USD for Mandriva Discovery and ~$38.10 USD for the Fluendo “All” codecs totals $78.
Just $78 to be legal and a great way to establish credit on my first credit card. 😉
Plus I believe I remember seing Mandriva having Cedega and Anti-Virus software as well. So thats an extra bonus to import into your favorate distro.
Edited 2007-04-26 22:17
While I agree with your reasoning, I am unsure if the codec packs actually are transferable from one distro to another.
I want the peace of mind that comes with running legal Linux software in the United States. Technically, any other way is illegal in the USA and several other countries.
Given that the vast majority of the functionality of the software you are talking about is allegedly covered by patents which have not been legally tested or proven in any shape or form, this is a massive step of the imagination.
if basic things like watching DVDs or listening/watching to music/video in WMA/V, MPEG2, etc. formats cannot be or arn’t done legally?
Assuming that what is being done now is illegal is a big stretch.
Patent lawsuits could follow and affect users.
That would be unlikely. Lawsuits against users would be messy, expensive and unenforceable, and it would mean that the basis for them would need to be proved.
It could get very ugly fast if Linux was in any dominate position on the desktop.
There is simply no way of avoiding that, and by then it would be too late anyway. If someone cannot write some software that is free of any question marks on it being freely distributable then it needs to be faced head on. Shying away from it will not help desktop Linux.
“What chance does Linux or any other Unix OS (besides OS X) have at gaining widespread acceptance if basic things like watching DVDs or listening/watching to music/video in WMA/V, MPEG2, etc. formats cannot be or arn’t done legally? ”
Presuming it even IS illegal in the U.S it does not affect Linux uptake in other countries.
“Patent lawsuits could follow and affect users.”
Users can’t be sued for patent infringement since users aren’t infringing on patents, the manufacturer of the product is. Patent infringement does not apply to purchase and usage but to manufacturing and possibly sale.
Using libdvdcss2 is illegal in the USA because it isn’t a properly license CSS decoder. Plus it sucks and wont play some DVDs with new encryption schemes. Many new Sony DVDs movies are like this.
Since I live in the U.S. it affects me. While its unlikely I’ll be arrested at my home, its still not legal.
Might as well just pirate movies from torrent sites. Thats illegal too but I’m unlikely to be caught, right? 😉
Your right. Users probably wouldnt be sued but they can force the distributor to halt sales/pay large settlements that would inadvertently affect users.
Anyway… why has LinDVD been ommited from 2007.1? The guy even mentions this issue in his review/rant. I guess I’ll just buy 2007.0 Discovery.
I know I can use the RPMs on Fedora.
Edited 2007-04-27 04:09
Software patents are ugly.
But you should know that patent infringement cases are brought against the producers of a product, not its users.
If Toshiba has a problem with Ford, it sues Ford Inc, not Ford drivers.
So for the love of God, stop putting fear into people’s minds because they might want to have multimedia support on their linux stations.
Of course, long time linux users such as myself have our music collections as ogg vorbis and don’t have to face any of these issues, but let people get to make up their minds about these things their own pace.
I’ll bet you’re the kind of guy who will hold it untill he gets home no matter how painfull instead of going behind a tree and exhale in relief
Don’t get ofended, just messing with you.
I bet you can crush a rock with your as.. I gotta stop, sorry. lol.
No, 2007.1 doesn’t include LinDVD and Cedega. I think we have discounted copies of 2007.0 in the Store, though, so that might work even better for you.
I find this review overly negative and simply inaccurate in some places. here’s an extract from some mails I sent discussing it:
“More Club advantages? Setting up the Club-exclusive repositories via drakfirsttime – which is popped up on first boot – works in 2007.1. Couldn’t really get much more obvious than that. “This process should be automatic during installation — ask for Club membership information and install the sources automatically” – well, that’s exactly what happens. I don’t know how he missed it. “How about some pre-seeded torrents of the DVD ISOs, too, so that members can get the new release in less than a day?” – that’s exactly what the Club gets.”
“Handheld device support? true, but then no-one else is doing any better AFAIK. The available support for Windows Mobile devices is extremely alpha and hard to integrate. The module has just gone into kernel-tmb, we’ll probably work on it this cycle.”
“Proper video card support? Well, um – “Everyone who installs Mandriva Discovery/LX, PowerPack, or PowerPack+ should have the latest and most capable video driver that the included X.org version will support, and it should provide 3D acceleration without any extra effort” – that’s exactly what happens. There’s a small bug with NVIDIA on upgrade installs that I really need to add to the Errata, but that’s about it. (He installed NVIDIA driver from upstream, but you don’t have to, you just have to re-run XFdrake to update xorg.conf).”
“Forget about the fancy special effects? he is labouring under the same misconception as some other reviewers, that this stuff takes a lot of development resources. It really doesn’t.”
on non-working packages:
“Actually, I disagree. This is the common cycle:
* $OBSCURE_CONTRIB_PACKAGE is broken
* no-one notices on Cooker because no-one uses it
* no-one notices during beta cycle because none of the people who use it try the betas
* QA don’t notice because they can’t test everything, they test the important stuff
* the release comes with the package broken, finally the two people who use it try it and realize it doesn’t work
* they file a bug
* the package gets fixed in /contrib/updates
Given that the alternatives are a) force everyone to try the betas (not likely until we rule the world), b) force QA to test every single little-used package in the distro (wasting resources that could be used on QAing more important stuff and likely slowing the release cycle), c) drop the packages entirely, d) keep the status quo, I think d) is easily the best option. I don’t think c) is better than d) at all; with d) we end up with a working package, with c) the user is stuffed and forced to switch distros or build from source.”
“I’m a bit sad that the comprehensiveness of our Errata was taken as a *negative* point. From my experience, the same amount of issues exist in other distros; they just don’t document them so extensively. Jem, would you be happier if I did a sloppier job on the Errata for 2008.0?
“
I have to agree with the author about the errata. It’s good to let the users know in advance but this time the errata is..quite long.
I do not have the system like the author. I installed it on a Centrino laptop. The battery notification actually works (I get about 2 hours) whereas Ubuntu 7.04 first gave me 19 hours and quickly down to 15 min
Haven’t used it a lot excepting for web surfing and audacity. The wireless network applet is quite nice, even better than the one in Ubuntu as it does detect my Netgear WPN511 and you could easily switch between different AP’s.
Not sure why they don’t have any suspend, hibernate button but running “s2ram -f -a 1” would do the trick for me
Turn on the power button, desktop and network are back to live. So far, I’m happy.
Default install of Spring puts klaptop in the system tray, it has suspend options when you right click.
While I agree that Mandriva has problems in some areas like management, client relationship and bad marketing, Mandriva Linux is very good in general and particularly in desktops. MCC has only equivalent in Suse (yast).
It is ironic that you never see artcles about problems and bugs with Ubuntu, Suse or Fedora. They are perfect ? Obviously not.
I begin to think that the problem with Mandriva is that it is a french company and therefore it is not popular in USA. I see that KDE suffers the same critics because is basically an european project, even being technically superior to GNOME for many years and even today in my opinion.
If you can read spanish or use google/babelfish translate, I recommend read this article about FUD against Mandriva
http://blogdrake.net/node/7559
Edited 2007-04-26 23:10
I am a very satisfied user of Mandriva for the past 5 years. I don’t deny Mandriva has its rough edges now and then, but their latest release is a lot more polished than some of the other distros mentioned in the comment threads.
Even the much praised Ubuntu has some unresolved issues in laptop suspend and hibernate. Mandriva got it right in this new release. No configuration required, just works.
Their new wireless configuration utility is top-notch. Very nice network discovery and effortless migration between networks.
The hibernate/suspend and the network discovery rivals win XP and OS X features.
The new metisse desktop is the most intuitive and a very user-friendly desktop manager that is currently available.
This is a revolutionary distro that is leading the way in Linux innovation. If you can’t see this simple truth, I can’t help but wonder, if you really ARE a linux user.
“This is a revolutionary distro that is leading the way in Linux innovation. If you can’t see this simple truth, I can’t help but wonder, if you really ARE a linux user.”
Yeah, we were all there already starting off with Man-Whatever but then we grew up into our Linux shoes and moved on. Back in the day Mandrake was good, but idiotic squabbling among some half-a**ed want-to-be developers ruined it.
I really have to admit that Mandrake ushered me into Linux and I will always be grateful for that. Unfortunately poor decisions have ruined a good distro
Where are you Gael?
If you haven’t used Mandriva lately, how can you possibly judge it?
Well, I started with Mandrake (Mandriva), and I find this to be slightly unfair on them, because the stuff he’s bashing them on can be found in just about every other distro out there. Mandrake is the only other distro apart from Suse that has at least half-decent config tools as well, which counts for quite a bit.
The problem for Mandriva and an awful lot of other distros is they just focus on all the wrong things. Metisse and getting it to work is rather pointless and the abomination of KDE is a fair point. This does not help people wanting to run a usable desktop or server system, it doesn’t help people wanting to install software in a sane manner or the countless other things people need to do. Mandriva and others are trying to make an alphabet soup distro, which is not what is required.
In my humble point of view this isn’t a review. This is a rant!
Obviously, the author has some misconceptions about several things like the video drivers, which in my experience are the best both on recent machines but also on some older machines that I had already tested. While in some other recent distros, video is just plain vesa driver, Mandriva auto-detect or is very simple to choose from a GUI list thanks to their DrakX tools!
While I agree that Mandriva has several problems (who doesn’t?) most of them are not technical or in their product (the ones which I had where easily resolved – and here I see errata as a plus and not as a problem), but more in their organization, web presence and marketing!
Overall I highly recommend Mandriva Spring, since in my book it is very comprehensive and one of the best linux distro around!
This release seems to have both.
Potentially it is a very polished distro.
But, for instance, I had to do a lot of extra work in order to configure pppoe, something a newbie is definitely not capable of doing.
I had random freezes while doing very ordinary configuration.
Next I want to know if updates are still the absolute pain they have been for several releases.
Addendum: the update was very smooth. However Firefox crashed while writing this, thus still mixed feelings.
Edited 2007-04-27 00:32
Just as a note: use of libdvdcss2 is pretty clearly illegal in the U.S. under the DMCA, which prohibits circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms *even for legitimate ends*. Forget about the patents.
On the Errata, just looking at the length doesn’t really give you the whole story. Let’s go issue by issue.
“Incorrect theme used for install boot screen in Powerpack+ x86-32 edition” – first, I’m not actually sure if this is still the case (it was the case with the first round of ‘final’ ISOs, but the ISOs were actually revised, so it may have been fixed). Assuming it is, well, it’s an aesthetic glitch. Might look a bit silly but it doesn’t affect any functionality.
“Java packages not included in Discovery, Free and Powerpack editions”, “locate not included in Free and Powerpack editions” – these are just notifications that a few packages some people might expect to be on the release images are actually not for space reasons. Nothing is actually broken. The packages are available and working from the public repositories.
“‘Help’ screen at boot does not display correctly” – genuine bug, nothing critical.
“kernel-enterprise incompatible with ACPI suspend” – not really a bug, just a limitation we consider it sensible to let our users know about. It’s an upstream incompatibility in the code. This is the kind of thing I mean when I say all distros have these issues, we just do a better job of telling people about them.
“XFS filesystem issues” – ditto. This is an upstream kernel problem.
“Slow internet response (particularly web browsing)” – ditto again. Problems with IPv6 and TCP window scaling are not at all Mandriva specific; they’re just often encountered by our users so we provide information and workarounds here.
“Issue with networking/firewire on Zepto/Compal models including Znote 6515WD” – extremely specific problem caused by bad hardware in a few particular laptop models. Would be nice to blacklist the offending modules based on dmidecode, but it’s hardly a critical issue for many users.
“Sound always plays through speakers on Zepto / Compal Znote 6515WD” – same again. This is very hard to ‘fix’ as the specific settings necessary for this one laptop are not the settings needed for other systems with the same sound hardware.
“ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting.” – genuine issue, I wish the packager would agree to switch to software crypto by default on this driver…
“PC Card devices not found” – upstream kernel issue. Affects many distros. Does yours tell you about it and what to do to fix it?
” Broadcom wireless network devices not working / unstable” – again, really just to notify users about an imperfect driver. The only real Mandriva ‘bug’ here is using this driver by default on hardware where it really doesn’t work very well, but at least we make it easy to use ndiswrapper instead.
“Some laptops (VAIO VGN-FS115B, Asus W6A) run slowly on AC power” – upstream kernel issue.
“3D acceleration not correctly activated on Intel graphics chipsets on x86-64 versions” – genuine issue.
“Writing to floppy disks is very slow” – genuine issue, when’s the last time you used a floppy drive?
“Invalid signature errors when installing packages” – genuine issue, we definitely need to handle the repository keys situation better. We’re working on this.
“Krita crashes when saving a file in PNG format” – genuine issue.
“Hydrogen cannot be installed” – genuine issue in a little-used package, already fixed with a candidate update.
“O3spaces does not work correctly on Powerpack+ i586” – just a consequence of the Java issue.
“UTF8 issue when reinstalling and keeping a previous /home that was not in UTF8” – upgrade issue; it’s rather hard to safely automatically migrate /home directories to UTF8, it’s safer to let the user handle it than destroy their data.
“Video players crash when trying to play high resolution videos (using Intel graphics adapters)” – upstream issue, impossible to ‘fix’ as it’s a question of how much memory gets allocated to 2D output and how much to 3D; wherever you set the balance it won’t be right for everyone. Affects any distro using i810 driver. Does yours tell you about this issue and how to avoid it?
“Packaged Azureus fails to work” – genuine issue, I wish we’d stop packaging Azureus and just let people install it from upstream…the packaged version is built against GNU Java and has piles of dependencies and doesn’t really work.
“Monitor powers off when viewing video with Totem” – hmm, someone else added this, I’m not familiar with it. Appears that they didn’t have gnome-power-manager installed on an upgrade install, for some reason. Must’ve been upgrading something old.
“3D-accelerated desktop not starting under GNOME” – not something that can be fixed ‘automatically’ as it’s a result of old GNOME user configuration files, and as a distro you *REALLY* don’t want to be messing with user profile stuff in /home. An Errata note is really the best thing that can be done.
“3D-accelerated desktop and video playback” – not a Mandriva bug, a limitation of beryl / compiz in that they’re not yet compatible with accelerated video playback. This section contains comprehensive instructions on setting several media players to use non-accelerated output. This affects anyone using compiz or beryl. Does your distro tell you about it and tell you how to switch to non-accelerated output?
“3D-accelerated desktop and some Java/Swing applications” – only relevant to people who install Java from upstream and not from our packages.
“Xgl and multiple user logins” – genuine issue, pity we didn’t get around to fixing it yet.
“Beryl and screensavers” – genuine issue.
“NVIDIA 3D acceleration not working” – upgrade issue, annoying but non-fatal and easily fixed.
“Broken pam configuration (commands such as su not working)” – upgrade issue. We were well aware of it prior to release but there’s just no good way to make an automated fix.
“Removable drives are no longer made available when connected” – upgrade issue; upgrading doesn’t automatically install the new kernel. Wouldn’t be a problem for anyone who keeps their kernel up to date, as they should…
I had a two years experience with mandrake (begening with Mandrake 8 and Mandrake 9.1 -good- and left after mandriva 10 due to unresolved problems with badly installed software and poor community support.
After a short Suse try, I switched to Ubuntu Dapper. Find all solutions to my unresolved problems due to good community support. Now with Feisty and I realize that the distro is really getting better every time. I do not intend to change …for now.
So this article does not surprise me.
shame about the lack of Cerdega, that is the kind of added value that tempts one to actually spend money on a distro rather than get the free editions.
i have always thought it a shame that SUSE have not released a more recent version of their commercial wine-rack product for suse.
Like lot of Osnews reader I have started playing with linux using Mandriva (I thought it was Mandrake 7.2).
It was way easier to install and configure than other distributions at the time.
And like many others I switched to Ubuntu one day and I stayed. Mandriva was very boring to use “for free” without subscribing to some service (for money), and ubuntu was offering a community support very impressive.
Recently I have decided to give a try to Mandriva 2007. The installation was absolute easy, and quite everything worked out of the box.. apart from the fact that, I was getting some random freeze for apparent no reason. In general I have noticed that for me Mandriva was working in a “esoteric” way. Some functionality worked, but sometimes not. I enabled desktop effect with no problem, but sometimes Xserver did not started.
At least in Ubuntu if something works.. well works.
Mandriva appeared to be instable, not very often, but showing some strange behaviour extremely difficult to understand or debug.
Currently using 2007.1 on my desktop at home and laptop… and 2007.0 on my server at home. I agree it does some strange things once in a while, but that has been my experience with fullly featured distro’s. Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse and ‘driva, all seem to have quirks and strangeness. I’ve played with several versions of those distro’s. I’ve come to the conclusion, tons of packages = some bugs. So I’ve stuck with a distro with good tools to fix the issues.
-Bounty
(p.s. note to self, stop buying ATI cards.)
I’ve been using mandriva since it was named mandrake and found some rough spots here and there. it’s also the case with 2007.1 but this time it’s not mandrivas fault.
My monitor, a syncmaster225bw simply resused to show any picture when using the build-in commercial fglrx driver together with my radeon9800 pro (i’m using powerpack). The oss ati driver works fine though. That forced me to ditch ati and purchase a new geforce card to make it work without problems. I’ve tried the same driver on pclos2007 tr3 through synaptic and encountered exactly the same problem.
That said, i think Mandriva have made a great distro with 2007 and 2007.1 – i now use 2007.1 spring for everything, including games and multimedia. I can only recommend it.
Sorry for any typeo’s. – if there’s any!
my 2 cents:
mandriva 2007.1 spring edition works for me very well. feels snappier than 2007.0 (I use KDE, so KDE improvements are noticed).
I upgraded using urpmi and all well quite well. by that I mean zero problems.
Just upgraded to 2007.1, everything has worked for me just the way I expected.