Submitted by The second beta of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Galilee, is now available. The release notes are available here. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this beta) is available here, and the detailed technical specifications are available here. This beta is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer. Future betas will be available in One live/install CD hybrid editions with proprietary drivers.
03 Spaces ( http://www.03spaces.com ) –> Nice to see that! Even though it is in the commercial version.
AppArmor replaces RSBAC : well, if someone from AppArmor would communicate as good as the SeLinux team does, it would be great!
Also thanks to the Mandriva team for preparing good documentations about releases like these ones.
I’ve been coding too long today. I read the title of this article as Microsoft Linux 2008…
I’m afraid that was vaporware
http://www.mslinux.org/
LOL… go to sleep then. That must’ve been quite a shock to your system
I really hope this time they won’t forget to install
locate and slocate as they were not present on the install dvd (spring 2007.1, free edition).
And someone has got to tell them that their theme looks like a kid computer toy. Everytime I have to reinstall the old theme (Mandrake Galaxy 9.2 which was way better than the new one).
Djamé
We use mlocate. It was mistakenly left off the 2007 Spring images, it will be on 2008.
Visual issues are inherently subjective, and you never get full agreement on what looks good. But the feedback we get indicates most users prefer our newer themes to our older ones.
To add to the announcement above – some major differences between this and beta 1: support for Suggests:-style dependencies, avivo driver as default for X1xxx-series Radeons (temporarily, for testing), possibly draknetcenter, the new consolidated network configuration tool (I need to check whether it got on the ISOs).
For those who have been following the betas of certain other projects, we would also point out that Mandriva has rejoiced in the possession of a graphical X configuration tool for something on the order of eight years, and easy printing configuration (and a default PDF virtual printer) for nearly as long.
> about mlocate :
Great
> visual issue : I know there’re very subjective but Mandriva used to be really good in this topic, that’s why I can’t understand why you changed the corner of the window from rounded to squared ? it’s so ugly now.
Remember the visual woaw was mandrake around the 9.2 series ?
it’s not anymore, compared to the default look ubuntu has, mandriva’s look looks like less professionnal and more like XP for exemple.
One thing which bother me the most is that you change the way the default desktop configuration without warning
the start menu used to be in the bottom from the very beginning of Mandriva up to Mandriva 2006 I guess, and one day, because of gome’s people choice, you simplified it and followed ubuntu, putting it on the top of the screen.
You, Mandriva People, must have to consider that your user base is loyal.
The biggest strenght of Mandriva has always been the drivers support and user friendlyness but you suck badly in public relation :
mcc is by far way better than the suse one and urpmi is really way underrated. You should provide a link to the plf site to allow user to simply add non official source to urpmi in one link and allow people to download any codec or non free software they would like to use.
be smart, add a meta package which will allows to run old binary (a lot of priotary software still use libc5 and glibc2.2 (houdini, allegro common lisp) and which will save us the assle of installing libc5, glibc2.2 and some old libtool.
Port the gcc_select tool from apple which allows the selection of gcc3.3 over gcc 4 and please allow scientist to still work correctly (i’m thinking of a tool using in Machine Translation whose name is GIZA++) which doesn’t run under mandriva 2007, I had to install manually the old 10.0 under /usr/local/old using the urpmi option –with-prefix and to run it under chroot, just because I updated my distrib…
come on, guys. You’re loosing it…
And yes I haven’t submitted bug reported, because whenever you came out with a new version, you mark the old bug as resolved even if they’re not (look for gparted or xfig bug I filled two years ago).
I like mandriva but really, I prefere mandrake as it was more user centred. This is not a rant post, I just want you to be again the more exciting distro over here.
Regards,
Djamé
ps : another bug. Whenever one creates an user, launch an xsession and for whatever reason, decides to erase the whole directory after this session the .profile is not created properly, the PS1 is “bash-3.1” instead of the default ps1 “user@machine dir”
Fred’s policy on GNOME is to follow upstream GNOME as closely as possible. Hence we followed their change in the default panel layout.
We cannot have any official links to PLF. It contains software that’s simply flat out illegal in major jurisdictions (most obviously dvdcss and win32-codecs) and hence we can’t be associated with it.
Mandriva’s GCC packages already use the Debian alternatives system (which we use whenever we want to have various alternative versions or implementations of the same command available). You can install GCC 3.3 and even 2.96 alongside the current version (packages gcc3.3 and gcc2.96) and then use the different versions in several ways: you can either explicitly call gcc3.3 or gcc2.96 , define the CC variable, or use update-alternatives:
update-alternatives –config gcc
(as root) and tell it which one you want to be the default.
I don’t know anything about Giza++. But in general, it’s very hard to ensure that obsolete software that is not updated by its authors will work with a modern distribution.
at least for dvdcss it’s obviously not illegal under european law. About win32 codec, I concur.
about update alternative, the compilation is not that hard, having two sets of library compiled for one or the other of compiler maybe a bit tricky. But it’s good to know it exists. it’s just a pity that this command is not listed at the end of man gcc, for exemple. How could we find about this command ?
About what you called obsolote software, i simply don’t agree at all.
You assume all programs should be upgraded whenever someone came with another library or api or whatever is the trend of the moment. But the kind of software scientists use are really costly to developp and yet to maintain especially if one version compiles fine and run fine for ten years.
Backward compatabilities should be the only thing that matters for an os seller, you can’t just trhough the baby and the water of the bath at the same time.
Even If I don’t agree, i can see the point for binaries compatabilities, but if a program is open source and uses posix call and no gcc trick, it shoud compile right under any new version. For Giza++ (http://www.fjoch.com/GIZA++.html, simply the state of the art for text alignement for those interested) it works right from gcc 2.96 to gcc 3.3 and I can see no reason why it doesn’t under new version of a given distro.
I’ve always been told that source compatability was the rule and it’s simply not true under linux world.
Why people should develop for an unix like OS if it’s not likely to be compatible in a few years ? that’s why we may see more and more acceptance of real unix (like solaris, or os x which maintains binary compatabilities even over change of processor not talking about different favor (from 10.0 to 10.5, everything is source compatible) where all sources are compilable without any problems.
I was told that LSB was the way to go to prevent such a thing, but it simply don’t work.
To go back talking about binary proprietary software, if a compagny has to change and provide binary for every damn distro, kernel version, library version, it’s just can’t work.
Think about the state of the games which have been developped by Loki. I wonder how many of them (except ut and quake 3) can run on a modern distro. It’s just a shame : I can’t order descent 3 and pay for it without having to work for hours to get it work on mandriva 2007 (to be honest, any of a new distro will have the same problem).
And it’s simply not normal. I shouldn’t loose my investment when I upgrade my distro.
It’s not a new argument, look at joel spolky’s “how microsoft lost the api war”.
If you want to be different from fedora, ubuntu and suse allow us to use the software we paid, we developped or we were trained just by having to install some metapackage like “bin compat” “gcc3 compat” or whatever you call it and please include this information when the dynamic linker failed
not “libwhatever.so not found. ”
but “libwhatever.so not found. This library is part of the package “bin compat”. do you want to install the missing library ? [y/N]
yes, pure science fiction, I know, but not too hard if your dependencdy database is well done.
Sorry if I’m long, but It’s nice to exchange with someone from the “inside”
Djamé
Looking at that page, GIZA++ hasn’t been updated since 2003. There have been several major GCC revisions since then. It’s simply not practical to stay on a version of GCC that works for this and maybe a couple of other old apps (3.3?) by default, and introduce huge difficulties in building more widely used and up-to-date software which is now targeting GCC 4.
A distributor’s job is always going to involve trade offs. In this case, I’m afraid, there’s just more benefits overall to defaulting to GCC 4 than GCC 3.
As I was saying, you’re watching this under the wrong perspective. You’re still assuming people have the means to follow every single revisions of a given software just to keep it source compatible whereas source compability is supposed to be the biggest strenght of OSS.
It’s the role of the os maker to make sure that software still run on the new version.
I’m not saying at all that the default should be gcc3, the default shoud be everything still working when I upgrade, not the opposite. If I’m paying 79 euros (the prize of mandriva 2007.1 in any french retail store), I want to be sure that the software I use will run in 3 or 4 years.
This is the whole point of big company certyfing for windows, solaris or red hat enterprise and not mandriva, they want to make sure that their custommers will be able to run their software for as long as they want.
And this is simply not the case with Mandriva (without a lot of asshle) whatever side you’re looking at it.
Forgot to mention: dvdcss would most likely be illegal under the EUCD, which like the U.S.’s DMCA, contains a clause forbidding the circumvention of copy protection mechanisms – even for legitimate purposes. So it’s very likely illegal in any E.U. state which has already passed a national law implementing the EUCD (as they are all bound to).
For those who have been following the betas of certain other projects, we would also point out that Mandriva has rejoiced in the possession of a graphical X configuration tool for something on the order of eight years, and easy printing configuration (and a default PDF virtual printer) for nearly as long.
Have you guys done any usability work on them for 2008?
I bought a laptop that came loaded with Mandriva (thank you HP) and the UI for most of the configuration tools was horrible. They actually look like they were designed 8 years ago.
Does Mandriva have at least one usability expert to review them?
Do you prefer a tool that works well or looks pretty?
The “usability” argument lately seems to be degenerating into a generic fallback for justifying lack of functionality. At the end of the day, if it does the job, it does the job.
“Do you prefer a tool that works well or looks pretty?”
Since when were those attributes mutually exclusive?
A well designed interface can actually enhance usability.
Edited 2007-08-26 06:38
I never meant to imply they’re mutually exclusive. In fact I was trying to imply that one doesn’t depend on the other, but I guess it came out wrong. I agree that a well-designed tool with a well-designed interface is a good thing, but I don’t think a well-designed tool should be dismissed because it lacks a well-designed interface, any more than a well-designed interface should justify a poorly-developed tool.
If that makes sense…
I think Mandriva is one of the best free distros today. It is a shame people seems to ignore it. Mandriva 2007.1 aka Mandriva Spring works out of box, with Nvidia, Wireless, multimedia codecs and more, with little configuration needed.
I was surprised when I was able to play wmv videos with no external dependencies at all. I don’t understand why Gentoo, Sabayon or Damn Small draw more attention than Mandriva (nothing against these two).
Besides, I understand why Ubuntu get so more attention, when I have a problem with my Linux box there is always a response available in a Ubuntu forum, and when I search for a new released program, its developer tend to offer source code and an Ubuntu package. For newbies, this is a great advantage.
Well, if you know the history of Mandrake, former name of Mandriva, you’d understand why they fell in popularity.
Linux users tend to have long memories and are picky when it comes to distros.
Mandriva may get some newcomers to Linux but to the 5+ year Linux users it’s pretty much dead.
With so many other great and free distros it’s better to support a truly free distro like Debian or Gentoo.
But yeah, it’s going to be hard for any distro to compete with Ubuntu.
Why is Mandriva not a truly free distro?
Well, have you looked at their website?
It’s a real dog and pony show. Finding and choosing life insurance is easier.
And they still have that stupid club that drove away most of their users.
And if you get the Discovery and most basic club membership you’re out 100 euro and get what’s equivalent to a type writer software in return.
Powerpack and Silver club is more than twice what Vista Business costs (OEM).
How do they expect to attract new users? With those prices? Unlikely.
I still use Mandriva as my preferred distro.
But you are absolutely right about their dog and pony show website and that stupid club.
Comments about the website are ok but you still did not answer the question. Mandrake/Mandriva has ALWAYS released free isos for their releases (remember SuSE and it’s ftp only install?)
Mandrake/Mandriva has always had their employees giving back to the open source movement.
The Club is something they need in order to survive. Mandriva is primarily oriented towards the desktop and there is where they would like to make money. Is that wrong?
If they had a multimillionaire backing them, sure they did not need any club. Fact is they deliver a damn fine distro that even Ubuntu is just catching up with in terms of configuration tools.
I am silver member there but only because I believe they deserve it (shortcomings and all…mind you).
Nowhere on the website do they say “you have to buy membership for this product to work”.
Asking for money does not make their distro any less free than Ubuntu…paying is a choice the user makes.
Pass on the pipe. I want whatever you are smoking.
Mandriva/Mandrake has always been a “truly free distro”. All of its tools are under the GPL as its the distribution itself and they have always released a completely free distro, besides the one with the additional proprietary bits.
If you are allergic to things like flash or proprietary codecs, and maybe we should all be, simply do dot install them.
In fact, Mandrake was a complete free distribution well before Suse release Yast under the GPL. Some of you people are ahistorical or simply like to spread disinformation, which serves no one.
Sometimes, when I hear of people pointing to Gentoo when discussing Desktop distributions, it almost makes me think that they are probably astroturfing for Microsoft or somebody else. By giving new users the impression that Linux is damn hard to use, which they might get if Gentoo is their first encounter, they actually drive them away.
Mandrake has had a graphical installer and has been easier to install than anything else for as long as I care to remember. Their partition manager is still second to none in ergonomics. Lest you think that I am some crazy Mandrake fan, I am actually not running it currently, although my family members do.
I have a mixture of Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and Red Hat on the networks and computers that I look after, but Mandrake is a fine distribution and I am tired of people spreading nonsense about it every time an article about it is posted.
But yeah, it’s going to be hard for any distro to compete with Ubuntu.
This reminded me of one of my favorite quotes that I had clipped some time ago, so I went and found:
Business Week, 1958: With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.
I agree, I had a very good experience when I last tried Mandriva. Aside from many legally included codecs, it has one of the best and easiest disk partitioners (which eased my first ever Linux installation two years back), an awesome control center, and not to mention the alternative “3D” desktop Metisse included as an option.
As for Ubuntu, one of my main reasons for using it is the solid forte it has in its community. It may be no better or worse than other distros, but it’s kind of where the party’s at (or more accurately, the busy intersection where you’re more likely to get directions).
“As for Ubuntu, one of my main reasons for using it is the solid forte it has in its community. It may be no better or worse than other distros, but it’s kind of where the party’s at (or more accurately, the busy intersection where you’re more likely to get directions).”
Interesting, when I started using Linux about 10 years ago, the same thing would have been said about Mandrake.
In this respect, I do agree that Mandrake squandered its huge lead over other distributions by having for a long time one of the poorest web sites one could find, along with being unable to deliver a consistent and clear message to the community about their roadmaps and products.
Ubuntu, from a marketing standpoint, has been a case study on how to do things well. From a technical standpoint, it does many things very well, but cannot be placed (in my opinion) alongside Red Hat, Suse or Mandrake, at least not yet.
Ubuntu, however, is good enough for many things and many users will continue to flock to it thanks to its welcoming and friendly community.
Here´s a free tip to Mandrake: outsourcing your forums was one of your poorest decisions as was creating two types of forums, the club ones where some users could post and the external ones open to all. I believe some of this may have changed, but it would take some very strong leadership to unify the disperse Mandriva communities so that new users would have an easier time finding their way around. After all, some of the arguments made here are that there is indeed safety in numbers and some users have even expressed their willingness to choose a product that they considered slightly inferior because they perceive it has a more vibrant community.
All distributions should take note of that fact.
The official Mandriva forums are open to all users and have been now for around two years. http://forum.mandriva.com/ . I agree it was a bad idea to initially make them Club-only.
We are working on the exact problems you describe from several angles at the moment. Wish I could be more specific, but expect more news on various changes next month.
>I think Mandriva is one of the best free distros today. It is a shame >people seems to ignore it. Mandriva 2007.1 aka Mandriva Spring works >out of box, with Nvidia, Wireless, multimedia codecs and more, with >little configuration needed.
I guess you’re not talking about the free edition ? it’s true that the powerpack really rules but seriously the free edition should have kept the original name they gave to it ; the limited edition.
At least with Gael Duval, the original spirit was kept all along : one great distro for every one.
It’s Free. That means it’s…Free. So of course you get no NVIDIA drivers, little chance of wireless working (since there’s hardly any wireless cards that work without non-free stuff), and a few other hardware issues.
But it’s very easy – http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removin… – to enable the non-free repository, and install all these packages. Of course, doing this also enables the main and contrib repositories, which contain *every* official free / open source Mandriva package – none of these are available only in the Powerpack.
It is also very easy to download One instead, which comes with them all included.
“It’s Free. That means it’s…Free. So of course you get no NVIDIA drivers, little chance of wireless working (since there’s hardly any wireless cards that work without non-free stuff), and a few other hardware issues. ”
that’s why you shouldn’t have stated that everything including NVIDIA and wifi work right of the box
I didn’t. The guy who did was using One (which is free, but not Free). So he was correct.
So your argument is that an OS can look like sh$t as long as it works. That may work in the data centre, but that argument is LAME and ridiculous on the desktop.
Edited 2007-08-26 03:44
If you want to be pendantic about it, then yes, I will argue that functionality trumps form when it comes to computer applications.
If blingy interfaces held value, then Apple would enjoy more than a single digit market share and Microsoft would never have had to bludgeon their enterprise customers into giving up NT for 2000 or XP, or now Vista.
The community is welcome to get excited about things like compiz or Gnome’s esteemed HIG as forward facing advancement’s for the linux desktop, and there’s nothing wrong with that, until the community starts thinking that is the cake instead of the icing. But dismissing capable applications because the interface is archaic belittles the developers working on those applications, and diminishes the value those applications hold for people that use them.
A shiny, well-designed interface is a joyful thing to behold, but I’m more concerned with being able to use my computer. And while I’d like to have both, if I’m forced to choose, I’ll settle for the latter. As will the vast majority of the population.
So, I’d argue that the LAME thing is arguing that a sh$t-looking OS should be easily dismissed if it works. Substance sells more than glamour, otherwise the industry would be shaped much differently than it is right now, no matter how many plugins the fusion community can come up with.
Don’t get me wrong, usability and HIG are important; I just don’t think they’re as important to users as people like to think. I don’t want to dismiss them, though, any more than I would want to dismiss an application that works well but lacks them. That was my point.
Will this include KDE 4?
From the ‘major new features’ section
…to the kind of mass recognition Mandriva (Mandrake) had when I first discovered it (as Red Hat with bug fixes) is going to take some doing.
Back in the early days, Mandrake was known as the easy to install/use/administer Linux distro. When every other distro had either hard to install free option (early free SuSe was an FTP installation only) or needed a computer science degree just to get X up and running, Mandrake was the forrunner. Centralized administration, witch soon included wizards for basic server setup, was a god send for both newbies and people looking for no nonsense.
Although I still like to hear about Mandriva, and wish them the best of luck, I find myself strangely reluctant to download and install one of they’re recent offering. Why this is the case, I don’t fully know and although I was very disappointed when Gael Duval was fired, I am hardly going to judge a distros technical merit on its companies human resource decisions.
I do remember quite a few people getting upset with some of the technical decisions Mandriva has taken over the years, not to mention, for a while at least, irregular update schedules. Also, with the option of PCLinusOS, as far as free operating systems go, I and quite a few others have found a somewhat better alternative.
I have tested PCLinuxOS over the last two years and always found it promising, but lacking. For instance, their recent final release would simply not start the livecd because the installer could not find the cryptoloop image that it used. I tried this on about five different computers.
I do have a lot of admiration for texstar and I used to install his Mandrake packages back in the day, but I don’t like one-man shows. They are great for pushing a creative vision, but terrible from the point of view of creating a self-sustaining community.
Maybe, my characterization of PCLinuxOS as a one-man show is wrong, but it certainly fees that way. It seems that not that much independent development occurs within PCLinuxOS and they are always riding on the coattails of what Mandrake is able to do, which is perfectly legitimate, by the way.
Besides using apt-for-rpm, and they were not the first to this (Conectiva was) I would love to hear what else PCLinuxOS has really contributed to advance the state of the art of desktop linux and including more proprietary bits by default and better artwork doesn’t count. I am asking about serious technical contributions.
Edited 2007-08-26 21:53
Apparmor has replaced RSBAC as the in-kernel application security tool
Was rsbac activated as default on a mandrake box? I know from compiling some mandriva kernels in the past you could set the various options for rsbac.
No, we never actually enabled RSBAC by default.
I keep wondering why Ubuntu and family seem so popular compared to the most full-featured distro on the planet. I can game on it, organize pictures(both digital and scanned), print, listen to music, archive my music collection, organize finances, surf the web, email, everything I need to do, I can do with Mandriva.
Things can be done from the console, or from Mandriva Control Center. I have only had to compile a few pieces of software for it, because it was not available via URPMI, and only one or two of them I was not able to get installed. Pretty good for not being a programmer…
On the other hand, I have had a couple of times when I wanted to abandon them because of goofy stuff like firing the founder(!) and stuff like that. For all that, Mandrake/Mandriva has been my main distro since version 8.2. The biggest recent thing is 2007 will not boot on my mother-in-law’s computer, but neither will any distro that came out this past spring. ISOLinux problems, I think…
I keep wondering why Ubuntu and family seem so popular compared to the most full-featured distro on the planet.
Maybe because of firing the founder or the near bankruptcy issue. Who knows. Personally wherever thereis C,perl or bash that’s my home. As long as its any unix,osx or linux i’m in.
As much as Adam W. is professional and fair-play, I always why one would use Mandriva over Fedora ?
Fedora has more packages in its repos, more up to date, it is a very flexible RPM distro, and once the livna.org repos are enabled, you can download pretty much anything with yum…
Both Mandriva & Fedora release every 6 months…
With all due respect to the Mandriva people, what do Mandriva provide that Fedora doesn’t ?
Hey Caraibes,
I recognize you from Beranger.org. Anyways, KDE integration with Fedora is pretty bad. You manually have to run Pup to keep your system up to date, while under Gnome you will get a notice saying there updates to download. There are no QT equivalents to Pirut/Pup. I understand that this is the first release with KDE as part of the official release. I really don’t know how to describe the difference between Fedora and Mandriva with respect to KDE except to say that it seems KDE was an afterthought with Fedora. Hopefully, they will do a better job as Fedora puts out newer releases. Also, nothing beats the Mandriva control center. It is too bad that only PCLinuxOS is the only other distribution that incorporates this feature. If you are into KDE, Mandriva is a much better choice.
Regards,
Patrick
Well, both answers make sense… I realize that the situation seen from a KDE user makes Mandriva more attractive.
I am a Gnome user, and I sometimes use Fluxbox on lighter system… So I didn’t take the KDE factor in consideration, so both of you guys have a valid point…
I must admit using Fedora only in my main box (because it is simply the best in that particular assembling of hardware), and Debian Stable on all y other desktops…
It’s easy for me.
1. KDE is main DE for mandriva.
2. There is no ather like Mandriva’s control center.
I’v tried to get used to Fedora but failed.
“Fedora has more packages in its repos, more up to date”
To my knowledge that’s simply not true. There are substantially more packages in the official Mandriva repositories (over 14,000) than in the official Fedora repositories. As far as I know, Fedora has no official equivalent to Mandriva’s backports repositories, which means we have a substantial advantage in providing up-to-date versions of software for stable releases.
“and once the livna.org repos are enabled”
You don’t need such third party repositories on Mandriva. They exist, but are much smaller and less vital. This gives you the advantage of a more cohesive package base; you get 14,000+ packages that are all built on the official Mandriva build cluster by the official Mandriva buildsystem, against each other.
“With all due respect to the Mandriva people, what do Mandriva provide that Fedora doesn’t ?”
Better KDE packaging, more configuration tools, more packages, official non-free repositories, backports…
1) Stability.
While RHES is a bastion of stability, my experiences with Fedora have been absolutely terrible.
2) Guaranteed security updates for 18 months on even free products.
3) A better control center.
4) A decent implementation of KDE.
For starters:
*Both* Gnome and KDE get the same amount of support. Both work beautifully and both QT and GTK applications run in “the other” desktop fuly integrated.
Then, the number of official packages available on Mandriva is comparable to Debian. On Fedora you don’t have as many packages officially available.
Also, Fedora is not that stable. Fedora’s configuration tools are behind Mandriva’s Control Center.
Fedora feels like testing ground for RHEL.
Mandriva feels like a real distro, not like a testing distro.
Peace
In case you have not noticed, Mandriva(Texstar Edition) is #2 on the
Distrowatch hit list and about to supplant Ubuntu in another week or two.
So yes, it is still very relevant.
> In case you have not noticed, Mandriva(Texstar Edition) is #2 on the
> Distrowatch hit list
Ehm… Are you sure about this? This is what I see in the Page Hit Ranking table for default setting, 6 months:
Rang Distribution H.P.D*
1 Ubuntu 2620<
2 PCLinuxOS 2464>
3 openSUSE 1476<
4 Fedora 1331<
5 Sabayon 1160>
6 Debian 1026<
7 Mint 986<
8 MEPIS 943<
9 Mandriva 780>
It looks almost the same for the other time ranges. I can remember times when it was on #2. Now Mandriva gGoing down constantly 🙁
2 PCLinuxOS 2464>
What do you think he meant by Mandriva(Texstar Edition)? You might want to brush up on the origins of PCLinuxOS.
PCLinuxOS is a fork of Mandrake Linux 9.2. Since 2003 it has not much to do with Mandrake and even less with Mandriva.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pclinuxos
Oh dear, I don’t want to raise anyone’s hackles by bringing this up again, but obviously it needs to be.
PCLOS 0.93 series was a fork of Mandrake 9.2. PCLOS 2007 series is a fork of Mandriva Linux 2007: they rebased the entire PCLOS off Mandriva Linux 2007.
This is no reflection on the quality or otherwise of PCLOS, just a simple statement of fact. PCLOS 2007 is heavily based on Mandriva Linux 2007. PCLOS did not branch off permanently from 9.2 and follow its own path from there, it has continued to rely quite heavily on Mandrake / Mandriva as a base ever since. This is acknowledged by Texstar and mentioned on the PCLOS website.
Can you please provide a link to the place on the official site where I can read about this Mandriva 2007 connection you mentioned? The only official connection to Mandriva (Mandrake) I can find is this one:
http://docs.pclinuxos.com/History
“…PCLinuxOS was based upon work by Mandrake/Mandriva (v9.2)…”, no references to further connections with Mandriva or Mandrake.
I don’t believe that specifically is mentioned on the website, but see:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=2…
post #47:
“Last year we did a rebase against an updated Mandriva to get an updated code base to work from mainly gcc and glibc due to time and resource limitations.”
which was a big-ass thread in response to a comment I made in a Distrowatch Weekly thread, where I actually went and compared PCLOS SRPMs against Mandriva ones.
Yes, I was talking about the free edition. Since Mandriva 2007 they are releasing the free One cd with proprietary drivers and codecs. It is a live CD that you can use to install your system. I think this method of installation is better than traditional ones for speed and simplicity.
It has a fair selection of software, and it can expanded easily via http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ . In this site, after providing basic information about your system, you get a bunch of commands to copy and past in your terminal, after that you can use Mandriva graphical tools to pick whatever piece of software you need/want.
I see this is not a problem anymore, but the localization in my native language (portuguese) is excellent. Mandriva 2007 was the first distro who could detect and configure my HP laserjet 1020, I had to boot Windows XP only to do my printing before.
To be fair, the only grip a have with Mandriva is the relative lack of documentation for the new adepts. It would be nice tell everyone about tools like easyurpmi e.g.
So when you said it supported NVIDIA right out of the box, it’s not true because their drivers are not included into the free edition, the same for most of the wifi wrapper around ndiswrapper.
About the localisation, they support tons of langage since the very beginning, including bask, finnish and even britain, so it’s not something new. It’s one of their strenght. I think that portugese support was here way before connectiva was bought.
Despite all of this I’m glad that they keep the idea of metapackage from connectiva but i’m sad they didn’t really push it to its extent.
I’d be glad to have a lot of metapackages
console
X11
gnome
KDE
E17
gcc Devel
Java Devel
latex
Video Tools
and so on
and not having to dig around too many times
that would ease a lof ot thing.
[adamw@lenovo dejavu]$ urpmq task
No package named task
The following packages contain task:
…
task-c++-devel
task-c-devel
…
task-e17
…
task-gnome
task-gnome-minimal
…
task-kde
task-kde-devel
…
task-x11
there’s quite a lot of ’em.
So when you said it supported NVIDIA right out of the box, it’s not true because their drivers are not included into the free edition,
Read again the parent post:
Yes, I was talking about the free edition. Since Mandriva 2007 they are releasing the free One cd with proprietary drivers and codecs.
While the Free version has no proprietary drivers, the One Live CD has them.
And this is because “Free” means “Free as in Freedom”, including only Free Software.
Proprietary drivers are not free software, thus, not included in the Free version.
This is why you have available the Mandriva One Live CD, with proprietary drivers. And it has a big icon on your desktop called “Install”, so you can install the distro.
Peace
Not sure about the version you used, but in my system the free Mandriva One 2007 Spring give me out of box NVIDIA 3d support and my ralink wireless card was detected using the rt61 module.
There is a version of Spring without any proprietary or non free code, maybe you are somehow making a mistake?
I don’t know what all that involves, but it sounds like very good news. When they first implemented udev, I had a devil of a time tracking down why I lost all ethernet connectivity. It turned out udev had arbitrarily swapped eth0 and eth1.
I wish Mandriva introduces more commercial products which will make some sense to the end user.
Paying 50-150 EUR for something you can get for free is simply way too much and there is no big added value in that.
What about selling cool original CD/DVD covers for Mandriva releases? Users can download ISO image for free but for some reasonable price they might be interested to buy the original cover. It should be something graphically really cool, something you can’t print with your cheap inkjet (e.g. with nice hologram label, engraved text). What do you think?
Edited 2007-08-28 17:11