Mandriva Linux 2010 Review and Commentary
With yesterdays release of Mandriva Linux 2010, we decided to take it for a spin and see what's what in this new release.
Mandriva has always been a visually attractive distribution and this release is no exception. Let's walk through some of the installation screens to start with.
Installation
At first boot up we are greeted with the following screen:
We are then booted into the installer which they have done a nice job on visually.
Selecting our language, we can proceed.You will be greeted with a license which you need to accept to proceed. Once that is done, you will be given the option to partition the drives.
In this case, we selected entire drive and proceeded. There is then the option to use extra media, which is unnecessary since we've downloaded the dvd.
Proceeding past this screen we get the one below where we can select out desktop environment. In this case, we picked KDE to begin with.
Now it's time to setup the user accounts which we can do below.
There is then an option for final configuration changes, which is nice and gives some added flexibility for administrators and advanced users.
Once you have clicked past the above screen, there is an option to download updates prior to the install beginning. They have had this step for quite some time in previous releases as well and we like it as it saves time by doing it all at one time.
Once this has been completed, the installation will begin and proceed through the process. In our virtual machine, the entire install process took about 25-30 minutes which felt a little long but considering the size of the ISO (4.3GB) we can cope just fine with those times.
At the end of the installation, we reboot into our brand new desktop.
The Desktop
You will be greeted with the following splash screen:
You will be given a welcome screen that prompts for info and asks you to join or contribute to Mandriva. You can either decline these or fill them out, it's entirely up to you.
Once done with this screen you get to log into your new desktop.
Select your username and log on to see the new KDE desktop.
They've done a nice job with the desktop. It has a nice background with an attractive new theme and icons. We've always enjoyed Mandriva's visual presentation.. they work hard on it.
Exploring further, we see the control center has seen some changes and has a nice clean new layout. Another one of Mandriva's strong suits is there control center and it's integrated applications. All work very well and make for a nice overall experience for the end user. We quite like the layout and the organization they've put into this release.
Mandriva also does a great job with their menus as you can see below.
They have rid the system of the (in our opinion) obnoxious kicker style menu and added their own modification of the original KDE menu which we think is much nicer and easier to navigate (not everyone will agree though.. we just prefer it ourselves). For those who want the other option, you can right click on the menu and choose "switch to kicker style".
Looking at the Gnome desktop we're greeted with Gnome 2.28.1 which also sports a nice clean new theme that closely matches the KDE one.
And of course, a nice clean menu as well.
In our opinion, this is an excellent release. Mandriva has done a great job polishing it and there are plenty of applications included that will fit the majority of users needs. Items are well located in their respective menus and they've obviously put a ton of work into improving their control center applications which is, as we mentioned earlier, one of their biggest strengths.
Visually, this is a great release as well with nice clean themes and attractive backgrounds and icons. Good job Mandriva.
Pro's
- Very nice presentation on both desktops.
- KDE and Gnome are closely matched theme wise to allow for similar experiences.
- Well organized menus and structure.
- The fabulous Mandriva control center keeps getting better.
Con's
- A little slow on the install process.
What I most like about Mandriva is that I can give the distro to family members and it will be beginner level friendly, but I can also use it and do more difficult tasks. Somehow Mandriva has produced a distro that power users and beginners can use.
A very good distro (especially for KDE fans), but I'm nervous about many of the decisions the company has made, and I feel the openSUSE community is stronger and more robust (and definitely has a much bigger say in the development process).
I've tried a few Linux distros, mostly with Xfce as the desktop, but none compare to Mandriva's stylish implementation of KDE 4.3!
For me, it's been the first distro I've used that's really been a prettier experience than WXP's Luna.
The beauty aside, it's also been the first distro I've felt allows the user to configure things in a way that seems intuitive (perhaps in part because of my familiarity of XP, which is, of course, actually quite unintuitive lol). And the wireless works! Hazaahs are in order!
All in all, a wonderful release! Thank you Mandriva!!
Gnome version keeps throwing up Fluendo codec notice,.
when updating software it states the "transaction failed"
Thats good,..failed on what ? the weather too hot? or must one guess???
amazing update message appeared ,.
" do you wish to upgrade to 2009 spring distribution" err NO
do the staff know what they are doing ?
1. The incarnation of KDE that Mandriva sports is hands down the MOST POWERFUL EVER. It just looks like any other KDE distro... until you install the myriad of NEPOMUK helpers and TaskTop. You can make dance your e-mails in front of you, tag them as you like, join that with PERSISTENT tags (in Kubuntu they half-work and they are not persistent) and assemble that with info coming from Google, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. It is definitely sad that Sesame2 isn't up to the task (and it's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4), but, to be fair, nobody else took NEPOMUK to THESE extremes. Mandriva is the first, and that's why those Nepomuk helpers, NEPOMUK-enabled KMail and TaskTop are not installed by default. Testing, testing and testing are the key words here; this is buggy and alpha quality, guys, but Mandriva 2010.0 will be remembered in history for this.
BTW, I repeat, these alpha-quality packages are NOT installed by default, and KDE by default does NOT depend on them (without them, Mandriva will behave just like every other KDE 4.3 distro out there).
2. There is a bug in the control center. You can't do two or more installs in the Control Center; you have to close RPMDrake after your install and restart it to work. This is a known bug, and Mandriva is working on it.
3. About working on bugs: Mandriva has something that Ubuntu doesn't appear to have: actual EMPLOYERS whose work is to find bugs with Mandriva software and kill them. They killed some in my 3 days with Mandriva.
4. I haven't had to resort to some phony PPA to install the 190 release of NVidia drivers; Mandriva did the backport for me and installed it for me as an UPDATE. Learn, Ubuntu. THAT'S HOW THINGS SHOULD BE DONE. However, this has a downside: I can't install experimental software without manual compiling, and there aren't so many third party repos. Only the essential: look for the Penguin Liberation Front and Mandriva Italia Backports. The only two repos you'll ever need.
5. easyurpmi is NICE!
7. The most important for me: THE KORG M50 EDITOR (for Windows) WORKS FLAWLESSLY! That thing didn't work with every incarnation of Wine I've been with, but WORKS OUT OF THE BOX WITH MANDRIVA! I can, finally, think about using a Linux box to control my synth!.
Like Digikam who is a KDE program, it need dependies who is not installed from start.
If you want a nice KDE distribution who works "out of the box" I prefeer Pardus 2009.
http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/
You are so right. Pardus 2009 is soooo much better than any other KDE distro at this time. I had to go back to Mandriva 2009.1 after testing 2010. On my main system I'm still using Pardus 2008.2, by the way this is the best out there if you are looking for a VERY stable distro. On my personal laptop I choose Pardus 2009. I'd recommend it to anyone who's after a distro that just works. If Mandriva can take some lessons from Pardus and improve the quality I won't mind giving a nother go with Mandriva. But until they produce a release with high quality I'll stick with 2009.1 on my work-laptop and definitly with Pardus on my own systems.
Detects wireless card just fine, and they use their own network config/connection utility rather than relying on the buggy KDE4 widget.
Top effort from Mandriva - kubuntu looks like a poor entusiasts attempt at a distro next to this. OpenSUSE 11.2 may/may not be more beautiful and better integrated (we'll wait and see) - but the last 4 releases have been somewhat sluggish...so it will have to gain significant speed improvements to top Mandriva.
Linux Mint is probably the go for noobs who want gnome, and I think Mandriva has to be the my recommendation for noobs who want KDE.
If Texstar from PC LinuxOS wasn't so stuck in his ways and came up with a KDE 4.3 distro then maybe we could see about that as well - but until then Mandriva ftw!
By using the original AA1 distro, Linpus, or one of the Ubuntu tweaks, there's no way to use a net-PC with an external screen and at the same time close the net-PC.
Just for fun, I tried to install Mandriva 2010, and guess what, it worked 100% right out of the box. A little pussling with the screen set up, and the external screen works flawless.
I am actually surprised that a full blown distro like Mandriva Gnome runs so smooth and with a start up time that competes with the Ubuntu tweaks for net-books. Startup time is approximately 40 sec.
FYI, I am using an Acer Aspire One, 110 L, with 8Gb SSD and an additional memory card of 16 Gb. I have installed 1 Gb extra RAM.
My suggestion is therefore: if you struggle with a net-book and want to use it as a normal PC with external screen, keyboard and mouse, try Mandriva 2010.
It's a centric user - or centric group - way to organise and find datas, metadatas and files.
Terrific, in my opinion and I hope the network capabilities of this feature will be soon introduced.
Have a look here: http://doc4.mandriva.org/bin/view/labs/Nepomuk-mdv2010-RC
Mandriva is the only distro that features an interactive firewall out of the box. It alerted me
of port intrusion and gave different choices of how to proceed to protect the OS. Also, it features its own security framework like SELinux. It can't get any better than this.
-t
Pros:.
1. Dual boot installation went smoothly. I have it dual-booting on my Acer 4736z laptop with Windows XP.
2. Eye-candy works like a charm.
3. Since this is a DVD, I got a boat load of applications. I chose the KDE desktop. For some this plethora of applications may be annoyingly redundant but I love it. I didnt realize how useful Kontact and Digicam were, for example, until I found them installed by default.
4. Excellent documentation, built right in the menu. For example, it gives cookbook style steps on how to install the latest Java from Sun. So instead of relying on what's in the repo, get the latest version from Sun and install that.
5. I was pleasantly surprised that I could install vlc using the installer DVD as the repo and not have to download the packages! There were several other nice applications I installed by using the DVD alone. It saves a lot of time.
6. I haven't even activated the easy-urpmi repo and yet, all the media codecs in the system takes care of my mp3 and other multi-media files.
Cons:
1. I could not configure the login manager. It was only upon googling that I discovered you need to "su -" to unlock the login manager.
2. I cannot access new usb flash drives on first try. I need to reboot the laptop with the usb stick on the port before the system allows me to access it. This is not always the case though. Some new usb flash memory sticks can be accessed just fine on first try.
Overall I am pleased with Mandriva 2010 FREE DVD. I highly recommend that newbees like me try it! I also got the Mandriva Live ONE 2010 version and while it works to test system compatibility, I found that the FREE DVD version is the best version to install.
Thank you, Mandriva 2010.
For this I have installed Mandriva 2010 in my new Acer 5738Z Laptop using LILO Boot loader.
Cons:
Dual boot installation went smoothly. But after complete installation ON REBOOT the screen prompt me which OS you want to use.
After selecting Mandriva as a working OS the screen is black and nothing is appearing.
And on the other hand after selection of window is working smoothly as it works previously.
Anybody can help me to get rid off from this problem.
I am not sure if it works ... but try re installing Mandriav and give GRUB boot loader instead of LILO and then it should reboot orperoly in to Mandriva OR Windows XP.
Let me know how it goes.
I'd really appreciate if some one could help in that matter