Mandriva Linux 2007.1 - Not bad, not great.
Mandriva seems to have trouble settling down on a release schedule. First it was every six months, then every year, and now they're back to six months.
I was also confused by their naming scheme. They've decided to name each version after the year in which it is released, which worked as long as there was only one release per year.
Thus, for this their second release of 2007, they've named it (drumroll please) "2007.1 Spring". Yeah, it doesn't really *pop* does it? Oh well. There's always 2008.
Install:
The LiveCD doesn't waste any time. After a brief bootsplash you're dumped into the live environment and asked to set your time zone, language and UTC or local time.
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Just another stupid review...
The guy doesn't specify the product he used (likely the Mandriva Spring Free version here) and claim for having no mp3 support...
Besides, Mandriva do have a scanner application which is Kooka...
And Java support is also available directly.
The fact is : this guy should have read a little bit more before downloading sthing.
And he should have download and tested the
Mandriva Spring "One " version instead.
Well, just another crappy review, like many of those we can see over the web :
- "OpenSuSe is great, wonderful" : whereas this distro is awfully slow to install, dangerous to install (no warning concerning the automatic resizing of the disk), and awfully slow to use, besides a dumb package manager.
-"Ubuntu is great, wonderful" : whereas this distro does still need more polishing, is really far from working really out of the box. (I personnally use Kubuntu, more buggy, but KDE addicted...)
Mandriva isn't THE perfect distro either, but please...stop the crappy reviews : write sthing true and accurate and fair, or just don't.
It will help most Linux fans a lot.
Mandriva Review
I installed Mandriva Spring 2007.1 (64-bit) version on my test machine while waiting for PCLinuxOS TR4 to appear.
My tentative plan is to install Mandriva on a server, and PCLinuxOS on the desktops.
However, I've not yet had time to configure Mandriva Spring as a server.
The installation was fairly easy in my case. Mandriva's custom disk partitioner/formatter remains one of the best.
I'm not fond of the orange/yellow Mandriva themes, so it did take some time to get the eye candy fixed to my preferences. Mandriva discusses how to remove/replace some of the default theme customization on their technotes page.
I'm not running any special background processes (httpd, mysql, postgresql, etc) at the moment. But I find the KDE desktop very responsive and snappy. Mandriva gets an A- for performance for the 64-bit version.
Metisse, Mandriva's new 3-D desktop did not work for me, as it set the busy cursor on my system as the only cursor. However, xgl and compiz worked fine.
With the CD iso holding a limited number of packages, most users are going to have to install/update from Mandriva's repositories. Mandriva's program to do this, rpmdrake, has been criticized recently for sluggishness, and lack of features. The sluggishness has been fixed. drakrpm does have a problem with the package search box not properly searching. This has been fixed in an update.
My major gripe is that rpmdrake will not provide a flat alphabetized listing of package files. Only a categorized listing. Many users have notified Mandriva about this in their forums during the beta/rc process, and this still hasn't been fixed.
Mandriva's large package repositories provide both Sun's Java and Kooka for scanners, so the reviewer really has no cause for complaint here. With a CD iso, distros have to pick and choose what packages to include and exclude.
This is Mandriva's first release without Warley, their release manager for several years. It's better than I expected, but not as good as I had hoped--it's certainly worth a look and a try.
Stability remains a question...too soon to tell--we'll know more about that with time. I'll start configuring it as a server soon.