Linux is making a name for itself as a better and more secure system. Mandriva managed to fuse this with one of the most user friendly distributions ever created.
Mandriva Linux: The next generation Distro ?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
> Nautilus – A very light but efficient File manager
ROTFL!
I’m rather dissapointed in LE2005. I had been running 10.1 on a laptop at home, and I did a fresh install with LE2005 and found it to be less stable than the previous version. X seems to be where most of the problems are coming from. Not impressed with LE2005 at all.
Is if it will automatically detect and configure my Linksys wireless lan pci card. Until linux does this for me, I’m afraid I can’t play.
“However the waters are shifting” … ?
I could not tell if english was the author’s native language. Unique phrasing aside, his description of Mandriva was detailed and informative.
I would really like to use linux, any linux! But I can’t get any of the modems in my collection to work with any distro that I’ve tried. I bought a Linspire equiped computer from F**’s last month which did not support the modem that was installed in the computer (no surprise). I have been able to use Linux installed computers with various ethernet cards including Linksis. But those installations don’t support my sound cards or my printers or my flash card reader or my scanner. Hey, if all you want to do is run pirated old fashioned Unix programs just in order to “screw the man”, then your welcome to that cheesy club of socialists and thieves. But hey again, IBM supports Linux. You know IBM, who just sold the Thinkpad to a Chinese outfit, and who just lost the G5 business from Apple. Yeah, they’re really the business I want to trust. I wonder if IBM customers ever log on with modems?
Cheers
Use an external modem.
I don’t understand your comment. I run GNU/Linux on multiple systems from p2’s to p4’s various hardware. I’m not saying I don’t have proplems but nothing like you described. I have completly abonded MS at home and only use it work.
it was a really bad attempt at trolling….
“But those installations don’t support my sound cards or my printers or my flash card reader or my scanner.”
ANY distro supports most of the hardware you gave a mention too…. however, you never named names !
but the most telling thing to show it was a troll was this….
“if all you want to do is run pirated old fashioned Unix programs just in order to “screw the man”, then your welcome to that cheesy club of socialists and thieves”
hmmmm
look ron, if you cannot give proper examples, or do not comprehend the differences between a Linux system today, and a UNIX system of ages past, or the difference between open source and “pirated” proprietary software, then keep quiet… your ignorance is showing
I like when people say they won’t switch to Linux from Windows because Linux won’t autodetect and configure all of their hardware for them.
Because Windows does that so well.
What does that have to do with “Mandriva Linux: The next generation Distro ?” ????
if you let windows auto detect an configure yur hardware i pitty you. windows generic drivers are the most horrid attemps at using hardware. not to mention the settings windows usually determines to be “safe” only work on occasion, if the moon is full, an you stand on one foot, with yur tung out.
linux isnt perfect, but atleast i dont hafta perform rituals on my box to disable thingsa like windows file protection, or remove programs that are so ingrained that the OS crashes upon you forcefully ripping them out of it.
Mandriva in the past caused me alot of grief but I held on.Gives me a decent file server.I only seeing it getting better.
“Is if it will automatically detect and configure my Linksys wireless lan pci card. Until linux does this for me, I’m afraid I can’t play.”
Mandriva does this. It’s the only distro that will detect and configure that card that I have come across.
“I like when people say they won’t switch to Linux from Windows because Linux won’t autodetect and configure all of their hardware for them.
Because Windows does that so well.”
No windows does’nt do it well. But all the hardware companies have drivers easily available for download and an install is just a click away, so it is still quite easy.
And in linux it is still a pain in the ass. I have yet to get all of my hardware working in years of playing around with linux on a variety of computers and distros.
And I always have to ask myself, is it really worth all this hassle? No, it is’nt.
In fact I have found most linux distros to be less stable than Windows XP. And Mandriva 2005 LE is the most unstable linux distro I have used to date.
I had enough of SUSE, (9.3 was the final straw) because I found it too buggy and because of some features (or, in some cases, luck thereof)
I found Mandriva 2005 decent and I have even considered using it.
But it is very unlikely that I’ll ever again be caught in the endless RPM distros’ update cycle.
The day they make one that you install once and keep updating forever (like Debian) I’ll seriously consider it. But it will never happen: how would they make a profit?
If you research the hardware before you buy it, if you’re willing to learn, if you don’t like getting overcharged for apps, if being free from some B.S. EULA is important to you or you like the idea of not being continuously under siege by malware, than Linux might just be for you.
But thank you, trolls, for putting in an appearance in this thread. The internet would be a boring place without you.
“Is if it will automatically detect and configure my Linksys wireless lan pci card. Until linux does this for me, I’m afraid I can’t play.”
Mandriva does this. It’s the only distro that will detect and configure that card that I have come across.
“I like when people say they won’t switch to Linux from Windows because Linux won’t autodetect and configure all of their hardware for them.
Because Windows does that so well.”
No windows does’nt do it well. But all the hardware companies have drivers easily available for download and an install is just a click away, so it is still quite easy.
And in linux it is still a pain in the ass. I have yet to get all of my hardware working in years of playing around with linux on a variety of computers and distros.
And I always have to ask myself, is it really worth all this hassle? No, it is’nt.
In fact I have found most linux distros to be less stable than Windows XP. And Mandriva 2005 LE is the most unstable linux distro I have used to date.
:…The day they make one that you install once and keep updating forever (like Debian) I’ll seriously consider it. But it will never happen: how would they make a profit?…”
You should have a look at PCLinuxOS. Texstar who used to provide many great enhancements to Mandrake started it and it has moved along at a furious pace. He uses apt with rpm’s and you can always stay up-2-date with a apt-get dist-upgrade.
Preview 0.9 is getting ready to be released soon.
Much better looking than mepis and an incredible community to help you with any issues.
Check it out
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/
@anonymous penguin:
You can do that on MDV already. MDV Cooker is the same as Debian sid, the rolling-updates development distro. Install it, do ‘urpmi.update -a’ then ‘urpmi –auto-select -v’ every day, and you get a continously updated distro without ever having to reinstall. Of course, since it’s the development distro it’ll break occasionally, but hey, same as sid. My laptop hasn’t had a reinstall for several years now.
“You should have a look at PCLinuxOS.”
Yes, that looked like a dream come true, but unfortunately the last couple of releases haven’t worked well for me. My hardware? Who knows…
I’ll definitely have a look at 0.9, thanks.
I agree, mandrake has given me many problems on different computers. I think slackware is good if all you want is
basic linux that works basic only. SUSE is much better if you
want to use linux in fact if i could no longer use xp or 98
i think SUSE is the best linux, but i still like windows
xp & 98 better. I however think linux is very good if that
is what you like. I dont like the constant distro upgrades
(SUSE 25.1, 27.2, mandrake 14.7 14.8…….) Now the live
distro’s are great.The perfect setup for me, windows on my
hard drive, linux on my cdrom.
Well, yes, I have been considering that, but I have always delayed it.
Is Cooker as buggy a SID?
I don’t know, but Sid has been very stable of late.
However with Debian I run a mixed system: tracking testing, getting bits from Sid or even from experimental (KDE 3.4.1 for instance)
At the moment it is wise to stop tracking testing for a while and use stable as the main branch.
How would I do all this with Mandriva?
If the new bimonthly releases were instead an ongoing repository (like Debian testing), that would make a lot of sense to me: find a way of giving access to paying members only.
“I agree, mandrake has given me many problems on different computers. I think slackware is good if all you want is
basic linux that works basic only. SUSE is much better if you
want to use linux in fact if i could no longer use xp or 98”
Having used both Suse & Slack for many years, I’d have to say your way off.
Basic Linux? I’m not even sure what you mean by that, unless you mean a system that complies damn near anything you throw at it. Suse is great with a nice rpm repository, but it really kills you on anything thats not prepackaged.
Mandrake pretty much falls into the same pitfalls as Suse.
Just they try & keep up with the latest/not always greatest versions of alot of progs.
Saying that Suse is decidedly better than it is silly IMO.
I’ve seen Yast stir up enough rpmhell cocktails that have to be fixed, wasting user/admin time.
You can’t mix branches on MDV, no, unfortunately. Well, you can try, but it’s not supported and it usually breaks rather spectacularly (perl is the normal culprit). I’m looking into urpmi access for the new Club releases now, with the current authentication system we couldn’t very well restrict access to Club members only, though. It might have to wait until the new authentication system is done.
“I’m looking into urpmi access for the new Club releases now, with the current authentication system we couldn’t very well restrict access to Club members only, though. It might have to wait until the new authentication system is done.”
Well, if a good, working solution can be found I’ll seriously consider paying for Club Membership
I can run as many Debian derivatives as I like, but they are very much of the same at the end of the day.
LE2005 can’t play video files properly. I’ve tried every player with all the codecs packs available from the mirrors and there are always problems with with MPEG-1, MPEG4 or WM9 files. I usually get the sound and a blue screen instead of the video. Linspire works much better in that area.
My experience with Mandriva has been excellent. I’m using it on several laptops and a slew of workstations (at work), and have yet to find any hardware it has balked at save a the D-Link 802.11g card I replaced a NetGear MA401 802.11b card with. In that case, I downloaded the madwifi driver and installed it in 5 minutes and everything worked — encryption keys and all. Under XP SP2, the card still has issues using D-Link’s provided driver. Oh well.
I bought a new USB scanner, plugged it in, and it just worked. XP SP2 also worked, but required I load the vendor’s software.
However, I do have a beef with Mandrake in that they do something very annoying — they customize the distribution by patching the kernel and various packages. This is the source for 95% of the issues people have with it (SuSe has the same problem). Moreover, the patches change the names of the standard configuration files used by things sometimes (such as the standard icon and image names for KDE). Patching the kernel to include Supermount is also fantastically stupid as it doesn’t get along with hotplug (also installed by default).
Apps crashed (SegFault), KDE was as old as 3.2 (while 3.3 was bundled on the CD I didn’t figure out how to get it installed properly).
IMO RPM distributions are much more difficult to mantain than Debian-based, especially if you don’t get the packages directly from the Internet. Apt & Synaptic are much more flexible, especially at handling dependencies and using multiple sources at the same time.
The graphical configuration tools were pretty nice though, probably the best I’ve seen. But why do they now use a dead penguin as their logo?
It should be pointed out that Mandrake uses URPMI, which is only different from apt in that it presents a hierarchy of packages.
Mandrake includes packages to use the RPM-based version of apt and synaptic. So, there’s nothing particularly “difficult” about using RPM-based distributions. A URPMI repository is a little easier to setup and maintain than an apt repository, but you have the choice of dealing with either sort (or both) with Mandrake.
Incidentally, upgrading to KDE 3.3 involved adding the KDE 3.3 directory on the CD to your list of package sources in the Mandrake control center (software management), and then selecting update.
probably the best reason to use mandriva or mandrake…
wonder if any other distro will be using it soon ?
I’ve had similar problems with video under Mandrake but this
*MIGHT* work – if you hear the sound but see nothing but blue, or there’s no sound but the slider is advancing or the time is counting up, try right-clicking on the the blue area.
You may have to do this more than once since it may sometimes pause the video ( but it will be viewable) and another click will advance it but it’ll switch back to a blue screen.
It’s pretty lame that a distro as old and popular as Mandrake let this slip through testing.
what Linksys card so you have? They are not all built the same, different models/versions have different chips in them. I have three (prism) Linksys cards that work out of the box in Linux. I have another (damn broadcom) card that only works with Ndiswrapper but it still works. It might be a little work, but almost any wireless card works in x86 Linux.