“Mandriva recently released its first distro of the year, dubbed Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Like previous releases, Spring is available in five editions, two of which can be freely downloaded. I installed and worked with the USD 76 Powerpack edition, which includes support and several gigabytes of packages. Not only does Powerpack score over other multiple CD/DVD free-of-cost distros, it also makes competing non-free distros eat dust.”
Kudos to Mandriva for releasing such a good distro. Their hardware detection is great and their diskdrake partitioning tool is second to none.
Keep up the good work Mandriva!!!
Best Regards
Gireesh
Um, I guess I shouldn’t complain about free extra publicity, but Thom, this is a dupe
already posted here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17873/Linux.com-Reviews-Mandriva-20…
Dupe or not Mandriva 2007.1 kicks some serious a$$. I’ve always been a BSD guy and leaned toward RedHat/Fedora when I needed a Linux workstation, but I’m seriously digging this release of Mandriva.
A few months back I made a post on this site seriously ripping Mandriva (including the One cd which for some reason had no man pages). Mandriva has more than made up for the flaws I pointed out at that time. There is still only one very minor glitch I find odd. You can’t set the system hostname during install. Not a big deal because I can find my way over to /etc/sysconfig/network but as I remember Mandrake 9.x allowed you to set this.
Hostname can be set during network configuration. It’s true, I guess, that if you leave the network settings on default and don’t run through the network config wizard during install, you’d never be given the opportunity to set the hostname…
I did the network installation. While it does write the hostname to /etc/hosts, it does not update /etc/sysconfig/network and that’s the file that gets sourced on bootup to set the hostname.
Not the network configuration at the start of the installation, the network configuration near the end – when you’re presented with a summary screen of all hardware and are able to go in and configure bits if you choose to. Did you configure the network at that point?
Everything I’ve heard about 2007 Spring has been great, and yet no one seems to care. It seems like there are often more comments and stories about Haiku than Mandriva these days. Has the community just given up on it?
no…we faithful Mandriva users show our loyalty by paying for a club membership and supporting the distro in real terms in addition to testing and submitting bug reports:)
Seriously, I still rate Mandriva the highest for both noobs and advanced users alike simply because they have the best distro with some of the best configuration tools.
I have distro hopped like mad since I “discovered” gnu/linux via RH7.3 but Mandriva has won out all other distros ever since.
No one seems to care? Well, that is not correct. “Nobody seems to argue about it” would be more proper IMHO.
Mandrivas release works very well for almost everyone I have met so far (I haven’t found anyone yet who could get it installed). It is thus very different to distros like e.g. Ubuntu that work very well on some hardware and are impossible to run on some other hardware. Furthermore, Mandriva is a commercial distro (although they ship free versions), so the idea behind it is well known and the politics, too. This gives you less “material” for a lengthy discussion about Mandriva than e.g. for Fedora or Ubuntu, where it is not absolutely clear if they are (in Fedoras case) a testbed for RHEL (an ongoing discussion. IMHO Fedora is not a testbed) or if (in Ubuntus case) they will remain a free distro or become the next Microsoft (also discussed a lot, next to breaking the principles of OSS).
Mandriva 2007.1 is not a really controversial distro. The politics are clearly layed out and it just works (except for the one or other bug, but that iss normal for any distro) for most users, so they probably don’t see a reason to discuss endlessly if it sucks or not.
Despite what is often said in the online (and other) media about Mandriva, the simple fact is that it’s great. Like gireesh says, we buy a Club membership and support Mandriva as best we can. The reward is a distro which is easy to use, secure and comfortable. So comfortable that although some of us dual-boot with XP, in practice we stay in Mandriva. Why? Because we like it there.
I installed MDV 2007.1 on my notebook last week (I’m still running 2007.0 on my main machine for now) and once everything had settled down, it was fine. I don’t use the 3D desktop but everything works just as before, in fact the GUI software manager seems to be getting better all the time and the overall quality increases from one distro to the next. I’m happy with it and if I wasn’t, I’d still be using the free version. I learned, I became acceptably good at using it and I even write about my adventures with it now.
So when I see articles knocking Mandriva, I just ignore them. Mandriva suits me just fine and I ignore the illogical and/or ill-informed prejudices of others.
message in the Cooker mailing list:
«
Hi all,
2007 Spring is now released for a few weeks. 2007 Spring is probably one
of the best Mandriva Linux release in years and I want to thank all the
teams, and also particularly all the cooker contributors, who have
worked for long months on this project.
The distribution is solid and has greatly benefited from the additional
2 weeks of tests we put into polishing the result. And it shows: reviews
are good and sales are solid.
We are now taking a short break before the next run: Mandriva Linux
2008. But during this break, we are making several changes in
preparation for the next release.
First, I’m reorganizing the teams in the Engineering, promoting Anne
Nicolas as Engineering Director. Anne was previously leading the
Corporate team. She brings not only strong professionalism, but also a
clear community minded approach. She will involve all the engineers in
the Brazilian team, who can now play a central role in building the
distribution. She will be in charge of the development of all the
Mandriva Linux releases.
Second, Anne is working with the teams to draft the technical roadmap
for the 2008 release. This roadmap will also contain a set of guidelines
for contributors work. This is the starting point for discussing and
adopting requirements expressed by the Cooker community.
Third, Anne will organize the work and enhance the Mandriva policy for
contributors.
Mandriva is proud and honored to have one of the oldest free software
community for distribution editors, one of the largest and one of the
most open, with key contributors working on many of the core modules of
the relese. Anne will ensure that this ecosystem continues to grow,
opens even more, and also that interactions are better formalized
without breaking the fun in the game Wink
On this occasion, I’m proposing a further step and wish that the next
Free Software version of Mandriva Linux be made directly by a member of
the community.
Last, build platform improvements will also be resumed now that the
release is out. Phase 1 was about stabilizing things, so let’s head for
Phase 2 and implement some much needed changes!
Thanks for reading so far. Thanks for your support of Mandriva Linux,
and… Vive le Printemps!
—
dbarth
»
regards
Having tried Mandrake 7.2 & 9 (I think it was 9) I wasn’t impressed. My NIC was never detected so I wasn’t very happy.
At the time I was hoping Mandrake would finally pull me over to Linux once and for all but it failed. Besides the driver issue, I’ve never been impressed with RPMs. I’ve always encountered dependency hell be it Red Hat or Mandrake.
Ubuntu (Kubuntu specifically) is the distro that won me over. Is it prefect…no; but then again no Linux distro I’ve tried is.
I’m actually dropping Kubuntu for Debian this weekend and that’ll be my main OS. I still dual-boot with XP for games unfortunately but hopefully sometime in the not so distant future game developers will recognizes that Linux is ever increasing in popularity.