Submitted by Linuxseekers reviews Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, and concludes: “In conclusion, there is no doubt that Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is a great release. Great artwork! The hardware support for this release has been excellent with exception of the support for the two of my USB-based TV tuners (Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 900 and the less well-known Compro type).”
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
Pretty good review, and I always have a soft spot for Mandriva as it was my first distro, my first plunge into Linux world. 😉
Mandriva 2008 is fast, beautiful and overall very well done. Right now, it’s the best kde implementation and I have it running great on my laptop.
It’s a shame that it wasn’t able to make the pci wireless card that I have on my wife’s desktop work. It’s a prism-based chipset that I tested with both windows and the latest kubuntu beta and works fine there. I would have preferred to use Mandriva on that computer too, but kubuntu will likely end up there as the wife needs to be able to get online.
I haven’t yet reformatted the Mandriva partition so if there is an easy fix for the wireless issue, I am more than willing to give it a try.
One last thing: does anybody know why Mandriva isn’t using network manager. It seems more reliable than their home-grown tool.
One last thing: does anybody know why Mandriva isn’t using network manager. It seems more reliable than their home-grown tool.
Because their own software is more tightly integrated with the Mandriva Control Center, allowing you to also configure network interfaces and such by just right-clicking on it? Besides, atleast I have always had some issues with network manager whereas this thing in Mandriva works like a dream.
if you post on the forums with a bit more detail about the hardware (lspcidrake -v output would be good), how you’ve tried to configure it, and what state it’s in at the moment, that’d be good.
net_applet (our tool) predates networkmanager and has always outdone it in features. for instance, we’ve had WPA support for, oh, must be three years now at least, it only got into networkmanager in the last year or so. every so often we do evaluate networkmanager as a replacement but it just never looks like a good idea.
My favorite distro ever. Mandriva’s Gnome is pretty nice. Love the new One wallpaper.
I wouldn’t have even bothered going down the Apple route. I have all the bling and reliability I ever wanted right here with this release. Also, having perforce had to endure Vista since Christmas as a preinstalled OS, in my feeling, the way Mandriva is laid out for the user is far more easily navigated and is by far more ‘intuitive’ to deal with than Vista, even after 10 years of Windows experience.
I think I will take back what I said before about Vista users probably clamouring more for XP than Linux as a way out. With distributions such as Mandriva at their disposal, it may not be the year of the Linux desktop just yet but more and more individuals may just find they have the epiphany of their own day of the Linux desktop sooner rather than later.
Edited – could someone please vote me down to a score of 1?! Again I have emerged with a score of 2 immediately. For the sake of equity, can someone do the decent thing?
Edited 2008-04-15 06:28 UTC
I think you get a higher default score if you have a high average score. It’s a legitimate mechanism, I’d say.
Couldn’t agree more – I just installed 2008.1 PP last weekend and it’s got everything – I paid for it and it’s worth every penny, looks good and flies on my vintage 2004 Athlon machine. I can even virtualise XP Pro on it (and anything else for that matter).
I’ve been a satisfied customer of Mandriva since 2004 and my installs of XP are just relics now, running relic software. When I build my new system, I will only run Mandriva – it does everything I need and problems are almost zero.