Mandriva Linux 2007 RC1 has been released. This new release brings the Ia_Ora theme to KDE, and fixes some bugs concerning proprietary video drivers (especially nVIDIA), the b44 network driver, and much more. You can get it via the development (Cooker) mirror trees on ftp and http, and via the preferred method: .iso images (available through the same mirrors as the Cooker ones). There is a changelog too.
I guess no one cares this crap has been released. Usually there are tons of comments. I am sorry if I sound negative, but any company that will get rid of their main man, Gael Duval, is off my list of approval. Well not really approval, because, who really cares what I, a simple man approves. More of a great dissapointment to me and others in the community. Why even use this if we have PCLinuxOS, that is free and way better?
Gael Duval was not and had for a long time not been the ‘main man’ at Mandriva when he departed. He was working mostly from home as the head of the community department; he was not directly involved in the management of the company or the development of any products. This was explained at the time, but obviously it needs to be explained again. Please judge the product on its quality and not on your judgment of the company’s internal politics.
We do care. It is just that we are busy trying it out rather than make comments
No seriously, have you seen any distro that has such good hardware detection, partitioning, mix of gui tools and power tools and is newbie friendly? I also hope that you know that PCLinuxOS for all it’s goodness is based off Mandriva Linux?
Are there problems with Mandriva? Yeah sure, but which distro does not have them?
2007 is shaping up to be a very good release (just as 2006 was till they pushed in Kat and the XOrg from cvs at the last moment). Hope they dont do such things now.
Best Regards
Gireesh
Well, we do care about it, but there is nothing negative to talk about, so what shall I write here except: It is very stable, almost bug-free by now and lightning fast (Boot time under 30 seconds on my machine!), while looking fresh and being bleeding edge (KDE 2.5, Gnome 2.16, Gimp 2.3,…).
Yes, PCLinuxOS is nice, but without Mandriva, it wouldn’t exist, as already pointed out, it is based on Mandriva.
And Mandriva is available for free, just to mind you. Since many, many years! Please don’t spread false information. Instead, grab a copy of it and test it yourself. It is amazing. 
adamw, you did a really great job this time. It is – without any doubts – the best distro Mandriva has ever released. Two thumbs up from my side.
I guess that Mandriva will again be the distro to beat, once 2007 is officially released.
One final note: Other distros also lost their founders or fired them. Who cares? This is a job and in jobs there is fluctuation, wether you like it or not.
>while looking fresh and being bleeding edge (KDE 2.5,
All I can say is: wow!
Yeah I noticed!!! 2.5, they sure are bleeding edge distro. So bleeding edge, I switched to Zenwalk.
Ooops… it is a typo, guys.
I meant 3.5.
what happened to the kernel-secure mandrake used to ship as well?
Humans can’t allways be trusted and neither can software.When will mandriva include SELinux or AppArmor?
We already include RSBAC.
Just installed Mandriva livecd. Everything works on this dual-core machine, even 3D effects/compiz desktop is working with one click! This machine has an onboard Intel video card. I’m very impressed!
The new color scheme is nice touch, also. I only wish they have a better icons theme. Getting bored with the same old icons.
Yeah, I was impressed as well with the KDE live cd. The artwork is really cool, but I agree with you, the icon theme now looks so dated and so does the galaxy window decoration.
I’ve been running Cooker(Mandriva’s Devel version) for awhile now and recently did a clean install of 2007 in beta. A quick sync up with the mirrors and PLF (for proprietary nonsuch) and it was all happiness and rainbows. They have cleaned quite a bit. Also, in contrib there are a ton of kernel options. I’m currently running Kernel 2.6.17.9-mm-desktop-1mdv multimedia kernel available in contrib.
I was impressed as well with the KDE live cd
I was not, there was to may annoyances for a RC. The most noticeable was the crapiest looking fonts I have seen on a linux install since 200 or so. For some reason it used a unscalable helvetia like font of some kind, I thought that was something that should not happen anymore.
the icon theme now looks so dated and so does the galaxy window decoration.
In my opinion the Galaxy window decoration is the ugliest decoration used by any distribution avaliable, and a good thing they have decided to get a new one as default. I think picking nearly anyone from kde-look.org would have been better than that one.
Sadly the new one la Ora is not that good either, for one it’s title bar is about twice the height it needs to be. Just wasting space with some blending effect or something. Luckily it’s easy to change to one of the stock KDE ones. And PLF usually package up the best of the 3rd party ones from kde-look, making better ones easily avaliable.
That said, since I have been a long time Mandriva user I may go back again. The 2006 release was to outdated when I last upgraded, so I picked a different distribution this time.
Edited 2006-09-10 10:55
morty: you obviously didn’t read the release notes, which admit the problem with fonts and explain how to work around it:
“Anti-aliasing may not be correctly activated into KDE, you must use kcontrol to force it”
you obviously didn’t read the release notes
Actually I did, but obviously I forgot that part immediately:-( Feeling embarrassed now.
To my defense I can say that the bright orange splash screen temporary chased away my sanity:-) Btw, the blue progresbar in it looks rather strange.
Please read the changelog/release note. I love the anti-aliasing. Don’t believe me?
http://vnlinux.org/images/mandriva-live-2007-desktop.png
OK, the icons are not stock. A quick trip to kde-look.org and found realistik icons.
One last wish
the artwork for background splash image is not very professional. If you look carefully, the Mandriva icon, the wand magic at the bottom right does not look as good as the background desktop’s.
eww, I’m going to throw up. I hope this company goes down under fast. It might have been a good distro when it was Mandrake. Even at the top distrwatch list, but now it is just crap. I started off on Mandrake and I liked it, but this is just rediculous. I think that star is gay. They should stick to stock stuff. This whole distro is gay, and I mean gay as in lame.
I normally don’t get into distro war but you said bunch of things without even trying or show any issues that you have with latest Mandriva.
The way it loooks is to each his/her own state. I could go on and say the same thing with other distros look like crap. I was talking about the anti-aliasing look. Try to install latest Kubuntu/Ubuntu and compare how it looks with Mandriva
Also, if you run MySQL performance on dual-core on all distros out there, tell me which one give you highest read/write transactions per second. Then come back here and talk trash about other people work.
I may revisit Mandriva with this one.
I might download the live cd and use it to install next Monday or Tuesday.
But I have two questions, can I gradually update it to 2007 final, or I have to wait until the next RC to get updated?
You can update incrementally with Cooker. Go to Easy URPMI – http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ – set distro version to Cooker, follow the instructions to set up ‘main’ and ‘contrib’ repositories. Then every day just do:
urpmi.update -a
urpmi –auto-select -v
but remember to remove the repositories (and set up new ones for 2007) when we freeze for 2007 final, otherwise after the unfreeze you’ll be running 2008 development stuff
Thanks for the tip Adam! After the 2006 release I had gone to cooker for various reasons (mainly to get newest Amarok devel and also KDE 3.5.3). Now that 2007 approaches release, I’m going to get off the release treadmill for awhile and enjoy my desktop (ie: actually just use it). Cheers.
Mandrive is still at the top: even compared with Suse, Kubuntu, you can make everything work easily.
However, I have seen it since 9.0: the graphics are chosen for uglyness and they never include all the standard KDE graphics, which are quite OK.
Why?
Moreover, they lost the topspot because of their new release cycle: people click on distributions only when they are constantly in the news. They should definitely go back to 6 months: too much happens in KDE-world in 1 year.
Edited 2006-09-10 21:45