Submitted by “Though delayed for a while and later to market than most Mandriva fans would probably prefer, the new Mandriva Linux 2007 PowerPack Edition is finally here, nearly a year after the previous release. 2007 is typical Mandriva through and through: attractively themed in KDE, easy to install without skipping the technical details, a little bug-ridden here and there, and full of new and interesting software technologies. This release does have its own identity, though; not only has the standard theme been redesigned for the first time in several years, but this is the first Mandriva release to include a legal DVD movie player.”
Let Mandriva go. It’s dead, Jim. Fedora/Ubuntu have the free desktop pretty much covered (along with numerous smaller projects, including BSDs), Xandros, Suse and Linspire are better “pay-for-it” options, and Mandriva has obviously long ago forgotten whatever they seemed to know in the era of Mandrake 8. As the Stones would say, “I used to love her, but it’s all over now”.
What difference do retail boxes make these days?
According to the article there’re still quite a lot bugs open.I might aswell install fedora 5/6 and order cedega for €15 separate or €19,95 for a CD.
Paying for a linux box in my opinion should garantee a more bug free experience in my opinion.
Than again SUSE 10.1 retail was/is a real disaster also.
There are three kinds of bugs in desktop operating systems […]
There’s also a fourth problem: customer service. Mandriva customer service is lousy. I bought Discovery from Mandriva Store. So far:
* Two FTP clients misread the size of the DVD ISO image on the server (I thought the file was corrupt, my mistake)
* It took personal prodding from AdamW to get some help — no assistance was forthcoming from customer service
* The download speed is so slow it’s taken me over three days to get to 75% (average of 10KB/s) — I have cable broadband, for goodness sake!
* No help has been forthcoming about the slow connection thus far
http://forum.club.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=54185
I’d like to try Mandriva Discovery — I have already tried Mandriva One, and it looks good — but until I get the product I really can’t say whether it’s worth the money or not.
This is not the first time I’ve been stuffed around either. During a club promotion I tried to join but was rejected by a scripting error with the Store — I couldn’t get as far as payment no matter what I did. What help I got during that debacle was too little, too late.
http://forum.club.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=51561
My very first experience with Mandriva was trying to register a service activation key — this was also difficult, although it was sorted out.
http://forum.club.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=40491
Maybe I’m just cantankerous, but the problem I have with Mandriva is that nothing is ever easy! With Linspire, their order system is rock-solid and their support (while slow) has delivered the few times I’ve needed it. With Mandriva the simplest things are turned into major obstacles.
Next time I should probably just download a pirated torrent (no I’m not going to give a link) or perhaps buy the PowerPack from a pressed CD reseller for a fraction of the box price. Mandriva wouldn’t get any money, but I wouldn’t get the frustration either.
+ About The AIGLX/XGL stuff
To use AIGLX, you need the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension support in the drivers. At present only the free Intel and radeon/ati drivers have this extensions. So you can use AIGLX only on computers with theses chipsets. Please note that the free ati driver ( r300 ) doesn’t support latest ATI graphics cards and is sometimes unstable.
GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap will be supported in the next nvidia drivers 9x.
How XGL/AIGLX work : http://principe.homelinux.net/
More info about AIGLX : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx
So it’s normal that the system only propose XGL for nvidia and ATI when using the proprietary drivers.
+ Cedega issue :
Unfortunately 3D desktop ( especially XGL ) doesn’t play well with video output and others stuff. XGL also disable direct rendering.
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrivaLinux2007Errata#…
So don’t expect to use correctly Cedega with XGL activated.
The solution in the future will be AIGLX+Glucose : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive…st/017527.html
+ About updates issues
The updates issues where due to the fact that FTP mirrors where in bad state and so a complete re-sync has been initiated and it takes severals days to have all mirrors correct.
see my blog about this : http://www.linux-wizard.net/index.php?id_blog=90
So that’s why the tool didn’t work at the end of the installation, most mirrors where just … empty.
+ LinDVD playback stop
The linDVd playback issue is due to the wrong location of the licence. For further information ( and how to fix it ), see : http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrivaLinux2007Errata#…
I’d just say, be careful.
I’ve so far done one upgrade from 2006, which left machine A unbootable and with no X config. It went into a loop on being unable to write the boot sector and only poweroff would allow rebooting. xorg-configure wouldn’t generate a valid configuration, and not much wanting to do this by hand, I resorted to extracting the xorg.conf file from the Live boot in the end.
I’ve never had problems with upgrades like this with Mandriva in the past, but thinking it might be upgrading that was the issue, I did a clean install on another new machine B. Same issue with xorg, but at least Grub got installed.
Got One, and that both booted and installed OK on B. Then downloaded the rest of the install. Now discovered that the screensaver crashed X. Fixed this, and tried to launch KDE apps from Gnome. Dcop server errors and permission problems. They ran relatively OK as root from a terminal. Created new user, and ran KDE and that seems to work, and most of the apps seem to work. Is there something about the permissions in the home folder when you create a user during the install process, but not when you do it from a booted system? Working so far, but not terribly confident.
I’ve been using Mandrake and now Mandriva for years now, and have a lot of admiration for what they’ve done, and their difficulties and how they’ve worked through them, but have to say, if other people are having this sort of experience, it was released too soon.
And Etch…well, probably sooner or later that’s the way to go. You cannot go through this stuff once a year.
Concerning upgrade and xorg issue, it’s mostly due to the Xorg 7.1, i.e modular xorg. 2 things have change at the same time :
1. xorg has been splitted in many differents packages
2. X binary change from /usr/X11R6/bin to /usr/bin and fonts moved from /usr/lib/X11R6/fonts to /usr/share/fonts.
This means that when you are doing an upgrade, some application needs to have their config files modified ( kdm/gdm, fontconfig ) because they will look for X binary or fonts in the wrong location.
I was thinking about something concerning the One issue. Could this be related to the fact as One is on a CD, permissions where defaulted to read-only ?