Submitted by Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site (release announcement), and on the network of public mirror servers. 2008 includes all the latest software and enhancements over previous Mandriva releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, a 3D-accelerated desktop (Compiz Fusion and Metisse), Firefox 2.0.0.6, and much more. You can read about the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The release notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.
The download is about 2 minutes away from being finished. Fire up the test machine! Must…be…distro…whore…
The Powerpack edition has Cedega, LinDVD (legal DVD player) and Fluendo media codecs (legal audio/video codecs).
Is it legal to buy Powerpack and transfer the RPM files for Cedega, LinDVD, and Fluendo to a distribution of choice, so long as the files aren’t distributed?
I dislike Mandriva because it’s generally too buggy for me: my mouse didn’t even work in 2007 final. However, I may consider it for the ability to transfer it’s goodies onto a different distribution–Fedora in my case.
I believe that would be legal, yes.
Please do try 2008 before you do that, though. Maybe it’ll be less buggy than you expect.
OK thanks for the answer.
Well, I would obviously try it in a VM or something at least.
is that possible / stable to use mandriva .rpms in fedora 8? That would appear to be a great solution to have the speed/polish and security, not to mention Yum from fedora and have the few things i miss installed from the mandriva powerpack without the need to resort to 2nd rate community software that gives me dependency trouble almost all the time. i would really like a x64 multimedia enabled fedora.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a way of life, no. There are sufficient differences between Fedora and MDV that it would not be a smart idea. I meant it only in the case of these packages, which as I noted are rather distro-independent by nature (commercial software for Linux tends to be statically linked as far as possible).
I sincerely hope you are correct. I had all sorts of problems with the 2007 KDE One desktop (yes, I submitted bug reports) and they were severe enough that I switched to the Gnome desktop to give 2007.1 a shot. I am quite eager to give 2008 a shot and I hope it works out.
Is it legal to buy Powerpack and transfer the RPM files for Cedega, LinDVD, and Fluendo to a distribution of choice, so long as the files aren’t distributed?
=> you mean use mandriva powerpack rpm on your fedora system at home ?
I dislike Mandriva because it’s generally too buggy for me: my mouse didn’t even work in 2007 final.
=> whaou ! you’re unlucky in general, or just specific with mandriva ;-p …
Yes. It is possible that there might be RPM conflicts but its easy enough to extract RPMs with fileroller or build Fedora-specific RPMs for my own private use.
The Cedega and LinDVD packages are rather generic anyway, and Mandriva and Fedora are fairly similar in terms of directory layout etc. So I expect the packages would likely work without modification.
I’ll test this one but I’ve quit using 2007 because it’s just too easy for me. Everything works out of the box, even my ralink rt61, for which I should at least edit the dat file of the driver. But no, even that works from the install wizard, and upgrading the kernel didn’t even breack it (damn DKMS). There is no chalenge. I’m going to LFS for now.
I hope 2008 make it a harder for me.
Edited 2007-10-09 18:09
Well, I’m going to give it one more shot. I still have a couple of people on Mandriva, and after disasters on my own installation which left it unbootable, passed on upgrading them to 2007. So OK, I’ll have a go with 2008 on the most tolerant of them.
But I fully expect to be on Debian by the end of the morning.
I always liked Mandrive, well I did like the 9.x versions; however can anyone tell me if the configuration center is decent now (functional as well as aesthetical)?
When I used it sometimes it felt like it was being held together with duct tape… sorry to put it so crude 😐
It has changed a lot since 9.x (as has just about everything else about Mandriva). it’s hard to know if it will meet your expectations, easiest way to tell is to try it out. Grab the One live CD, boot it up, and check out the control center.
IMPORTANT!
If you downloaded 2008 at any point prior to this posting, and you have set up repositories via rpmdrake, you probably got Cooker repositories.
This is not what you want.
Please use the repository configuration tool to remove all remote repositories, and then add them again. You should get proper 2008 repositories now.
Sorry for this error!
I don’t mean to bitch, and I know Mandriva is KDE-centric, but since there’s a one-cd KDE iso, it would have been nice to have Gnome one too.
Still to come, I guess?
possibly. when there’s definite information, we’ll let you know.
There was one for last release I think. I’ll be waiting for the GNOME CD if there is going to be one.
When I used Mandriva least (it must have been version 9.x), the draktools had a blocking UI. Each time a “background” operation was executed, the draktools seemed to freeze.
Is this fixed now? (If I remember correctly, this was implemented as a workaround for some perl-threading problem.)
It’s fast, easy, and looks gorgeous. Install was fast and easy. HD detection was pretty good.
However, there are some annoying “gotchas”.
1. Numlock is enabled by default. Mandriva even has a numlock daemon to make sure numlock is on. Also in Mandriva, in the KDE control center, under peripherals, keyboard, the numlock toggle is on by default. OK, fine, I turned off the stupid daemon, and turned off the toggle in KDE control center. But then I still had the problem when providing the root password (for apps that require it, like MCC). Yes, can still disable numlock manually with my laptop keyboard. But it’s a huge annoyance, which has not happened to me with any other distro.
2. RPMdrake is slick. It’s fast and easy. However, when I selected a huge number of packages (lot’s of Java stuff, and games, and such), it kept say “such and such package has a bad signature, do you want to install anyway?” This meant I had to keep hitting “Yes”, over and over again. This might have to do with the Cooker repos Adam mentioned, but it was a huge annoyance nonetheless.
3. Upon logging into KDE, it went into a “Starting Services” screen, until I hit the enter button, and then the KDE desktop came back.
4. 3d acceleration failed. Not a biggie, but you can’t run ppracer, or tuxkart, or other similar games, without it. It’s also manually configurable, but all my attempts in doing so have failed.
These are all annoyances that make me not want to use Mandriva. Too bad, because it had a lot going for it.
I seem to be having bad luck with RPM distros of late:
The latest Fedora failed in configuring X on my laptop.
SuSE 10.3 was a disaster (tried it yesterday). It took 2-1/2 hours to install, it’s fonts kept getting messed up, it’s slab menu was very bulky and inefficient, and it was pretty heavy on resources.
PCLinuxOS, while pretty great with most things, failed to have 3d acceleration enabled. I want this, and I don’t have the time to figure out how to do it manually.
I’ve had much, much, much better luck with Debian and Ubuntu, and derivatives. Deb + Apt is much better than RPM + yum/yast/urpmi, and the Debian/Ubuntu repos are much more vast and well managed than any of the RPM repos. HD detection in Debian distros is flawless for my hardware (all peripherals work perfectly, video is flawless – with 3d acceleration, no numluck problems, etc). Heck, even plain ol’ Debian Etch has given me a vastly superior experience to any of the RPM distros – Debian Etch is almost as user friendly as Ubuntu.
I also like Slackware and derivatives, but they require too much manual configuration for my tastes.
So, it’s Debian and derivatives for me. I think Debian and Debian based distros have gone far ahead of the rest of the pack. Unless RPM distros start getting their act together, Debian and Ubuntu and derivatives will dominate (and deservedly so).
Edited 2007-10-09 21:21
#2 is indeed just a teething issue while we sort the online repositories out. If you remove your repositories and reconfigure them, you should find that either a) it works or b) they won’t set themselves up at all any more. Hope for a).
If you get b), it should turn itself into a) if you try again tomorrow.
#4, what graphics card do you have? Are you using Free or One?
I’m using Mandriva One.
The graphics card is an onboard Via CLE266.
I will most definitely try the repos again, BTW.
Also, do you have any hot tips regarding the numlock thing, based on my previous description.
BTW – thanks for your response. As my previous post stated, I’m in a pro-Debian, non-RPM phase right now. But I’m actually wanting to really give both Mandriva and openSuSE a good college try.
Both have put out great distros in the past (Mandrake 10 was far and above the best distro I’d used at the time of it’s release).
Plus, I’m somewhat bored with Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives. Time for something different. 🙂
On the graphics adapter – I tweaked the detection for VIA adapters myself based on information from users of VIA chipsets and also stuff from the Openchrome documentation. If 3D acceleration is disabled for your chip that’s most likely because there isn’t a working driver with 3D acceleration support available, at least to my knowledge.
Could you please run this command as root, so I can know exactly which Unichrome chip your board has?
lspcidrake -v | grep VGA
also, if you have been successful in getting 3D acceleration on other distributions, could you let me know how? Thanks!
“Could you please run this command as root, so I can know exactly which Unichrome chip your board has?
lspcidrake -v | grep VGA”
Gladly:
Card:S3 UniChrome-based cards with 3D support: VIA Technologies, Inc.|VT8623 [Apollo CLE266] integrated CastleRock graphics [DISPLAY_VGA] (vendor:1106 device:3122 subv:1019 subd:b320)
By the way, when I talk about “3d acceleration”, I’m talking simple stuff like running PlanetPenguin Racer both fast and smooth (which it does on Deb based distros, but seems to fail on my recent forays into RPM based distros). Now, serious 3d stuff, like GoogleEarth, never works correctly (I don’t think it works correctly with OpenGL, but prefers DirectX).
I just want the diversion of PPRacer, or TuxKart, once in a while, and the knowledge that my hardware is being fully utilized by my installed distro.
“also, if you have been successful in getting 3D acceleration on other distributions, could you let me know how? Thanks!”
I would gladly tell you that, if I ever successfully did it manually myself. But I haven’t. The hd auto-dection and auto-configuration of Debian, Ubuntu, SimplyMepis, Kanotix, sidux, Kubuntu, and Linux Mint have all done it for me.
Yep, I understand the issue. However, I’m not sure why it ain’t working
. As you can actually see in the output of your command:
“Card:S3 UniChrome-based cards with 3D support”
that means it’s in the group of cards I’ve got configured to use the ‘openchrome’ driver, with 3D acceleration enabled. So I’m not sure why the 3D isn’t working.
Can you mail me (since they’ll be quite big) your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log files, please? awilliamson AT mandriva DOT com. thanks a bunch.
Edited 2007-10-11 00:29
On the numlock issue – sorry, no. The ‘default numlock on’ setup is correct for all my systems so I’ve never had occasion to look at it. You could post to the Mandriva forums, or to one of our user support mailing lists, perhaps.
On repositories – current status is that adding repositories through rpmdrake should work, but you will most likely get NOKEY warnings for every package you try to install. This was corrected on our master mirror around two hours ago. One mirror that I tested has the fix sync’ed already (pubkey files were missing from the media_info directories), but all the others don’t yet. Once the mirrors are all sync’ed up, things should work without problems, but you will have to re-add the repositories if you added them before the fix was sync’ed. I’m posting this information everywhere I can, sorry for the inconvenience.
That’s because you installed from net. Just uncheck it at the beginning of the installation and then it takes about 15 minutes.
While I agree with you in most points, I was surprised that you listed this as an annoyance:
1. Numlock is enabled by default. Mandriva even has a numlock daemon to make sure numlock is on. Also in Mandriva, in the KDE control center, under peripherals, keyboard, the numlock toggle is on by default. OK, fine, I turned off the stupid daemon, and turned off the toggle in KDE control center. But then I still had the problem when providing the root password (for apps that require it, like MCC). Yes, can still disable numlock manually with my laptop keyboard. But it’s a huge annoyance, which has not happened to me with any other distro.
To me, it is usually the opposite. I appreciate a lot the Numlock on per default as a nice touch. However, I use Linux mostly on desktop systems so I can understand where your frustration comes from if you’re using it on a laptop.
Perhaps they should add a conditional checking during the install procedure to enable it on desktop systems and disable it on laptops.
#1 Actually, I really like that numlock is enabled by default. I always install it on other distros. So, it’s a matter of taste…
#4 You are using the CLE266, the same chip that my Laptop uses. That gfx-chip is afaik not able to perform 3D-stuff in any decent way on any linux or other OS, it never was.
“You are using the CLE266, the same chip that my Laptop uses. That gfx-chip is afaik not able to perform 3D-stuff in any decent way on any linux or other OS, it never was.”
Understood. Google Earth doesn’t run on my lappy, no matter if it’s Windows or any Linux distro. But what I’m talking about is running simple stuff like PlanetPenguin Racer.
On the aforementioned Debian based distros, PPRacer is smooth and fast (with this cheap-o lappy and Via chip), but on PCLinuxOS, openSuSE, and Mandriva, it’s veeery sloooow and jerky.
GLGears shows the bits per second slow, if that means anything.
Not that PPRacer, or other similar games, is all that important to me (I’m not a gamer). But it’s nice to have that diversion once in a while, and it’s nice to know that the Distro install is making the best possible use of my hardware.
I am a long term Mandriva fan, but Ubuntu (in beta form) and Suse 10.3 arrived sooner on this laptop.
Is there anybody who has tried all three able to put some arguments in favor of Mandriva. I might try it on a friend’s computer, but I am too lazy to install it just for the sake of it, unless one of you make a very convincing argument as to its capabilities vis-a-vis Suse and Ubuntu.
All in all, Mandriva seems to be back in the game. Its web site has improved, its communications have improved and the software itself seems to have improved.
I didn’t try Suse but I believe one of the advantages of Mandriva over Suse is package manager speed. urpmi is faster than yast. But I can’t tell if Suse is better since I didn’t try it.
I tryed Ubuntu and apt-get/aptitude is the fastest you can get from big distros. Ubuntu is rather easy but Mandriva takes ease to a whole new level. The Mandriva control center is the best. Ubuntu has improved a lot, but there are still issues, like wifi/wpa configuration if you don’t have the right hardware and upgrading the kernel often breack stuff (especially if you have proprietary drivers). Overall, I believe Mandriva is easier in the long run. I mean, Ubuntu looks very easy until you get caught breacking everything after an upgrade.
As I said earlier, I used Ubuntu and Mandriva and now I’ve moved to some harder distros because I like tinkering to make things work. I’ve tryed gentoo, which wasn’t much of a chalenge because I had my Mandriva around where everything work as an example and to chroot. I’m now running LFS installed from Mandriva as host OS, and that is becoming interesting.
If you like the easy way where you just install and use, then Mandriva is the way to go, unless Suse is better. Ubuntu is easy at first, but things like virtualization or driver management just aren’t so mature yet, but it has other advantages, such as apt-get and community support. That said, I didn’t try the latest Mandriva 2008 yet, and I’ll probably be disappointed again if it works so easily as 2007.
Edited 2007-10-09 22:20
You don’t miss anything if you decide not to run it.
Personally if wineX and powerDVD are reason enough to buy powerpack Mandriva box.
Will there be a 2008 powerpack boxed version including wineX and powerDVD?
I was a long time mandrake fan but when came the 9x series it was a disaster then I changed to debian and then of course to Ubuntu since the beginning !
But as since 3 versions I don’t see any ( sorry for the zelots) change and as it become a bit an “ennoying distro” (I mean not enough excitment at my point of view).
As came the 10.3 I thought it could be a good move but to install something you have to wait the repos to be checked, yast is what ever you want except “user friendly” (I use gnome so it’s their first attempt), and if you want to install anything a bit exotic you may know a lot then to rearrange everything (even a some fonts !! it was a mess and 2 hours to reorganize the baby…)
Then I saw mdv 2008 why not downloaded and installed, great everything went smooth and neat, checked 2 or 3 parameters ( by the way why this stupid idea to reconfigure nautilus with spacial effect !!? )
I am actualy downloading a full 39 Euro version because in 4 days now i had a nice simple distro giving me pleasure and fun …
This distro look as the new mandriva site, at least or last a good idea.
I hope they will continue this way.
The spatial configuration for Nautilus is the official GNOME default, which we respect. Ubuntu patches it to have the non-spatial version as the default. So it’s the other way round from what you thought
ok ok ! one point for you
But as I don’t (like it) find that usefull, here is the command to get rid of it:
gconftool-2 –type boolean –set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser 1
…..
By the way why I don’t have my mounted disks in “my computer” shortcut
I have to go all way around to get it in /mnt/
they are visible in kde but not in gnome
Edited 2007-10-09 23:46
The reason I always liked it a lot for unsophisticated users was the control center tools. Everything in one place, easy for them to find and use. Once you explain the difference between configuring the desktop and configuring the system, they find it quite easy to manage.
The thing that turned me off it was the instability with the 10x onwards. Not of any particular version, but the upgrade process. For a while it seemed like trying to move from one annual release to the next was totally unpredictable in what it would do. Sometimes it worked flawlessly, other times it resulted in an unbootable system, other times the result was unstable. One occasion I just could not get it to even do a clean install, and this was on more than one machine.
If you find yourself in this situation, you hopefully have taken a Debian disk with you to the site, and you don’t have a lot of choice, you just pop it in and go. Yes, administering it is going to be quite a bit more complicated for them. But at least it works, and it upgrades reliably.
I’m 80% on the download now, but am really in two minds about whether to even try this, or to just migrate them straight to Debian…
This is probably the real argument about Debian – its not package management as such, at least as regards packages, its more the system upgrade process, and how labor intensive and fraught it is when you have to do annual or every couple year system updates, and you have stopped trusting the process for a particular distro.
Your comments on Debian are spot-on.
I don’t trust any other distro, particularly rpms one, to work well after an upgrade, particularly an online update.
On desktops, I always place /home in its own partition so that I can do a clean installation without having to worry about whether the upgrade will work or not.
I have, however, moved servers from Debian Sarge to Etch without issues.
I don’t trust any operating system, at all, during an upgrade process. I must just be pessimistic. Windows, [insert any Linux flavor here]… you name it. Even if the upgrade process technically works flawlessly, IMO it’s still better to just start from scratch and have a nice, fresh, clean drive. With Linux distros and most other non-Windows OSes, it’s a breeze, thanks to the ability to separate user directories from the main file system. With Windows… well, not quite, but having a spare NTFS partition/drive lying around eases the pain quite a bit.
That said, I’m sure there are some distros and operating systems out there that can keep going for years, even with regular upgrades. Debian, as others have mentioned above, is one; I’ve also heard that the BSDs are rock-solid when it comes to upgrading. Even if I were to run such a system, I would probably still do a complete reinstall every few years, even if not absolutely necessary, just for extra confidence. That, and to clean up all the crap that accumulates on the drive without having to bother looking through it
Besides… there’s no fun cleaning up a mess. But starting a new OS installation from scratch, on the other hand… that can be pretty fun.
draknetcenter looks very nice, but how can I download its code without installing Mandriva? I can not find any links to their repositories.
Mirror list:
http://api.mandriva.com/mirrors/2008.0.i586.list
on any of those sites, go to:
(toplevelMandrivadir)/official/2008.0/SRPMS/main/release
and get the drakx-net .src.rpm.
Or, it’s in SVN here, as part of drakx-net:
http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/soft/drakx-net/trunk/
for info on using the Mandriva SVN repository, see: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Howto/Subversion (there’s a note on anonymous checkouts at the bottom).
First off, I tried about 20 different mirrors which didn’t work till I found one that did. Not a good start.
Gave live cd a try, wanted gnome, only kde avaiable. Annoying. Boots into desktop, right clicking configure desktop, click I think display on the bottom of list, this causes KDE to completely freeze. Reboot try again, same results. Good game. Back to Fedora 7.
On a side note OT: I don’t know how many times I have written a post, forgot to enter a subject, and then proceed to lose my entire post. Can’t there be a popup or something to warn you before you lose everything? I do realize it states required, but some times I forget.
Edited 2007-10-10 12:54
This should fix the problem :
urpmi gnome
Good luck and have fun with Fedora anyway.
Edited 2007-10-10 13:29
Yeah I was planning on downloading it once installed. So it wasn’t too big an issue, more annoying than an actual problem.
On the plus side, it did actually start installing unlike 2007. 2007 would never even start copying files to my hard drive. Also compiz fusion worked out of box, so that’s good.
I suppose I could just install it and not worry about KDE freezing, it might be some oddity with the live cd also.
I will probably run GNOME anyway. I do switch back and forth between GNOME and KDE though, so it could be an issue if it freezes after installing.
it’s task-gnome , actually. and you need repositories configured.
AdamW, is it possible using the one live/installer cd to use LUKS disk encryption?
Downloaded the KDE One cd yesterday, and by my suprice almost everything worked on my laptop by default.
Powersaved and so on…
The only thing that didn’t work was my broadcom wireless, but this card is really bad in linux, but with ndiswrapper that was up and running as well.
Just bought the Powerpack version, doesn’t cost that much and are installing as we speak, just to support the guys at Mandriva.
Good work…and it looks really nice, a nice release.
Have been using Ubuntu since the first release but I think it is rather buggy, at least on my hardware.
Edited 2007-10-10 17:11
Broadcom wireless does actually work, without any need for ndiswrapper and using only the Mandriva GUI tools. This is the best we can do, though – we can’t make it work out-of-the-box as it requires firmware, and we cannot legally distribute the firmware even in the non-free editions.
So we made the Mandriva network configuration tools wrap bcm43xx-fwcutter, the tool that extracts the firmware from the Windows driver. If you remove your ndiswrapper configuration and run the Mandriva network configuration tool, it should tell you about this and ask for a Windows driver to extract the firmware from. If you have one, try it. If you don’t have one, or the Windows driver you have doesn’t work for firmware extraction (some don’t), use the one at http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware – the 3.xx one, not the 4.xx. That should be all you need to do (except the usual configuration for any network adapter). I tested this myself, as I have a Broadcom wireless chip on my own machine, and I’ve walked a couple of people through it since release. It’s also mentioned in the release notes – http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2008.0/Notes#Required…
I almost skipped this release, it would have been my loss. Simple and elegant install. All my hardware worked out of the box…even my sound card which has never worked in the past.
No major problems so far. I think this will stay installed on my laptop…it will be nice to have music while on the road.
The spell checker in Firefox seems to be in the wrong language…It shows every thing I type as being mis-spelled. Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Languages has the correct setting, so I don’t know what that is about. That is a fairly trivial issue and I should be able to straighten it out when I have a few minutes free.
Props to the folks at Mandriva…nice release.
Edit: Fixed the Firefox/spelling issue. Right click in a field that accepts typing, the bottom entry is Languages…select proper language. Don’t know if this is a Firefox or Mandriva bug.
Edited 2007-10-10 20:38 UTC
Didn’t installed mandriva 2008.0 yet, but really happy with my current installation (powerpack 2007.1), and I what I seen from here to here looks like another good release.
But a good release is not the only news. Mandriva has decided to unite again its community by dissolving the paying club and opening more cooker process (dvpt version).
Commercial clients will also be happy, powerpack contains cedega (play windows games), lindvd (read dvd legally), fluedo (use windows codecs), with cheaper prices…
Kudos Mandriva for good work!
More specifically, I should ask “how do I enable direct rendering with Mandriva?”
Thank’s Mandriva for this wonderfull product!!
Im mandriva fan since the 9.1 but they lost me when eaGames release CnC3 and had no luck with transgaming so went back to Ms… but thank’s again
Please see http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/11/public-service-announcement-nok… for a follow up on the NOKEY errors issue, including how to resolve it. Thanks.
Yes, tried it.
Now here I am sitting with a system that will not boot, and looking forward to a wasted evening trying to figure out what its doing. Yet again. Yet again!
It hangs during the boot process showing a legend of Cluster IP version 0.8 loaded successfully.
My conclusion: its time to stop messing around with this pile of horse manure and move to something that works.
A final message on the NOKEY issue: all mirrors in the official list are now okay with the sole exception of http://ftp.cica.es. Any other mirror proposed by the Mandriva repository configuration tools should now be okay. As mentioned in the previous message, if you have already set up your repositories and are encountering the NOKEY issue, you will need to either run ‘urpmi.update -a –force-key’ as root or remove and re-add your repositories to stop the errors from showing up in future. Once again, we’re sorry for this inconvenience.
I really appreciate the fact that you think because Mandriva has some problems with YOUR specific configuration, Mandriva automatically becomes “a pile of horse manure”.
Ubuntu crashes on my previous mobo when I use a SATA hard disk, while it works on Mandriva. Yet I don’t go around calling Ubuntu “a pile of horse manure.”