Submitted by Mandriva has today released Mandriva Linux 2009, the new major release of the popular distribution. 2009 is a bold release which brings the new KDE 4 as the default desktop, along with a re-designed installer and Mandriva Control Center and many other new features. Other significant updates include GNOME 2.24, OpenOffice.org 3, Mozilla Firefox 3, and kernel 2.6.27. Key features include new graphical in-line upgrade capability, netbook compatibility, class-leading hardware support, and further improved support for working with mobile devices. For more details, see the Release Tour and the Release Notes. Get it at the download page, or go straight to the torrent list.
All commerial backed distros seem to ship 2.6.27 this fall/winter.
Maybe that african cosmonaut has influence after all
Edited 2008-10-09 20:41 UTC
I would think its because its the current kernel going stable, not because of one man?
Fedora/Suse/Mandrake/Ubuntu all run with the latest on there next release.
the guy who don’t contribute to linux?
what kernel do you want it use?
2.6.25?
I think Mandriva chose that kernel because they will stick with it with the next Mandriva 2009.1 as they did with 2008 spring edition.
If they don’t, this would have meant to provide mandriva 2009 spring with a quite old kernel…
regards,
glyj
Edited 2008-10-09 21:19 UTC
We’re shipping rc8, actually. (But with the e1000e fix of course).
glyj: we’re not tied to it for 2009 Spring – we changed kernel between 2008 and 2008 Spring, if you remember. We decided to go with 2.6.27 because it adds rather a lot of important hardware support, and 2.6.26 will be harder to support post-release.
Is there a way to upgrade from RC2 to final ?
Yes. Remove your repositories, add 2009 final repositories (easiest to do this with Easy URPMI, once it’s up to 2009, otherwise you can do something like: ‘urpmi.addmedia –distrib ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrivalinux/of…‘ ), and run ‘urpmi –auto-update’.
If you had been updating your RC2 regularly you may actually have gone a bit past 2009 final, in which case you should do the above but then also remove all mandriva-release-* packages (with rpm -e –nodeps) and replace them with the same packages from the 2009.0 repos.
Thanks Adam. I have been updating RC2 regulary. Apart from release* rpms, are there any other applications/libraries that might be ahead of 2009 final in my setup ?
One or two, but it’s not really important. They’re not significant changes. If you’re worried, though, just do ‘rpm -qa | grep 2009.1’ and revert anything it returns.
I’ve been using RC2 for a few weeks now and have been surprised how really good it’s been. When I first heard Mandriva were going to default the desktop to KDE4 I was a little skeptical as my previous experiences with it had been a bit ‘hit and miss’ and thought it might be jumping the gun a bit. I’d tried KDE4 several times during the year but each time drifted back to 3.5.x due to missing functionality or a general lack of polish… but not this time.
I’m discovering handy new features and really enjoying the experience. I have no doubt ‘2009 Final’ will be a solid release and will just say… if you haven’t given KDE4 much of a chance up to now, this would be a great introduction to what is fast becoming a very slick and powerful environment.
My congrats and thanks to the Mandriva team
Hello all,
I have two questions before I download:
1. What is Mandriva’s policy on updating or backporting applications? I am currently a fairly satisfied Ubuntu user except for one major gripe: I really find it irritating to wait 6 months for the next release in order to upgrade to the latest version of my desktop applications. The Ubuntu backports are almost worthless, they are very slow to upgrade and only care about the most popular packages. In the case of a more obscure app, you’re out of luck until the next biannual release. Is Mandriva any different?
2. How modular are Mandriva’s packages, especially Gnome? I like to run a very minimal Gnome desktop that I install from scratch with only Nautilus and gedit and the panel and the a few utilities. With Ubuntu, this works very well. With some other distros, a just installing the Gnome panel pulls in gstreamer, Totem, gnome system tools, any many other “required” packages that aren’t really necessary. What about Mandriva?
Looks like a nice release. Thanks for the help.
Mandriva backports are more active than Ubuntu’s, but it really depends on exactly what you’re looking for. There’s no policy of Thou Shalt Backport or Thou Shalt Not Backport – it’s up to the maintainer of the package. You can often ask for a backport of something that’s not been done yet, though, and if it’s not too much trouble, the maintainer will do it. What specifically were you looking for?
I can’t fully answer the second – I’ve never tried doing a minimal GNOME setup like that – but looking at the gnome-panel dependencies, it doesn’t depend on gnome-system-tools or totem, but it does depend on gstreamer.
Thanks for taking the time to answer questions, Adam.
1. Obscure packages like http://tovid.sf.net , and http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net for example. These are just random examples of obscure programs that I use. And what about backports of things like Gnome and KDE, does that ever happen?
2. Basically, different distros break up big projects like Gnome in different ways. Debian and Ubuntu tend to be very modular, and you can install just little parts of Gnome without being forced to install it all. And Debian and Ubuntu tend to allow you to install little parts of Gnome without being forced to install many dependencies. Many other distros, for example, (I’m not sure about Mandriva) don’t break up Gnome quite as finely, and they tend to have label more packages as required dependencies when they’re not really absolutely necessary.
Well, tovid’s been stuck at 0.31 upstream for a while, so there’s nothing to backport.
We don’t have mtpaint packaged yet.
As I said it really depends on the package. It’s not possible to give a definitive answer to the question.
You can check out the main and contrib backports repositories for 2008.1 to get an impression: ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/MandrivaLinux/official/2… and ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/MandrivaLinux/official/2… (the files in this directory are source RPMs, so don’t install these by clicking them unless you want to rebuild them yourself)
You can install task-gnome-minimal – that should pull in just the bare minimum of Gnome packages. Have fun!
I’m a KDE type but the same should hold for both I would think. After installing urpmi and the minimum to reboot with network support, I urpmi konsole to get the terminal and minimal KDE required to run it. It seems to only bring in what base KDE is actually needed for it.
By contrast, my only gripe with Debian is that any KDE has the rest of KDE as a dependency. Instead of “apt-get install konsole” and only getting the required KDE framework, I get all the extra plugins and crap along with it.
Mandriva is still my first love for a desktop and Debian for a server. Debian’s drawback remains the all of GNOME or KDE as a dependency for any GNOME or KDE. Mandriva’s strength remains a nice modular dependency tree, great hardware support and, well, draketools.. wonderful draketools.
Ah! I know why your Debian installs extra packages like you described. Check this out:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=2830909#po…
I’m a cli type and have been spoiled by apt-get on my Maemo. I’ll have to give that forum thread a read over in detail a bit later.
(Now, I’m just curious why my post got negatived. Was my experience with urpmi and apt-get really off topic?)
the KDE one CD fails to boot on my computer. the booting process stops at :
“cannot run ‘/etc/init.d/rcS’: no such file or directory
Please press Enter to activate this console”
my computer completely hangs up at that point
It sounds very much like you have a defective or corrupted copy of the CD.
i dont think so. I use the same CD to install mandriva 2009 on my other PC. It worked just fine.
So I thought I might have problems with the DVD drive of the first PC. So I used my Ubuntu CD to test. Ubuntu was installed successfully on the first PC …
Your symptom is still consistent with a marginal CD such that the CD drive on one PC is more sensitive to the problem than on another.
I say this because of the text of the error as you reported it … being about a missing directory.
You should also check out the errata page:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Errata
There is one report of a “hang” during boot:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Errata#Periodic_freeze_of_the_gr…
… but this does not seem to match the description you gave.
Most of the errors mentioned on the errata page have a work-around.
I burnt the CD again w/ lower speed mode (4x) then it works now. Thanks lemur2 !
Given that you eliminated a bad burn, it may be a hardware issue. Have you tried Free, to see if that works? You don’t need to download the whole thing to test – you can download the Mini image, or grab boot.iso (only 12MB or so) from a mirror. If it can get to the main install phase, then Free will work.
Thanks AdamW!
it turns out that one of my CD drive is more sensitive to errors than the other one.
Burning the CD again w/ 4x writing mode helps
Is there a DVD equivalent to the One-CD edition?
In other words, a DVD with the additional few binary bits such as flash, etc?
Does the DVD edition use a traditional installer?
Do the free-edition CDs use a traditional installer vs the live installer of the One edition?
And for a kde user, which edition does Mandriva recommend for a netbook such as the Medion Akoya Mini E1210 (rebranded MSI Wind)?
Thanks
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Choosing_the_right_edition
There’s no freely available DVD edition with the non-free bits (Powerpack has them, of course), but it’s very easy to add them from non-free repo after installation. Or you can do a network install (which uses non-free by default), or you can install Free but add the online repositories during install.
All Free and Powerpack editions, and the network install, and the mini-ISO, use the traditional installer (DrakX). All One editions use the live installer (draklive-install).
The edition you pick doesn’t really make a huge amount of difference, in the end, as they’re all built from the same repos and use the same public repos anyway.
From a user perspective, I’d download One and Free.
Mandriva One – good for testing hardware compatability and as a non-installed liveCD any time you need one. I’ve consistantly used 2008.1 One on my work issued notebook when not doing work stuff. I can’t touch the hard drive and a booted Mandriva environment works natively alongside the rest of my home network. I actually tend to use the notebook as a thinclient running my prefered apps from the workstation in another room (SSH -X is wonderful).
Mandriva Free – this gives me an custom install for my hard drive builds. I don’t like the prepicked selection from any liveCD outside of BT so if I’m going to install on the hard drive, I use the Free CD or DVD (thanks for bringing back the CD images on that one). Through the install process, I partition the drives and use the custom package selection to install the minimum and OpenSSH. The install process then selects the correct X server for my system. When I reboot, I can then urpmi in just the minimum preferences of packages until I get my functioning X GUI environment. After that, it’s time to remove the CD repository, add network repositories and do a urpmi –auto-update.
Installing minimally for the first boot is a habbit from FTP installs where a broken network connection or package half way through toasted the install. Install the minimum to reboot then install in small pieces after that. Installing select packages is personal preference. I like the base defaults and adding in what is needed. In contrast, One has slightly different defaults (or did with 2007.0) and means removing what is not wanted. (deny all, allow as needed.. never allow all, deny as needed)
Okay, so I’m looking around on the download page, and I cannot find anything for downloading in the US. Torrent is a no-go for me because my ISP throttles torrents down to 0.5 to 2 kbps, so I need a “real” download link.(I know, I should change my ISP, but this is the only high-speed internet in the area, and my only other reasonably priced option here is dialup, which ain’t gonna happen.) Can someone point me in the right direction?
Download from any other country. The download speed will still be very acceptable.
Cheers
Below the Public Mirror Selection, choose any of the mirrors, and start downloading
ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu
should be somewhere like /linux/distributions/Mandriva/ISO/…
You may have to dig around to find it but tends to be a nice fast connection once your in.
1) Do they have a 64Bit edition of Mandriva 2009?
2) Does the Free download include all codec to play MP3, Flash and everything else found on the Web?
3) Is it worth it to pay for the PowerPack edition?
Thanks!
1) Yes.
2) The free as in beer does have all the required codecs for no money. The Free software version, i.e., lacks all proprietary codecs.
Choose the One edition if you want said codecs.
3) Yes, you get support, a manual, and contribute to the viability of an important Linux company.
Edited 2008-10-10 10:16 UTC
On the hardware spec for Mandriva 2009, it is said that all SoundBlaster are supported except X-Fi.
On the Creative site, their is beta driver for the X-Fi but they say only tested with Ubuntu, Fedora and RedHat. Is it possible to install those drivers with Mandriva? Is it hard?
I’m a Windows guy, you know, double click on setup.exe and click NEXT NEXT NEXT until everything is installed!!!
WoW.
Been using linux since 1996, love all distros (great work all devs!), have been using Ubuntu since release 4.10 as my main workstation.
I am now using Mandriva 2009 on my main workstation and laptop. Fantastic release! Will have in-depth review over the weekend.
I have installed it in my laptop to seriously test KDE4 and I must say that it is the first usable implementation. Mandriva’s KDE4 is only lacking panel autohide to reach standard desktop usability. It also properly requires two clicks for an icon to be run in Dolphin. It has excellent hardware support and the machine configuration is properly exposed unlike other KDE4 implementations(I understand that Kubuntu and OpenSUSE are still betas, but they are lacking).
However, praise ends here. We are in what, 2008, and international support is infradeveloped. I understand that you can’t fit all localizations in a live CD, but even NetBSD includes all the countries in the world as an option for your location and keyboard input.
The other big black hole is the package manager. It has already broken once, it has no granularity and the system is slooooow. Being used to aptitude I can just hope that I won’t have to install many packages until I decide to go back to Xubuntu. The RPM disease is just sad for such a great distro.
You don’t expect the mirrors to be fast when everybody is downloading like hell. Wait a few days and you’ll see that urpmi is as fast and as reliable as aptitude, if not even better. There is no rpm disease except in your head.
Edited 2008-10-10 15:00 UTC
It’s not the downloads. I get my connection top speed. In aptitude, I can read what a package is about without having to download a separate information package for example. And more importantly, a system update starting up while trying to install a package doesn’t break synaptic or aptitude forcing me to reinstall them using apt-get.
Oops, sorry, now I see your follow-up.
If you’d prefer to have all information on all packages downloaded in one large lump when you update the database (rather than the appropriate information file being downloaded when you actually query a package), you can do:
Options / Media Manager
(in Media Manager)
Options / Global Options
set XML meta-data download policy: to either ‘Update-only’ or ‘Always’ (I forget which, try both)
we actually introduced the dynamic system in 2008 Spring because it usually works out better overall than downloading a massive file full of all information for all packages, when the hdlists are updated.
“I understand that you can’t fit all localizations in a live CD, but even NetBSD includes all the countries in the world as an option for your location and keyboard input.”
It’s a known bug in One: each One edition only makes the languages it has localizations for available as locations, even for things like timezone and keyboard layout. We know this is wrong, but it’s actually rather difficult to fix, in technical terms. I wanted to have it done for 2009 but there was so much to do it got left over, unfortunately.
If you use the correct One edition for your location, it will be available as an option. Otherwise you can just use Free or PWP, which of course make all localizations and locations available. Aside from that one bug in One, Mandriva’s internationalization support is actually very good; we have a lot of non-English-speaking users, and Mandriva works well for known-‘difficult’ languages like Chinese.
As satan666 said, slowness in package management right now is more likely to be down to slow mirrors than anything else. We have been working on optimizing urpmi and rpmdrake for several releases, and they’re really quite fast now. I’m not sure what you mean by the package management system being ‘broken’ once, or what you mean about granularity.
The gui package manager broke because you apparently don’t lock the packages properly. I was starting to install additional packages and when I hit “Apply” it told me another package manager was running. Update then came up and told me I had to update many things. I did so, and that permanently broke the GUI: “rpmdrake or some dependency needs to be updated”. Only uninstalling it and reinstalling it through urpmi would fix it.
Edit just to add that rpmdrake wasn’t even among the updated packages.
Edited 2008-10-10 16:38 UTC
The RPM and urpmi databases are both locked by all MDV package management apps at the appropriate times. It’s a bit hard to tell from your brief description exactly what broke, but if you can file a bug on it with a more detailed description, I will get it triaged to the appropriate maintainer. Thanks.
I’m not sure if I have a broken package management system or not, but I had a similar “interference” event between the updater and the GUI package manager, and now there are a significant number (probably over 30%) of packages that refuse to install no matter how I try. GUI, urpmi, or just download (wget) the rpm file and try to install it from the local copy.
Every method I try now says “bad rpm” or a similar message. It happens for about 30% of the rpm files from any repository. If an application wants to install a number of dependencies, there is almost zero chance that it will install correctly.
The message I get when using urpmi is as follows:
Very frustrating. According to urpmi, the rpm files obtained from the mirror are corrupt.
Try removing all files in /var/cache/urpmi/rpms and /var/cache/urpmi/partial , and give it another shot.
Regrettably this failed to fix the problem.
I eventually overcame this problem by re-installing Mandriva 2009.0 from the Mandriva-free-dvd, over-writing the earlier attempt installed from Mandriva One CD.
I suspect either that my Mandriva One CD is flaky, or that there is a problem with Mandriva One CD that is not present on the dvd.
What is the benefit of distros always trying to ship the latest kernel?
I’m asking because I’ve always found this practice to be rather silly, and detremental to the stability and compatibility of the final product.
I’m not picking on Mandriva in particular – I actually love Mandriva – it’s one of the very best desktop oriented distros IMO.
But, I’d rather have a slightly older kernel, that is proven stable and compatible, packaged with the latest driver modules. This, combined with agressive backports of many popular desktop apps (that’s where always getting the “latest and greatest” is actually compelling).
Yet, most distros, except for Debian Stable and Slackware, always try to ship the absolute latest kernel. And I see no real benefit for end users or packagers or developers. I only see this policy causing problems (like a video card module no longer works, or something doesn’t compile correctly anymore, or something becomes incompatible).
I’d like to see perhaps some sort of yearly “desktop reference kernel” release, and then all distros basing on that, and adding their own goodies on top of that.
Again, I see no benefit for all these distros (Mandriva, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, et al) shipping either the latest kernel, or a heavily patched (and incompatible with all others) kernel.
Stability and compatibility is much much more important with the kernel than always getting the “latest and greatest”.
Every kernel generation picks up more hardware support along with other functions. The latest stable kernel will still mature but provides that better support.
All those people who try a Linux distro for all of five minutes then spend the next week on forums going “but, what I tried didn’t support hardware component X or Y so all Linux distros suck”.. That’s why.
Mandriva tends to be a latest-tech distro so they choose the newer kernel for the better support. You also get newer versions of software like KDE4 being included where many people are still using KDE3. I can put Ubuntu, Debian or other distros in a machine, have hardware issues then pop in Mandriva One and the hardware works. Backtrack requires manually working with wpa_supplicant and WPA/TKIP where Mandriva One recognizes the NIC and works perfectly with WPA2 using AES.
There are other distros that focus on other things. Debian Stable.. well, you won’t find the latest kernel but you won’t find odd glitches likw Mandriva 2007.0’s tendancy for PHP support in Apache to randomly fail.
(we restart the apache deamon from time to time when the morning webserver test returns broken PHP pages. Debian will be the next webserver platform though Mandriva is still the first choice for workstations.)
“What is the benefit of distros always trying to ship the latest kernel?”
The benefit is in hardware support and bugs fixed. This specific kernel introduced a few nice additions. I agree with you when it comes to running a server, no doubt about it. For a desktop system though, I prefer the latest and greatest. It really all comes down to the purpose of the system you are using IMO. If it is multimedia, webcams, newer hardware, then the latest and greatest is the best bet. Just my 2 cents.
“What is the benefit of distros always trying to ship the latest kernel?”
“But, I’d rather have a slightly older kernel, that is proven stable and compatible, packaged with the latest driver modules.”
Well, that’s the problem. The latest driver modules are *in the latest kernel*.
We took this decision mainly due to hardware support and maintenance issues. 2.6.27 adds a lot of hardware support improvements: better drivers, basically.
The alternative was to ship 2.6.26 and backport a ton of driver changes from 2.6.27. But that’s a lot more work and prone to problems: it introduces a new potential for breaking stuff. It also becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain over time – and remember we have to support this release for 18 months.
That was the basis of the choice to go with 2.6.27. It wasn’t just “ship the latest kernel at any costs!” – we evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of both choices, and went with 2.6.27. We’ve gone the opposite way in similar situations in the past, depending on the exact circumstances.
Just thought I would post this here since there are some of us who will do this…
If you install One as a guest and try to install the VMWare Tools it will fail. The following explains how to fix that issue.
1.) Install gcc and make.
2.) Install the kernel headers
3.) In /usr/src/linux run ‘make oldconfig’
4.) Edit the Makefile in your favorite editor. Change the line that reads ‘EXTRAVERSION = -0.rc8.2mnbcustom’ to read ‘EXTRAVERSION = -desktop586-0.rc8.2mnb’
5.) Run make. This will create the kernel modules and specifically the version.h file which stops vmware-config-tools.pl from running.
6.) When prompted, answer yes to the GCC version difference question..the tools compile fine and work perfectly.
7.) Enjoy MandrivaOne as a guest OS.
The whole key here is the kernel headers do not match the installed kernel, so without editing the Makefile, even answering yes to the gcc question, the install will bomb out as it can not find the proper headers.
Hope this helps someone..I can;t be the only one running this as a guest to check it out
You probably installed kernel-source , which is not how you’re meant to to do it. You’re meant to install the -devel package that matches the kernel you’re running.
“You probably installed kernel-source , which is not how you’re meant to to do it. You’re meant to install the -devel package that matches the kernel you’re running.”
The -devel was not available, nor was the source. The only choice in the package management was kernel-headers, which also downloaded the source as a dependency. I have no choice of kernel’s to install besides the default of desktop586. Running it now still only shows kernel-headers, no kernel-devel. Maybe my repos are not right? Or the packages are named something different? That of course would explain it.
Interesting..I can see the -devel packages and such now. Must have been on my end…operator error as it will
I installed Mandriva 2009 and on the first startup after the install, I got a Grub error. So I put the CD back in, rebooted and tried to reinstall. It told me the partition table was corrupted and wouldn’t let me modify the partitions. Thanks, Mandriva…awesome! Now I’m back to SuSE..
OK, I’ll admit it – Mandriva have stunned even me, a user of the thing for the last three or four years, this time around.
I stumbled back from the pub here in Korea in the wee hours of Saturday morning and when I booted up my main machine, I was greeted with a prompt to update the system. Update the system? I’m running PWP and I didn’t expect this . . . but I hit “OK” and to my complete amazement, the thing then spent about ten hours or so (time when I was mainly asleep) completely updating itself. I just put the finishing touches to it using urpmi –auto-select and the only thing that hasn’t come down is the 2009.0 version of mdkonline, which apparently has a place in the mirror’s filesystem but isn’t actually there yet . . .
After adding everything that was available I have just rebooted and lo! and behold, only minor problems, rather like the last time around . . . all settings preserved, no lost files or anything. This is unbelievable! My desktop machine is now over four years old, yet it displays hi-res on a 20″ Samsung SynchMaster and flies like it is new, I do all sorts of sound recording, video editing and transcoding (for my camcorder) and text; I can originate and edit documents in a wide range of languages, too.
Compare this with my post-SP3 experiences with the dreaded Redmond Rot, my freshly reinstalled XP Home SP3 blue-screened at least five times in a row last Wednesday afternoon when I needed it at work (running Hangul Word Processor) and I gave up in sheer exasperation!
Now completely OT but very interesting . . . a boozing friend who normally lives in South China had to come here on business and, seeing the mess which XP has become (and looking at Vista and considering it a joke), he deliberately sought me out here (again, at the pub . . . what a surprise!!!) because he knew exactly where to find me, knew that I ran Mandriva and asked me for a copy. He knows me and he knows he can tap me for information about it any time. Seems he is so fed-up with his slow Windows XP Pro that it was time to kiss it goodbye. And I was happy to oblige! ^_^
Back on topic . . . Adam, wherever you are, I remain a grateful customer of Mandriva’s and I am happy with what just happened. To experience this and not have to go through the agony of backing up and distro reinstallation is fantastic; I have never regretted switching to Mandriva, and right now I don’t think I ever will. And you smartened up the MCC Software Management window, too!
Andrew (in South Korea, a.k.a. chromium)
Edited 2008-10-11 08:57 UTC
If you’re in South Korea, why’s your nickname in Japanese?
Nice to hear about your experience, glad the live upgrade worked so well for you! Thank fred crozat – I know he’s been testing this for weeks because he kept bugging me about how my packages were breaking on an urpmi upgrade.
Good question, long story. Originally I flew out to Tokyo back in August/Septermber 2001 and had a contract to teach English to adults in Shibuya, but when I got back home, they cancelled it. But I kept learning Japanese . . . nowadays I try to learn Korean, but this is very difficult. In between the two I was actually studying Chinese in Taipei. If you want to read about my adventures out here, go to: http://my.opera.com/fukudasan/blog/.
Fred must be very busy all the time . . . anyway, I am sitting at my desk at home here in Korea now and the same actions have been performed (overnight, again while I slept) on my laptop. The files have all installed properly and the system is working fine – the only trouble was that I couldn’t unlock to get out of the screen saver and had to pull out the battery and reboot, but it’s OK now. mdkonline is also not showing up as an update in MCC now.
Something of a seachange in attitude towards other OSes seems to be happening now out here – people are becoming more interested in the alternatives and having become noticed out here as something of a computer user (i.e. knowing more than they do, not really a geek), I have been repeatedly “grabbed” for assistance. It’s bizarre that in my transition between OSes, it’s the “legacy” one that I have to keep returning to all the time because people have so much trouble with it – mainly I suspect because they cannot adapt to use other software on other platforms!
Anyway, let’s say that I stick with Mandriva because it’s reliable, easy to use, fast and NO TROUBLE AT ALL. I cannot use the “legacy OS” – the Redmond Rot, as I call it – without a rising feeling of disgust. And here in Korea, people seem to have no understanding of any security problems – they just go crying to a so-called “engineer” when a Trojan locks them out. I have read on the Net that some people are calling Mandriva “the new Windows”, and I can believe this. Easier to install, easier to run, gets better and more reliable all the time. Excellent! ^_^
Installation was slow, but the system…
It’s FAST!
urpmi is faster than ever. It looks 2 times faster than apt-get on my machine now!
It boots in less than 10 seconds on my machine!
I’m more than happy with this realease. Thank you!