Submitted by A review of one month’s use of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring on a Toshiba Satellite 2410, by Sam Bailey: “For the last month (and a bit) I’ve been running Mandriva 2007.1 Spring PowerPack on my Toshiba Satellite 2410. To avoid people having to skip to the conclusion, I’m sticking with Mandriva Linux Spring on my laptop permanently!“
1 Month On: Mandriva 2007 Spring – Toshiba Laptop
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’m using Mandriva 2007.1 too on my laptop, and I can say it is a very good release and I’m happy with it, the big pluses for me are:
– Fast boot and shutdown – the best distro in this aspect, it even beats Ubuntu’s upstart
– Suspend to disk works
– Suspend to ram works (first distro to accomplish it on this laptop)
– Urmpi is working pretty well, I would dare to say it’s on the same level as apt-get+.deb in terms of speed
– has all the software I need in the repos
– Lovely splash screen (nice but not crucial)
Now, I want to see how Fedora 7 will come out, it’s my main distro, though Mandriva is threatening its long term presence on this laptop…
Edited 2007-05-24 23:31
… that a Linux fanboy would choose to install Linux permanently on his machine. Truly shocked.
Lol. I’ve been running WinXP primarily on my laptop for years despite being a linux fanboy due to problems getting stuff working
Ditto
I installed it on my friend’s brand new Dell desktop after Suse failed to detect USB keyboard (no PS2 port) during installation. And I have to say I am impressed. urpmi is very good, and all the needed software on repos, except for acrobat reader. GUI configuration options are very detailed and great. Plus Its very fast with bery+compiz installed. Fonts are eye-pleasing. And with all multimedia apps, I made my friend switch to linux full time. Now I am thinking of installing it over Suse 10.2 on my desktop.
why is acrobat reader a requirement? get some other program that can read PDF files
KPDF handles everything you can throw at it in my experience.
And it’s a Hell of a lot faster
You can use KPDF etc., but if you’re a PowerPack user Acrobat comes with it. Package name is acroread. Also comes with RealPlayer, Java, etc. for your convenience. This is also another reason I missed LinDVD for out of the box dvd playing.
Seems the guy had a lot of trouble: nvidia driver not working, grub hanging, beryl gives him a black screen, hibernate to disk doesn’t work, has to find old disks to install DVD support. I admire his persistence.
Nope – he had a working system with the standard drivers.
BTW – why bother with proprietary DVD players when there is vlc?
Not so much as persistence as stubborn
The nVidia thing is not specific to Mandriva so I can’t knock it there. Beryl, grub and hibernate are issues but can be fixed and are mostly pretty minor.
The LinDVD is important for ease (& legal) use of DVD especially for newcomers. vlc and libdvdcss are great otherwise if you’re a bit of a rebel
[edit] P.S. I don’t like regressions
Edited 2007-05-25 13:17
Maybe a little bit offtopic.
“Suspend to ram works (first distro to accomplish it on this laptop)
”
Thats not true. Mandriva AND Fedora 7 supports a new “sleep” framework (pm-utils) which should make all kind of “sleep” options work on most (if not all) laptops.
Credits for this awesome work goto Richard Hughes.
For people who are interested check: http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/
First, sorry for my pedantic nature here:
I think you’ll find that it probably IS true. Its the first one to work on HIS laptop. At no point does he ever mention running Fedora 7 :O)
But nonetheless, its good to know that Richard Hughes has done some stirling work here. Hopefully this feature will find its way onto all distros in the future.
It is true, because Fedora 7 is…not out yet. And Spring is. So Spring is, indeed, the *first* distro to accomplish it.
but yes, we share the pm-utils framework with Fedora, and great work by Richard it is too. But our developers do help in its development, too.
Edited 2007-05-25 08:44
I like the howtoforge perfect setup article link.Seems Mandriva is far from being dead and a outcast:-)
I USED to be a Mandriva user and was one of those offended by their handling of the community. I have moved on and although I run more than one distro, I don’t run Mandriva anymore.
Just went to their website, as well. I see they now have the word community back on their front page and are trying to make things right, I suppose. Hopefully, things work out for them, I liked their work. But it’s too late for me and I won’t use them anymore. That’s the cost of screwing around your supporters. The lack of my business won’t kill Mandriva, but it’s business they’re guarantee never to get and business Mandriva’s comptitors are sure to get.
I’ve decided to give Mandriva the benefit of the doubt. They’ve messed up.
But they’re a company/community trying to be some kind of hybrid. Of course there are mistakes and growing pains. But Mandrake did a lot for the Linux Desktop as we know it.
I think if they’ve released such a quality distro, we at least owe them a kudos…
I have a similar attude towards SuSE after the zmd debacle.I like their AppArmor though.
I suppose. Hopefully, things work out for them, I liked their work.
So do i, mandrake 8.2 .. 9.1 where good releases.I guess you’re right there are more good distros with more inspiring communities.
Those were the days! 9.1 was so sweet I literally fell in love
Great to hear it just works there.
I don’t exactly know the reasons why Linux distributions are so badly uncapable of just doing the trivial-looking job of suspanding/waking up OK, I’m just one of the many that suffer because of the sad fact.
I hope this may be the time passing this issue.
Edited 2007-05-25 09:58
From everything I’ve heard the issue revolves around the lack of anyone following the ACPI standards, or throwing in their own ‘special’ stuff in with the mix.
I believe windows gets around this because all the manufactures supply drivers to get it to work right. Just did a reinstall on a dell laptop, and before I got the dell specific drivers in there, surprise…the sleep and hibernate functions didn’t work. (after I did they of course did work)
This Mandriva release is one of the best of the last few years. Configuring updates took only a few moments, I liked the look and feel…
Only configuring PPPOE needed some extra work, but it was fine in the end.
It is a pity that I am so used to Debian and SUSE…