My private domain omat.nl was a catch-all domain, so any email addressed to the omat.nl domain was delivered to me. The day before yesterday I was welcomed with a few thousand bounces, so my domain was used for a spam run.

That meant I had to disable the catch-all function and only specify the addresses I really use. Unfortunately I forgot to add the address used for all kde related mail. So if you have sent a mail (private or on any list) and expect a reply from me, please send me a reminder.

Last week I installed Mandriva Spring edition. This week version 2008 was officially released. Yesterday I updated my system to 2008, but that left my computer in a bad shape. The new kernel paniced while trying to unpack the initrd. Very strange things.

In the end I decided to simply download the One cd and see if that one would run, asuming it has the same kernel. It did. When that cd was completely booted, I decided to go on the road with the least resistance and simply…

The day before yesterday I had enough of my very slow computer at work. So I grabbed some new parts from our stock and assembled a new computer.

So yesterday was the day I wanted to use on installing the operating system on it. I first tried KUbuntu Gutsy, but that halted on ‘installing language pack’ in the gui-installer. I tried to resolve that, but did not succeed in it. I tried for a bit more but decided Gutsy was not the distro to use at this moment. Which is fine and understandable considering the current moment in their release schedule.

Feisty was not an option. I had enough of Feisty. The crippled Konqueror being one of the more irritating problems (showing no url-bar when using ctrl-n from an existing browser is just plain irritating). Also understandable considering they are working on Gutsy.

So, time to look for something not Kubuntu. I installed MEPIS. The current stable 6.5 is based on ubuntu Dapper, which is kind of old. So that was not what I wanted. So I tried upgrading to version 7. Ok. That was a big mistake. That one is based on Debian Stable, so the upgrade path was pretty rough. So rough, that I got in a dependency loop which I could not get out. The remaining option was to go to Debian Testing, but that would mean my computer would be a mess from the start. So I ended the day by deciding to install Debian Stable the next morning.

But that evening Helio pointed me to Mandriva. I decided this was the perfect moment to try that one out. I downloaded 2008(?) RC2 and booted from it this morning. All went fine and I wanted to install it. That did not succeed. The ‘one’ CD of RC2 does not contain an installer. On IRC I was advised to install 2007 Spring edition. Although I did not like to color, I decided to burn that CD and try it out.

I must say that it’s a good distro. I’m very impressed by the level of completeness and work on the details. The package application is very intuitive and the system configuration tool is very nice and very clear. Also the default style is very ok. I like the mouse busy cursor and it also seems like the artwork is changed on a lot of area’s by Mandriva. Which gave me a more consistent look and feel throughout the distro. For example OpenOffice.org looks much better than I’m used to, but booting it in a fraction of a second makes a big difference compared to my old pc.

I missed the tool for configuring the NVidia driver (which is great tool to setup TwinView in a few clicks). The people on IRC helped me to setup some Pinquin Liberation repository and that solved that issue. Also my sound does not seem to work, but that can wait until 2008 is released and installed. No need to invest time in it now.

So, for now I’m a happy Mandriva user (sorry Planet Kubuntu readers). I’m excited to see how the next couple of days at work will be. To be continued.