Mandriva 2008
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… reinstall. I made a mess of my system anyhow in the first hours as new Mandriva users, so that was more or less expected.
The installer is very clever in that respect, I told him to use existing partitions and the installer suggested to format the partition with / on it and to not format the partion with /home on it and mount it on those locations. Awesome.
Although I noticed that the installer does not check for enough space on / or give an error when the partion is full while installing. It simply exits.
I still do not get the selection of languages on the live cd though. Dutch is not an option, while languages with much less ‘users’ were present. It will have to do with the size limitations probably. As the installer uses that data too, I had to fix that after installation.
And my sound is also working again, I wonder why the soundsystem is disabled by default in KDE. Fixing the the Twinview was easy, the NVidia tool was already present in the menu’s, so no Flying Pinguins repository was needed (yet). I needed to build Mailody as it is not available, some nice meta packages make that easy enough to prepare the system.
Printing was a breeze as well. I just clicked on Printing in the Mandriva Control Center and it installed some packages and it spotted all the printers from the central cups-server. Would be even better if I did not have to restart OpenOffice.org Writer to get those printers. It seems silly, but it is the general use case. You want to print something, does not work, fix it, return to that task.
What I miss for now is the system settings from Ubuntu. Now that I don’t have it anymore I now see how much I got used to that instead of KControl. But to compensate I heard that Kickoff should be available. I just have not found how to enable it yet.
Now I’m tempted to install it on my laptop (which I tried to keep KDE4 only up to now, but I’m about to give up on that idea) and at home. Better wait a bit, until I’m sure about it and feel more confident with tools like ’service’ and ‘urpmi’
Hi Tom,
Did you know the Dutch Mandriva Club has a rpm build service?
Mandriva users can ask the team to build RPM’s of their favorit applications, and when granted, the team will put them in their urpmi repository.
you can ask for rpm’s at this url:
http://www.mandrivaclub.nl/site/index.php?autocom=bugtracker&showproject=1
I recently made the switch from Kubuntu to Mandriva myself. I also notice that on his blog Troy Unrau speaks of the same switch.
I am very happy with my Mandriva 2008 install, and I do plan on staying on this distro for some time.
I haven’t looked at Mandriva lately, but if you mean arts when you say KDE soundsystem there are a lot of reasons to deactivate it.
First of all, most KDE programs which have audio output out there today don’t use arts anymore (Amarok, Kaffeine, etc.) so there is only limited need.
Second, arts becomes a problem as soon as you want to use systems which don’t have an arts output plugin: arts blocks Alsa, and therefore other applications are blocked or have to use the arts wrapper. However, this introduces sometimes a quite heavy delay, and in cases of flash Videos or Skype telephony this can really kill the application.
So, the only reason to activate arts is to have KDE system sounds. And the reason to not use it are many for the average user.
for kickoff you just have to right-click on the kde menu button
Ok, I did not know that.
That easy? Hmmf. I would have never found out.
You can get the configuration tools used by Ubuntu. Just install the package ‘gnome-system-tools’.
You can right click on the KDE menu button and select “Change to KickOff”.
1. inability to select packages when doing Mandriva One installation :
This is due to the fact that the Live Installer ( draklive ) will just copy the LiveCD content to the hard disk.
2. No dutch support in Mandriva One :
as you said, CD size constraint. However with localedrake it’s very easy to add others languages later.
3. system settings :
you should really have a look at Mandriva Control center, you will be surprise. To be even more surprise, install the drakwizard package. You will see how easy it is to setup a DNS or a SQUID server.
4. kickoff :
check that kickoff-i18n package is installed eventually. right clikc on the Mandriva menu icon, and select kickoff. kicker will be relauched. The best thing, then, is to log out and log back
5. Documentations :
Have a look at the following websites for documentations and further ressources :
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/KB/
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Desktop
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/SysAdmin
I just installed the Mandriva 2008 on my laptop (Dell D820) and for the first time:
- working suspend AND resume (to ram or disk)
- easy 2 screens config with xrandr
It seems also that power handling works better ; it seems really great.
I don’t use Mandrake any more (found other distros that suit me better, for the most part), but there is one thing I miss: urpmi.
Call me a heretic, but that’s my favorite CLI package manager (and yes, I’ve used apt-get and aptitude). I might just try 2008, since openSUSE 10.3 doesn’t seem to like my laptop.
I’ve found (when reading about resource improvements in KDE) that you can select an external player (from the Advanced button, I believe) and select an external player like /usr/bin/aplay or /usr/bin/play and have kde system sounds. I’m surprised one of them is not enabled by default….?
Trevor
He was talking about the Kcontrol replacement “system settings” in Kubuntu.
With MDV 2008 urpmi improved much and I like it much more :) try it out.