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Our Blogs Open Sauce Mandriva 2008: keeping the faith
Our Blogs Open Sauce Mandriva 2008: keeping the faith | Mandriva 2008: keeping the faith |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 16 October 2007 | |
  
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Last week I downloaded Mandriva 2008 just to have a look. I still remember the time, nine years ago, when Mandriva, then called Mandrake, was known as "Red Hat with KDE." Red Hat used GNOME and thus if you wanted to have a look at KDE (then in version 1.1.1) a safe option as a beginner was to install Mandrake which had been based on Red Hat. No longer is that the case - the two distributions have now diverged as far from each other as possible and packges for one cannot be installed on the other without being repackaged. The name change from Mandrake to Mandriva occurred due to trademark reasons. But the quality is still the same - with the only caution being that this is bleeding edge stuff and it may occasionally lock up. Not half as often as Vista, though. The 2008 version of Mandriva is extremely easy to install - it took just 14 minutes for a working interface, including configuring every bit of hardware that I wanted to configure. There is no complicated beast like YaST around as in openSUSE. Mandriva is a commercial distribution and makes no bones about that at all - there is a single disc version which is free to download and use and there are packs for sale. The price is reasonable for a nicely designed, working Linux system. The single disc free version does not provide a choice of interfaces during installation; only KDE and its associated applications get installed. If your system has a NVIDIA-based card, then the proprietary driver from that company gets installed by default. On occasion, I noticed problems, especially when graphic special effects are being used. If you chose to run without the desktop candy, the driver works without any hiccups. For my part I've always preferred the open source nv driver for such cards as the driver can also be upgraded by those who develop the distribution in question. Mandriva takes the right approach for a commercial distribution - things like the Flash plugins are installed along with the rest of the system and ready to use on the first start-up. About the first thing that I normally look at when playing around with distributions is the adding and removing of software. Mandriva has the necessary bits and pieces in the right place - and very logically organised. Updating is a no-frills operation; the update indicator is a little orange icon on the taskbar and looks very similar to its Ubuntu counterpart. Automatic updates are enabled by default. Another good thing about Mandriva is the fact that it does not misbehave when configuration files are hand-edited - this is in stark contrast to openSUSE. I have found few distributions which can set up the right parameters for my 22-inch LCD monitor which can provide a screen resolution of 1680 x 1050. Editing the xorg.conf file on openSUSE resulted in the GUI breaking; with Mandriva, such tweaking did no harm. On the next boot, I had the desktop looking as it should. There is adequate software with the default install but one thing which left me nonplussed was the lack of a torrent client; KTorrent is an excellent application that is part of the standard KDE desktop and given that Mandriva includes the latest possible stuff from KDE, it was difficult to find a reason for its omission. And it must be borne in mind that a lot of us do download torrents that are 100 per cent kosher. Mandriva comes with a ready-made firewall which can be tweaked to one's leaking. There are simple and advanced configuration interfaces. All in all, I found it to be staying in line with what it was - a distribution at the cutting edge, simple and easy to set up and use. |
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