Oct

31

Living with Mandriva 2008

Filed Under Mandriva, random thoughts | 6 Comments

I tend to switch distributions as often as Paris Hilton switches sexual partners. At any time I am running two or three different distros in addition to windows vista (how can I complain about Vista if I don’t occasionally use it?). when Mandriva 2008 came out, I decided to stick with it, day in and day out and see how I felt. This isn’t a review, just a look at my experience with it. For those wanting a review, I’ll imitate one you one in one paragraph!

Mini-Review:

Installation: flawless, except my (insert odd hardware or ati card here) didn’t work without fiddling around. Mandriva 2008 contains (list of updated packages with boring numbers i.e. 3.4.7). I (really like!) (hate) the updated look (circle one). Talk about Mp3/W32 stuff. Mention Ubuntu. Complain about Gael Duvall’s dismissal years ago. Wrap it up by saying either you love it, think it is okay but you are sticking with whichever distro, or hate it because something didn’t work.

I just can’t write those anymore. I want to give a shout out to those that do, though, because the current round of distribution reviews have been excellent. You go girls! Why do you need me to tell you what others have said eloquently enough already? You don’t, and I can live with that.

So, back to my point, which is I thought it might be interesting to stick with one distribution and see how it fit my day to day needs. Most reviews I have written were written after spending a couple of days with a distribution. It is like having a friend over for the weekend. A whole different world than living with the friend every day. Or…. Having a one night stand, then deciding to date the person. The way you feel one day is probably very different a month later. So I moved in with Mandriva.

It was made easier to stick with Mandriva after the new video card came to town. I believed the hype and rushed out and got an HD ATI card. Previously, ATI and Linux got along like John Bolton and the UN. The new AMD/ATI Linux driver situation is very promising. In that there are a lot of promises being made. OpenSuse couldn’t handle the card. It gave me one of the most screwed up errors I have ever seen. It was nothing compared to Vista, though. Vista could not handle the righteous intensity of having on board video and a PCIe video card. I’m stuck in 4bit graphics hell. ATI says it is the motherboard’s fault. the motherboard manufacturer blames vista. Visa blames the motherboard. Every fix does not work. How did mandriva do? Worked right out of the box. Big ups!

All of my hardware, none of it exotic, just works. I couldn’t play around with Compiz-Fusion due to my poor choice of video card and its proprietary drivers. No biggie. I am sure if I hacked around I could have gotten it to work, but it is too big a hassle for the benefit of bling that will cause an occasional crash or freeze.

Everything I need to do in my daily life I can do with Mandriva 2008 Powerpack. The same can be true of most distributions these days, but the feel of the Mandriva System is better. There is a lack of annoyances that I find in other popular distros.

Pluses I find:

  • I like the new menu layout, with XDG integration. The mixture of KDE/Gnome apps is smooth. I feel *buntu gets crazy and incoherent when you run more than one Desktop Environment on the system.

  • Everything just works. I run a 64-bit system, and that is important to me. Adobe’s Flashplayer would not work on OpenSuse. Unfortunately Flash is an essential in my web surfing, so that detail was a deal killer for O/s.

  • I love Mandriva’s community. Adam Williamson impresses me. He is all over Mandriva’s forums being helpful. Any article mentioning Mandriva he is usually there representing the company in a favorable light. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Adam has given Mandriva a public face, and it is positive.

  • Drak3D as a login choice, to get it set up outside of being in a DE, is smart. I like.

  • Blogrover and Foxmarks installed by default is an interesting choice. Blogrover has proven to be irritating (Stop jumping out at me!) Foxmarks (sync-er of bookmarks) does its job well.

Annoyances:

  • I’m not crazy about the new theme. No big deal, it takes all of a minute to adjust things. The Orange look of Mandriva 2007 Spring was fresh and new, the updated look, while decent, is a bit boring and cheap looking.

  • No description of packages in the otherwise excellent package manager. I am sure there is an easy fix out there, but they should be in there by default. Or, since there is a brief description right next to the title that says it all, just get rid of that message.

  • No Katapult?

  • Surprisingly, nothing else!

I am glad to see this release getting the respect it deserves. For too long Mandriva has been viewed under the harsh light of past failures instead of the strength of the product they deliver. They are racking up a string of great releases. A lot of hard work was put into 2008, particularly at the end, and it has paid off. I feel it is better than OpenSuse 10.3. Ubuntu hasn’t caught up to Mandriva in my eyes.

This is currently my favorite popular distro. From a practical standpoint, I feel it is better than Windows Vista. I don’t say that as a Linux slappy. Looking at it from an angle of which OS enables me to do the things I need to do day in and day out, Mandriva shines. My next article will compare Vista and Mandriva 2008 in depth, and I will convince you why 2008 wins.

 

 

Nov

16

Random Thoughts: FVWM Crystal, Fedora Core 6 and Donate to Beryl

Filed Under Fedora, Uncategorized, beryl, fvwm crystal, random thoughts | Comments Off

I started running FVWM-Crystal on Ubuntu 6.10. Tired of the KDE/Gnome wars? Looking for something different? FVWM Crystal is absolutely beautiful, lightweight and fast. If it were a quarterback, it would be Micheal Vick to Gnome’s Joey Harrington. I was going to review it, but in my research I found a fantastic review that I cannot beat. It covers it all. Here it is:

Read the review at Polishlinux.org.

Since that review covered everything, eliminating the need for another, I decided to get back to my Fedora Core 6 review. I just couldn’t get excited about it, no fault to Fedora. Does the world really need the 67th review of Fedora 6? I couldn’t convince myself it did. Instead, I will give a micro-review.

  • Installation was painless. It took 20 minutes and went exactly like a modern distro install should.
  • Option to add repositories during install is new and a nice addition.
  • I liked the new graphics. I am tired of the icons. Me and every other reviewer on earth.
  • 55 updates greeted my install. They took forever. This was 2 weeks after the release.
  • The package manager acted flakey. Yumex (an alternative graphical installer) crashed often. Yum on the command line worked well.
  • Post Novell’s announcement, I appreciated the Free as in Freedom stance of Fedora.
  • That said, I installed the Nvidia beta drivers, MP3 codecs, etc… from freshrpms.net. It was as easy as doing it as any other distro. No problems.
  • I found out there is an alternate KDE for Fedora, I installed that. More on that soon, it is a whole article.
  • I still do not care for Fedora’s administrative packages. I couldn’t find them using KDE. It is probably my fault, but it should be easy.
  • Compiz and the 3D desktop did not work well for me at all. For lack of a better term, it seemed half-assed.

Overall, Fedora has done a very nice job. Graphical package management still is flakey after all these years. It is fine from the command line. If you are a new user and looking for an easy distribution, I can easily recommend it. Personally, I just could not get into it. It seems to lack something that I cannot define other than “excitement”. I constantly found myself going back to Ubuntu. When I do figure it out I will give it a short write up.

Finally:

If you use Beryl and are excited with it, I would like to encourage you to donate to the team. They are doing a great job. I am having fun using the eye-candy. I find it hard to work outside of the 3D environment now, something I completely did not expect. Here is a link to the thread that has donation information.

Beryl Donations.

New content is slower to come than I thought. I am focused on reviews and interviews at the moment. I am trying to integrate a forum into the site. I thank all of you that visit this site. If there is anything you would like to see here, drop me a line.