Mandriva Talk

[poofyhairguy]

Here is a link about Mandriva, and it has a lot of input by Ian Murdock (founder of Debian). This is an interesting quote:


Murdock believes that soon Mandriva will need to continue its strategy of acquiring successful international distributions by incorporating one or more of these Debian-based distributions. For a distribution that was originally based on Red Hat Linux, such a move would certainly be huge leap. Given the success of Debian and the recent arrival of Sarge, Murdock thinks that now is the perfect time for Mandriva to consider moving to a Debian-based technology.

But, given the technologies involved, can Mandriva make that jump?

"Not only can they do it, my assertion is if they don't do it, they can't survive," Murdock said.

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/newss/5900/1/

Will Mandriva be another Debian spinoff? Fun to discuss this one.

[benplaut]

i see a "Fun to discuss this one", but no replies :roll:

--

i think that would be a huge step forward for Mandrake, err, Mandriva (i'll never get used to that), as, IMO, it is easier for new users to install new software on DEB based then on RPM based (never tried out Mandr___ itself, but i've used alot of RPM based distros, and they a a pain in the @$$ to deal with dependencies)

i think some users of RPM based versions of Mandr___ might jump ship, and switch to Fedora or SuSE, being such a huge change.

i think that this might hurt Ubuntu's new user share, as some percentage of new Ubuntu users are attracted by the ease of use associated with DEB based systems. This is not, however, all that big of a factor because ubuntu continues to have an amazing and huge community, as well as being free (all versions, unlike Mandr___). Still, it might end up as a progression that when Mandr___ users decide to move on, but don't consider themselves ready for Debian itself, they might decide to make the switch to... yours truly!

As long as it still remains very new-to-linux-newbie friendly, i think it's benificial to have the ubuntu communities have more of the new-to-ubuntu users be somewhat aquainted with linux, in the first place.

Ubuntu, while being for for newbies who are willing to learn a bit about linux (like how i started), is still lacking in alot of the GUI utilities that Fedora, SuSE (and i assume, although i haven't used it myself, Mandr___) have.

[poofyhairguy]

Ubuntu, while being for for newbies who are willing to learn a bit about linux (like how i started), is still lacking in alot of the GUI utilities that Fedora, SuSE (and i assume, although i haven't used it myself, Mandr___) have.

True. Maybe if Mandriva did turn to Debian, there could be some sort of pact with Ubuntu? They do have different goals.

[benplaut]

True. Maybe if Mandriva did turn to Debian, there could be some sort of pact with Ubuntu? They do have different goals.

do the goals really matter to a windows refugee? not much... they just want a system that does the things they want it to do

[somuchfortheafter]

o you guys cant see the future.. hmmm well i predict that if they try to to this, ubuntu will once again whip out its spongey outer coating and absorb all the gui stuff that they make open source, then the devels for ubuntu will tweak it for us, and we will make it free. Mandriva devels will come to us, and ubuntu will then focus on novell.... or we could stick to the desktop market...

[panickedthumb]

do the goals really matter to a windows refugee? not much... they just want a system that does the things they want it to do
no, but they DO matter to an OSS developer. In fact, it's sometimse the most important thing.

[poofyhairguy]

do the goals really matter to a windows refugee? not much... they just want a system that does the things they want it to do

Thats the goal of Mandriva.

[weekend warrior]

Respect to Murdock for Debian and all but it really sounds more like he's looking to set up a buyout deal. He says Mandriva can't survive? I'd say he's got his distros twisted. I can't think of compelling reasons to install or use Progeny. With Sarge, installation seems improved, so his Anaconda card is gone now.

Other "Debian installers" like Kanotix or Mepis offer things like KDE and full multimedia out of the box that Debian can't supply, compelling reasons to not even "upgrade" to Debian at all! but Progeny seems to fall more into line (and relative obscurity) with the likes of Zen Linux - nothing special. When he says Mandriva should go to deb tech sounds more like wishful thinking. Mandriva, and the other rpm distros, already have apt-get, thanks to the Conectiva purchase.

A more interesting speculation is what would Debian be like today if Murdock hadn't left? With a similar type of leadership, ideas, goals and timelines that Mark Shuttleworth has had here what would Debian look like today? Would ubuntu even exist? Even more alternate reality thoughts, what if Debian had had both Murdock and Shuttleworth?

[zxee]

Well I saw all these other distros in this forum-so I couldn't resist starting this thread. Mandriva has a new beta out. Check out the iso from www.distrowatch.com since strangely the url I just downloaded from http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/2007/mandrivalinux2007beta
seems not to be there now.
Mandriva used to hold the #1 position at distrowatch-now held by our fav Ubuntu.
I'm still curious from time-to-time what Mandriva(formerly Mandrake) is up to. This beta release has gnome 2.16 or if you choose the kde version it's 3.5.3 with kernel 2.6.17. When I last tried mandriva (2006 OC version) it was ok but sort of bland. Since I just downloaded this latest release it will take a day or two to check it out.
Maybe someone else has comments, thoughts or other grumblings?

[tjansson]

I used to be a Mandriva user for severeal years but finally dropped it. Some of the reasons were:

* I hated that the only in-dock-update-notificator was pay-only option.
* I hated that the chose to do ones a year updates - I want bleeding edge.
* I hated that club members could acces new Mandriva versions two og three weeks before the public.
* Finally I seriously hate their wireless application (can't recall the name). I had a script which work fine and their script was virtually impossible to remove and was total disaster.

[zxee]

I suspected this wouldn't be a popular distro to start a thread on.
I ran mandriva beta, thor 2007. It runs live no need to install.
The nice things were that it ran with a kernel matching my processor. Very good system hardware reporting/detection. The locale drake tool is a clear easy way to see and set up hardware. Remember this is a beta release there wasn't a ton of additional software-I guess normally mandriva comes on 3 cd's. However movies played without any addition configuration (I have a small movie clip on a usb flash drive-it played) The livecd had gimp, OO.o, epiphany & ff and the normal other apps-no games.
I will probably still play with this release-but won't install it since dial up/pppd are not working right (mandriva did see my onboard ethernet card-but not the external modem). Lack of dial up support is becoming more common all the time-dapper didn't work either and needed a lot of hacking although edgy is fine. I do have an external hardware modem-that works. Pretty soon modems will be like wooley mammoths. :)
If anyone has any questions that I can answer about this distro-fire away.

[greggh]

Not a good experience with Mandriva 2007. I downloaded the live cd and its the first live cd I'v tried in the last 2 months that just would not run at all. I think I've experimented with over 10 different live cds lately and Mandriva is the only one that would not load at all. I got to the orange splash screen with the progress bar after hitting enter, but then the cd drive just spins down and it doesn't load.

[angryfirelord]

Whoa, no one runs Mandriva here anymore? :)

Just put on a copy of 2008 just to see what it was like (the previous version I used was 2006) and I must say, they made a HUGE amount of improvements to it. Plus, the Club is free, so you don't have that corporate shadow nagging you to pay something all the time.

08 looks really polished and the MCC is a nifty tool to use. urpmi still feels awkward to me, but no problems with it dependency-wise. I recommend giving it a spin.

[dawg]

Angryfirelord, im expecting a copy of 2008 any day now. I sure do hope it runs well on my laptop. Last time I official used Mandriva was back in 05 I think it was "Mandriva 2005 LE" and it ran circles around k(u)buntu and fedora. I tried running the 2007 live cd and it failed miserably albeit i'm using a different laptop now. I just hope it works for me. *Crossing my fingers*

[samwyse]

Two small things I noticed:

1. bytecode interpreter not enabled in freetype2 (blurry fonts)
2. gtk2-engines-qtcurve not in the repos

[AdamWill]

1. It's still under patent, so of course it's not enabled in the version in the official repos. A bytecode-interpreter enabled build is available from a popular third-party repository (or you can grab the .src.rpm, change one digit in the spec file from '0' to '1', and rebuild it).

2. er, I'm sure I read something about that on the Cooker mailing list lately, but I just can't find it again...

btw, the official Mandriva forums are at http://forum.mandriva.com/ , and are well-populated and pretty busy, you can get help, advice, discussion etc there.

[tbroderick]

2. gtk2-engines-qtcurve not in the repos

In case you didn't know, there are rpms at kde-look.org. Just download and double-click the lib followed by the theme and gurpmi should install it for you.

QtCurve KDE3 & Gtk2 Mandriva 2008 rpms (http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/QtCurve+KDE3+%26+Gtk2+Mandriva+2008+rpms++?content =72064)

[BigSilly]

Thought I'd bump this up rather than starting a new topic.

I've just gone back to using Mandriva alongside Ubuntu after spending a while with the excellent PCLinuxOS. On balance, as good as PCLOS is, I prefer Mandriva, and when I got hold of the 2008 Powerpack I thought it'd be well worth the install. I was right too, it's a really lovely operating system, ideal for the home user. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I was wondering though - how long do Mandriva support their Powerpack versions for? By support I mean updates and security fixes etc. Now I've got this installed I'd very much like to leave it on the PC for as long as is safely possible (hopefully a few years!) , but will I have to upgrade to a newer version sooner or later?

Cheers dudes. :)

[tbroderick]

I was wondering though - how long do Mandriva support their Powerpack versions for? By support I mean updates and security fixes etc. Now I've got this installed I'd very much like to leave it on the PC for as long as is safely possible (hopefully a few years!) , but will I have to upgrade to a newer version sooner or later?

12 months for desktop packages and 18 months for core packages. So around April 2009 support will end.

[BigSilly]

12 months for desktop packages and 18 months for core packages. So around April 2009 support will end.

Thanks for the info. I guess I'll be updating it then next year. I'd hoped they have a rolling updates programme for their Powerpack editions, but never mind.

Cheers again.

[djbsteart1]

2008 is without a doubt the best distro for my hardware around. You install and go, no messing about with video card drivers that ruin the display a la kubuntu, the display works unlike ubuntu, the live cd is able to mount squashfs unlike MEPIS. And there is no need to install anything for wireless, I had my belkin card running just by telling it to enable the card that it auto detected at boot up. So, there really doesn't seem to be a need for Mandriva to switch, two years on and they walk up and down all of the Debian based distro's around

[sandysandy]

Mandriva 2008 rocks. simply awesome !

[BigSilly]

It is indeed a brilliant distro I have to agree. I'm using the Powerpack 2008 version and it's a lovely experience. I think anyone coming to Linux from Windows should look at Mandriva if Ubuntu doesn't take their fancy.

Question though - as I say I'm using the Powerpack 2008 version of Mandriva. Do you think I should install Mandriva 2008.1 Spring over it when it comes out, or should I continue with what I have? If I do stick with the PP version, am I going to be missing out on new features and updates? What do you think?

[Extreme Coder]

It is indeed a brilliant distro I have to agree. I'm using the Powerpack 2008 version and it's a lovely experience. I think anyone coming to Linux from Windows should look at Mandriva if Ubuntu doesn't take their fancy.

Question though - as I say I'm using the Powerpack 2008 version of Mandriva. Do you think I should install Mandriva 2008.1 Spring over it when it comes out, or should I continue with what I have? If I do stick with the PP version, am I going to be missing out on new features and updates? What do you think?
It's a pretty good idea, to install the latest version, but wait first to see some reports of users who tried it out first.
Although I will download it the second it comes out:)

[djbsteart1]

It is indeed a brilliant distro I have to agree. I'm using the Powerpack 2008 version and it's a lovely experience. I think anyone coming to Linux from Windows should look at Mandriva if Ubuntu doesn't take their fancy.

Question though - as I say I'm using the Powerpack 2008 version of Mandriva. Do you think I should install Mandriva 2008.1 Spring over it when it comes out, or should I continue with what I have? If I do stick with the PP version, am I going to be missing out on new features and updates? What do you think?

Waiting does seem a good idea, I'm using the latest release candidate and it is nice, so really looking forward to the final release.

[dca]

If anyone cares...

Last months ( March 2008 ) Linux Pro Magazaine in the US offered a free copy of Mandriva 2008 Powerpack DVD, pay the $9.99 USD and get the $50 some-odd dollar vers for free. This one includes the commercial LinDVD and a free other goodies...

[BigSilly]

We got that in the UK too, dca. It's the distro I installed alongside my Ubuntu and I have to say I find it excellent. Not rightly impressed with LinDVD because it region locks after so many uses, but you've still got all your other favourite DVD players in their repositories, such as VLC etc that don't do this. I need a multi region player as I legally own lots of region 1 and 3 DVD's.

But other than that, I really love it. I'm going to be sticking with it for some time now. I think it was a very clever move from the Mandriva team to allow their latest Powerpack to be given away free in this way, as there is a perceived worth and people will try it based on that. Luckily, the distro doesn't disappoint at all, so they're bound to create new fans this way.

I say, if you see it pick it up. If you can't find it, then get the free version from their site. There's no real difference, other than you get a few free extra bits with the Powerpack. It's well worth your time either way.

[Bossieman]

I just installed 2008 spring RC2 and I was just blown away. I am very impresed with it.

[igknighted]

If anyone cares...

Last months ( March 2008 ) Linux Pro Magazaine in the US offered a free copy of Mandriva 2008 Powerpack DVD, pay the $9.99 USD and get the $50 some-odd dollar vers for free. This one includes the commercial LinDVD and a free other goodies...

I'm using that right now actually! Powerpack seems much less buggy than the One CD (correctly installed the laptop kernel and some other bugs from 2008 seem gone). As for LinDVD... it's nothing super by any stretch, but it is the only US-legal dvd player for linux (no dvdcss involved), so if that matters at all to you it's a good option. Otherwise, the OSS choices (VLC, mplayer, etc) are probably better.

[AdamWill]

igknighted: it's not a bug that One doesn't install the laptop kernel, it's a limitation of how One works. The traditional installer (DrakX) used by Powerpack and Free is a 'proper' installer that works the way you'd (probably) expect: it bootstraps a very minimal working environment and then installs all the actual software as packages. So it can check what CPU you have, how much memory, and whether it thinks your system is a laptop (we have various heuristics for this), and install the appropriate kernel.

The One installer, by contrast, is basically a glorified wrapper around dd. :) Well, not THAT simple, but you get the idea. It doesn't have a clue what a package is. All it knows how to do is dump an image of the entire One environment to a hard disk. It basically just dumps a bunch of data from one place to another, it doesn't know what the data is or what it does. All it can do is install a copy of itself, so the only kernel it can install is the one it uses itself. And we have to have One use the desktop586 kernel, as it provides the widest possible hardware compatibility.

So it's not really a bug, per se. That's just how it works.

[igknighted]

igknighted: it's not a bug that One doesn't install the laptop kernel, it's a limitation of how One works. The traditional installer (DrakX) used by Powerpack and Free is a 'proper' installer that works the way you'd (probably) expect: it bootstraps a very minimal working environment and then installs all the actual software as packages. So it can check what CPU you have, how much memory, and whether it thinks your system is a laptop (we have various heuristics for this), and install the appropriate kernel.

The One installer, by contrast, is basically a glorified wrapper around dd. :) Well, not THAT simple, but you get the idea. It doesn't have a clue what a package is. All it knows how to do is dump an image of the entire One environment to a hard disk. It basically just dumps a bunch of data from one place to another, it doesn't know what the data is or what it does. All it can do is install a copy of itself, so the only kernel it can install is the one it uses itself. And we have to have One use the desktop586 kernel, as it provides the widest possible hardware compatibility.

So it's not really a bug, per se. That's just how it works.

Yeah, I suppose that was poorly worded. I was more impressed that the powerpack DVD got the right one than I was dissapointed the One CD didn't. The bugs were more like the random laguage selection as default for aspell (never my selected language during install) that existed on One but not PP. They were all relatively minor and easy to correct, just a little annoying. Can't wait to try 2008.1

PS: never used the free DVD, so it could do just as well as the powerpack one. I can't say for sure.

[dca]

All things considered, I'm thoroughly impressed w/ 2008.0... For a desktop, this is pretty much where it's at on both DE(s). The Network Center way of handling nic(s) is something every distro should be using. I mean, it's static across both Gnome & KDE... Excellent.

On that note, their enterprise server offering is something they should be looking into. Corp Server 4 runs a 2.6.12 kernel and touts virtualization but apparently that was the one thing not working well in the eweeks review. Mandriva is gonna' have to step up w/ their enterprise offerings. It's too late to catch the boat w/ Novell & RedHat running on big iron but it's not too late for them to release a multi-purpose (who knows maybe text-only server edition a'la Ubuntu) server distro.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Mandriva-Linux-Whiffs-on-Virtualization-Integration/

...maybe they should just spend a little more time on Powerpack 2008.0 as far as testing it and putting it through its paces so that way it can be re-released as a multi-purpose Linux distribution...

[AdamWill]

it is multi-purpose, you can happily run PWP as an enterprise server, some people do, in fact. The point of the enterprise products is basically the support you can get for them and the five year life cycle.

[igknighted]

Many people still use RHEL4, which uses 2.6.9 IIRC. 2.6.12 really isn't that much older than the 2.6.15 in Dapper either, the last Ubuntu LTS. I'm sure corporate server 5 will be out before 4 is too outdated. In the meantime they have developed an excellent lineup of products like MDS, so I think the future of Mandriva on the future is fairly bright. It's too bad Zimbra dropped support for Mandy tho, I wanted to use it for a Zimbra box but am going to end up on Fedora or CentOS instead.

[djbsteart1]

When 2008.1 became beta I jumped from 2008.0, nothing has caused any trouble yet, just the minor things that have been stated, but all in all it is easily the nicest distro I have found. The only wresting match was with the printer, everything else was just plug and go.

[dca]

it is multi-purpose, you can happily run PWP as an enterprise server, some people do, in fact. The point of the enterprise products is basically the support you can get for them and the five year life cycle.

So Powerpack+ 2008.0 is a five year support release?

[AdamWill]

no, but that's not what was asked. Only the Corporate products have five year support. main line Mandriva Linux is supported for 12 / 18 months.

you can't, really, update a product every six months and support each of those iterations for five years (which is of course why Ubuntu has staged LTS releases). so there's an inevitable tradeoff here. you can't really complain about older kernels in long term support releases because that's just the way things are going to be. if you want a product that will be supported for a long time, you're going to have to resign yourself to the fact that it is not going to have the very-latest-everything all the time.

Our Corporate products are, in fact, based on the mainline Mandriva Linux releases. we take a mainline release, ensure that it's stable, add the Corporate extra features and software to it, and that's a Corporate release. but we're not going to do a Corporate release every six months, that just wouldn't be workable.

[dca]

...indeed, but the 18month releases from Ubuntu you are still able to buy support for both the server and desktop editions. I'm not slighting Mandriva in the least, I think the polish on it is extraordinary, in line w/ openSuSE...

I see the provided kernels on Powerpacks are only laptop & desktop. So, they will not release a server optimized kernel on those? ...only the Corp Server releases?

[AdamWill]

There is a -server kernel in the mainline Mandriva releases.

[igknighted]

There is a server kernel (several actually) in PP2008.0. There are actually about 10 different kernels/patchsets in Mandriva: desktop, laptop, server, linus, multimedia, tmb, rt, vserver, xen, and mm. Make sure that you have the distribution sources installed and are not just pulling off the DVD.

[dca]

A-ha, thanks...

...Adam or ig, I know PP+ has playback for MP3(s), how do you set it to rip CDs to MP3? I see the setting in Rhythmbox 'edit' settings but it won't let me set it as default...

[AdamWill]

Only desktop, desktop586, laptop and server are flavours of the official Mandriva kernel. multimedia and tmb are alternative kernels maintained by third party contributors (multimedia is basically obsolete now, it's not in 2008 Spring). linus, rt, and mm are straight rebuilds of the upstream kernel branches of those names; they really exist for testing, not for use, as they have no Mandriva patches or customization. xen is...for xen. And I don't remember what the heck vserver is...:)

[AdamWill]

dca: there's no mp3 encoding library available for Linux that would be legal in the U.S., so we can't ship one. The commonly used library is known as LAME and is available from the PLF third-party repository, but do be aware that using it is technically illegal in the U.S. and anywhere else Fraunhofer has a valid and enforceable patent on the process.

[gsmanners]

I'm looking forward to the next release (April 9).

[swoll1980]

Ive siad a hundred times that I love everything about mandriva exept the absance of the debian base. this would be perfect

[djbsteart1]

Ive siad a hundred times that I love everything about mandriva exept the absance of the debian base. this would be perfect

Its the fact that its not debian based that makes it so good for me, all things bases on debian don't work on my hardware if any sort of graphics are enabled so being based on redhat is great. This was also written a good number of years ago so I doubt that they are going to switch.

[dca]

Adam, on the 2008.0 release, when using 'drakconnect' or whatever the network manager dealie is, if there were multiple access points in an office it would show each different connection. Is this supposed to be that way? In other words using NM-applet (un-adultered) on other distro(s) it would show them as a single AP and auto-pick the unit w/ the greatest signal...

[Comhra]

Just tried out Mandriva Spring and everything worked fine except for the screen resolution. It was the KDE version and though I love KDE appliances I'm more accustomed to using Gnome and I couldn't adjust the resolution. In Gutsy, I'm using 1280x800 and it works nicely.

I'd like to try a Gnome version of Mandriva Spring and though I found plenty of references to it on the net, I couldn't find a d/load link. Can someone post a link to a torrent that will give me Spring with the Gnome desktop?

[r76]

I'd like to try a Gnome version of Mandriva Spring and though I found plenty of references to it on the net, I couldn't find a d/load link. Can someone post a link to a torrent that will give me Spring with the Gnome desktop?

http://club.mandriva.com/ is a great jumping off point - all download info for new releases is there. HAven't seen any torrents (I'd head to linuxtracker maybe if you're keen), but the download mirrors (http://http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_RC_2#Availability)can be found from that page

I guess the file you want will be named something like
mandriva-linux-2008-spring-rc2-one-GNOME-int-cdrom-i586.iso

[Comhra]

OK r76, thanks for that.

[tubasoldier]

For anyone interested PLF will provide any needed packages for MP3 playback and all codecs.

Back to the original post, I'm not sure Mandriva would die completely if it were to remain based on RPM instead of DEB. However, I do believe that if Mandriva were to go to a Debian style the benefits to other distros would be immense. Mandriva and Suse have by far the best graphical system configuration tools. I prefer Mandriva's over Suse's. Of course PCLinuxOS has the Mandriva system GUI tools. I'm sure this would help out some of the Ubuntu Newbies quite a bit.

I started seriously using Linux with Mandriva 9.2. Before that It was a little Red Hat 9 but not seriously. I learned a lot from Mandriva but I stopped using it because of the large number of bugs and the fact that they didn't have backports at the time.

Another thing that really bugged me was that the "updates" wanted to install all updated packages, not just the ones I had installed. Has this changed? Does anybody know?

I tried out the Mandriva One live CD and it was pretty slick. It definitely has a different feel to it. Mandriva is one of the few distros who has really tried putting some work into the look and feel of the desktop.

[AdamWill]

Torrents are available at http://torrent.mandriva.com/public , but we don't do torrents for pre-releases (there's not enough demand for it to be necessary; FTP mirrors handle the demand fine).

dca, I'm not quite sure what you mean, but if you mean that NM combines all APs with the same ESSID into one entry and only allows you to use the one with the strongest signal, we would not consider that to be correct behaviour. There's no law that says that any time you encounter two APs with identical ESSIDs, they're just alternative access points to the same network; in fact, it's usually not the case (it usually happens when lots of people leave their router on the default ESSID, 'default' or 'linksys' or 'netgear' or whatever: in this case, the identically named APs are not linked in any way, and *ought* to be displayed differently). So if that's what you meant, we consciously choose not to implement it that way. If you meant something different, sorry. :)

[AdamWill]

tuba: MDV includes MP3 playback out of the box. For gstreamer we use the Fluendo codec, which has no legal problems (it's licensed). We do in fact also include unlicensed MP3 *decoders*, as a pragmatic decision: it's commonly used functionality and we believe Fraunhofer has no intention of suing distributions who do this. But we know that they would be likely to complain about distros who include encoders, so we don't do that.

DEB vs RPM is a red herring, for the issues you're talking about. You seem to be saying Debian-based distros could benefit from adopting some MDV tools, which of course we wouldn't disagree with :) However, the packaging format doesn't really matter to this at all. If it were only a matter of packaging format, it'd be trivial for Ubuntu or Debian or any other Debian-based distro to adopt the Mandriva tools - all they need to do is package them, which they do all the time with all other applications. The source for the MDV tools is freely available.

The reason it would be trickier for Debian-based distros to use the Mandriva configuration tools has nothing to do with package formats - it's simply because we don't use the same methods for handling system configuration, so what the Mandriva tools actually *do* in terms of changing underlying configuration files would not apply on a Debian-based machine. That's independent of packaging formats - it wouldn't be solved if Mandriva used DEB for its packages, or Debian used RPM.

[dca]

Torrents are available at http://torrent.mandriva.com/public , but we don't do torrents for pre-releases (there's not enough demand for it to be necessary; FTP mirrors handle the demand fine).

dca, I'm not quite sure what you mean, but if you mean that NM combines all APs with the same ESSID into one entry and only allows you to use the one with the strongest signal, we would not consider that to be correct behaviour. There's no law that says that any time you encounter two APs with identical ESSIDs, they're just alternative access points to the same network; in fact, it's usually not the case (it usually happens when lots of people leave their router on the default ESSID, 'default' or 'linksys' or 'netgear' or whatever: in this case, the identically named APs are not linked in any way, and *ought* to be displayed differently). So if that's what you meant, we consciously choose not to implement it that way. If you meant something different, sorry. :)

Hmm, that's what I figured. I've got four AP(s) config as one throughout an office, in NM on Ubuntu/SLED it just lists the AP as one instance. On MPP+ network it lists all four w/ their corresponding signal strengths. No biggy...

[dca]

tuba: MDV includes MP3 playback out of the box. For gstreamer we use the Fluendo codec, which has no legal problems (it's licensed). We do in fact also include unlicensed MP3 *decoders*, as a pragmatic decision: it's commonly used functionality and we believe Fraunhofer has no intention of suing distributions who do this. But we know that they would be likely to complain about distros who include encoders, so we don't do that.

DEB vs RPM is a red herring, for the issues you're talking about. You seem to be saying Debian-based distros could benefit from adopting some MDV tools, which of course we wouldn't disagree with :) However, the packaging format doesn't really matter to this at all. If it were only a matter of packaging format, it'd be trivial for Ubuntu or Debian or any other Debian-based distro to adopt the Mandriva tools - all they need to do is package them, which they do all the time with all other applications. The source for the MDV tools is freely available.

The reason it would be trickier for Debian-based distros to use the Mandriva configuration tools has nothing to do with package formats - it's simply because we don't use the same methods for handling system configuration, so what the Mandriva tools actually *do* in terms of changing underlying configuration files would not apply on a Debian-based machine. That's independent of packaging formats - it wouldn't be solved if Mandriva used DEB for its packages, or Debian used RPM.

...arguments like this have always boiled down to speed, not superiority of package management architecture. That really irks me, I judge all the distro(s) on their merits.

Mandriva really needs to push hard if they want to tackle SMB(s) in the US... I haven't heard anything from them since they were Mandrake. When it comes to big iron in the enterprise it's RH & Novell, but what about the little guys (SMBs)? Around the turn of the century/nineties, Mandrake was a good alternative for those (enterprises) not wanting to run RedHat on lesser systems because of cost of license/support/maintenance. I mean, you're paying money for support to run mission critical systems, but when it comes to simply setting up a router or a file sharing device you didn't want to spend all that money on RH... Adam, how is Mandriva looking at this or are they abandoning the US? Ubuntu is trying to muscle in on the US SMB(s) w/ the hiring of sales & service/support people in the US.

http://www.ubuntu.com/employment

[djbsteart1]

...arguments like this have always boiled down to speed, not superiority of package management architecture. That really irks me, I judge all the distro(s) on their merits.

Mandriva really needs to push hard if they want to tackle SMB(s) in the US... I haven't heard anything from them since they were Mandrake. When it comes to big iron in the enterprise it's RH & Novell, but what about the little guys (SMBs)? Around the turn of the century/nineties, Mandrake was a good alternative for those (enterprises) not wanting to run RedHat on lesser systems because of cost of license/support/maintenance. I mean, you're paying money for support to run mission critical systems, but when it comes to simply setting up a router or a file sharing device you didn't want to spend all that money on RH... Adam, how is Mandriva looking at this or are they abandoning the US? Ubuntu is trying to muscle in on the US SMB(s) w/ the hiring of sales & service/support people in the US.

http://www.ubuntu.com/employment

The CEO of Mandriva in an interveiw after the lay off of Gael Duval did say that they were going to focus on bot the enerprise and desktop markets, but as you say, this has as yet not been evident. I do hope they manage it and get back to where they were when Mandriva was Mandrake, 2008 and 2008.1 are good starting points, heres to 09.

[igknighted]

This is a little off topic, but I have a licensing question for you Adam:

I'm running Mandy 2008 Powerpack and Fedora 8 on my laptop. I use LinDVD for DVD's on Mandy, but would like to also use it on Fedora. The install worked fine and everything, but provided I have Powerpack am I allowed to use the software on other distributions? Or is this against the EULA (which I can't seem to find now)?

Same applies for the other goodies in powerpack (like Cedega, for example). Could these legally be used with another distro providing I have Mandy Powerpack legally?

[Amorphous_Snake]

I have used Mandriva before and I liked it. But can it run properly on my older system. It's a Celeron 1.2 Ghz with 512 MB RAM. Currently it has Ubuntu 7.10 running fine although a bit slow. I don't care about all the fancy 3D effects.

Is NTFS-3g finally properly integrated by default in 2008.1?

Finally, is there a way to install from the One CDs without instaling all the extra drivers and languages I don't need. I end up installing from the Free DVD because I end up installing drivers for hardware I don't own, together with updates for these drivers!!!

[igknighted]

I have used Mandriva before and I liked it. But can it run properly on my older system. It's a Celeron 1.2 Ghz with 512 MB RAM. Currently it has Ubuntu 7.10 running fine although a bit slow. I don't care about all the fancy 3D effects.

Is NTFS-3g finally properly integrated by default in 2008.1?

Finally, is there a way to install from the One CDs without instaling all the extra drivers and languages I don't need. I end up installing from the Free DVD because I end up installing drivers for hardware I don't own, together with updates for these drivers!!!

There used to be a free OneCD (back in 2007.1) but I would search in the mirrors to see if it still exists.

[djbsteart1]

I have used Mandriva before and I liked it. But can it run properly on my older system. It's a Celeron 1.2 Ghz with 512 MB RAM. Currently it has Ubuntu 7.10 running fine although a bit slow. I don't care about all the fancy 3D effects.

Is NTFS-3g finally properly integrated by default in 2008.1?

Finally, is there a way to install from the One CDs without instaling all the extra drivers and languages I don't need. I end up installing from the Free DVD because I end up installing drivers for hardware I don't own, together with updates for these drivers!!!

There is dual mini, now, which has the choice of kde and gnome, and I think it is limited in the drivers and stuff that it installs. I havn't used it but I will at some point as I guess you could get the system that you want from it.

[AdamWill]

ok, various answers :)

dca, that's certainly a market we're interested in, but I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about buying. I mean, basically, like other distros, we sell support. We also sell a few bits of commercial software - in the PWP - but none of that's relevant to setting up a router in a SMB. Unless you often play Half-Life on your router. :) So you say people "don't want to spend all that money for support" when it just comes to a simple router, so - why would you pay any money at all? Frankly, if I was setting up a simple router for a SMB, I'd use Mandriva Free. We do have enterprise products that we sell, Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop, but they're more aimed at kitting out a whole office with software that works well together, and providing support for it (which we're happy to charge you for). There wouldn't be a whole heck of a lot of point in shelling out for a CS license just for a single router machine, to be honest. If you're interesting in a more comprehensive software / support contract, we are happy to sell it to you :), and we have an agent in the U.S. who will handle it - Walt Pennington is the guy to talk to, wpennington AT mandriva DOT com. Tell him I sent you.

igknighted, it depends on the license for the specific commercial app you want to use. Each commercial app in the Powerpack has its own license, which should be in the package somewhere, or accessible from within the app itself. That is what determines whether you could also use it on another machine. You'd have to read the licenses yourself and look, I don't honestly know those terms off the top of my head.

snake, Mandriva would be fine on that system. A default Mandriva and a default Ubuntu are fairly similar in terms of hardware resource usage, and in both cases, you can tweak things up for lower resource setups - using a lightweight desktop like IceWM and lighter apps rather than Firefox and KMail / Evolution and OpenOffice etc. But for a Celeron with 512MB you'd probably be fine with the default apps, really. Maybe bumping the ram to 1GB wouldn't be a bad idea, if you could find an appropriate module cheap. Yeah, NTFS-3G should be okay in 2008 Spring (I'm just going to confirm this on my own machines with the final One images I'm downloading now, but it's supposed to be). No, you can't install One without the extra languages and drivers, because of the way the install works - it just dumps the entire running One image to your hard disk, it isn't actually capable of installing or removing 'packages' per se. You can, however, remove the unneeded packages post-install. The mini-CD is rather different from One - it's not intended to give you a pretty-full desktop, it gives you a very basic system which you're then supposed to expand using urpmi.

[Amorphous_Snake]

Thanks Mr. Adam. You are always helpful. I am stuck with 512 MB RAM on that system because that's the maximum the motherboard can allow!

I will wait for your confirmation about the NTFS-3G thing. Is the final out yet?

Looks like I will get the Free DVD as usual.

[dca]

...yes, indeed, thanks Adam for all the help. I'll probably see you on the Mandriva boards, also.

[gsmanners]

Looks like the torrents are up on the release page.

[AdamWill]

snake: I tested with One last night and NTFS seems to be done right.

Final is in the process of getting released right now.

[Amorphous_Snake]

Thanks. I am downloading the final Free DVD. I have my fingers crossed!

[Antman]

I was reading some of the features of 2008 Spring, and I must say it sounds very good so far. I was impressed with 2008.0, but 2008.1 Spring looks even better.
Then I saw the control panel picture and saw how NFS shares are easily added via the GUI... openSUSE does this too and I was impressed. Did 2008.0 have the NFS tool...?!? I can't recall since back then I was using SMB mainly to share files.

Can't wait to try it.
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/uploads/b/be/20081_drakconf.png

[Antman]

Now I recall one of the problems I had with the 2008.0 PWP version. When using ATI drivers (x1300) I couldn't suspend my T60 laptop.
So far only Fedora 8 and openSUSE 10.3 can do that correctly with no tweaking/patching needed on my part. I guess I'll see if Mandy 2008.1 can impress me in that regard. ;)

[FuturePilot]

Anyone know how to disable CPU scaling in Mandriva? I tried under the System Services in the Control Center but it didn't seem to do anything. I need to do this because if I don't I get nasty lockups when I use the Nvidia driver.](*,)

[AdamWill]

futurepilot: easiest way would probably be to blacklist the cpufreq modules. you can see what modules are loaded with 'lsmod | grep freq' and then add each one to /etc/modprobe.conf

blacklist cpufreq_ondemand
blacklist cpufreq_powersave

etc etc.

antman, the network sharing tools have been in mcc for years, but they always used to have ridiculously bad and confusing names. I made the names better for this release.

[Amorphous_Snake]

I have installed MDV 2008.1 successfully. It's a great release.

How can I set up a VNC server that starts automatically? There was a tool for this in the KDE Control Center, but I can't find it.

[Antman]

Now I recall one of the problems I had with the 2008.0 PWP version. When using ATI drivers (x1300) I couldn't suspend my T60 laptop.
So far only Fedora 8 and openSUSE 10.3 can do that correctly with no tweaking/patching needed on my part. I guess I'll see if Mandy 2008.1 can impress me in that regard. ;)

FYI: 2008.1 suspends my IBM T60 laptop, while using ATI drivers, without a problem. ;)

[Amorphous_Snake]

I have installed MDV 2008.1 successfully. It's a great release.

How can I set up a VNC server that starts automatically? There was a tool for this in the KDE Control Center, but I can't find it.

OK. Problem solved. I installed "kdenetwork" and it worked. It seems that krfb wasn't installed by default. This is strange, considering that I installed from the Free DVD.