[aRTee]

This thread is for reactions to the second part of my Mandriva Linux 2006 review.

The third part will be up as soon as I can manage to finish it.

Any comments, corrections, flames or praise, please leave them in this topic.

I hope you'll enjoy the read,
aRTee

[arctic]

Again: Very well done. :)

[KKn]

Just some tips regarding the video overlay, there should be some option to set in the X conf-file to move overlay to the secondary display or display on both (i have an ati-card, don't know the nvidia well) Try "man your-driver-name"

My system includes two cards, an ati radeon9800 AGP with two displays for work, and an ati radeon 9200 PCI for movies.

By applying this kernel- and Xserver-patch: "http://www.ltn.lv/~aivils/" I am able to run two instances of X active at once. One X for the r9800 with a mouse and a keyboard displaying on the dualhead desktop , and one for the r9200 with just a cordless mouse displaying on a TV.

The impact of watching wideo on a 2GHz machine is quite low, so it's no problem working (ok, coding / surfing the web) while my wife watches a movie.

The only drawback i have found is that my tty:s don't work anymore, so i have to stick to the gnome/kde consoles.

-KKn, running Gentoo

[solarian]

Hi, can anyone say what's wrong with the experimental Xorg the new Mandriva uses apart from it being experimental?
What exactly are the glitches?
I'm asking because I'm putting MDV2006 on a friend's computer this week and I'd rather prefer to know what I'm going for.

Thanks!

p.s. Nice one getting on Slashdot again, aRTee!

This post has been edited by solarian: 15 November 2005 - 09:23 AM

[ianw1974]

I don't know if this is a problem caused by my urpmi upgrade, or whether it's the same for everyone, but I found that the Euphoria ScreenSaver (kdeartwork-open-gl), doesn't work correctly. It appears in the top few inches of the screen, rather than fully screen.

Some of the other GL screensavers are the same, so not sure if this is because of X or not. But others, that are new to 2006 work perfectly fine.

Very good article artee! :P

[Reiver_Fluffi]

solarian, on Nov 15 2005, 09:16 AM, said:

Hi, can anyone say what's wrong with the experimental Xorg the new Mandriva uses apart from it being experimental?
What exactly are the glitches?
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

In a nutshell, the opensource nvidia and ati drivers are borked, and there have been instances of X creating 100% cpu load (although this appears to only happen at 4 in the monring, something to do with logrotate!)

You must at least select the vesa driver if your machine has an nvidia or ati graphics card (although I don't believe that the problem is quite so severe with ati, don't know personally as I use nvidia cards). Otherwise X will not start (alternatively you could get the nvidia driver from nvidia before installing, and run it immediately after install, but make sure your kernel source is installed first).

[solarian]

shit!
And why on earth did Mandriva release such a buggy version!?
I mean - they had plenty of time to notice this, 95% cards out there are nvidia or ati,
this is a extremely serious glitch!

[aRTee]

If you install the clubmember edition, you get the closed source nvidia and ati drivers - which work as usual. I guess that's why they could release...

The logrotate issue: haven't seen it at all.


KKn - thanks, I'll have a look. I did have some contact with a Nvidia linux driver developer, who explained that it couldn't be done - maybe on ati, this is done through options in the driver, IIRC even the nvidia readme tells you about overlay on the first head (grep overlay nvidia-readme...).

Thanks all for you feedback - glad you liked it!

This post has been edited by aRTee: 15 November 2005 - 11:58 AM

[solarian]

Humm, but how about the Free isos that are out now?
Why didn't they wait until the issue has been fixed? Or has it?
Releasing a distro for the general public knowing such errors in code is unresponsible at the least.
If MS did such a thing I think most of the internet would be up in arms crying foul.

[Reiver_Fluffi]

solarian, on Nov 15 2005, 11:58 AM, said:

Humm, but how about the Free isos that are out now?
Why didn't they wait until the issue has been fixed? Or has it?
Releasing a distro for the general public knowing such errors in code is unresponsible at the least.
If MS did such a thing I think most of the internet would be up in arms crying foul.
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Who knows, some of the club is up in arms about the whole thing, its not good PR, and its not good for GNU linix and general (as far as I can see, most noobs are drawn to Mandriva as their first distro, I know I was). Although it does give an additional motive for people to join the club, maybe that's what they want to trap them into the 12 month contract after you have parted with your money, only to find out that the club membership really ain't worth all that money!!! I have even seen Adam Williamson (the club forum administrator) remark that if the choice was his, certain items would not have appeared in that release!

This post has been edited by Reiver_Fluffi: 15 November 2005 - 01:00 PM

[solarian]

Well, I guess my friend will get some other distro as his first then,
I heard Kanotix is a few weeks away from a new release (or maybe it's already been released).

[scarecrow]

In short, this Mandy is a FAILURE.
For me, the stock nvidia driver worked on my notebook- but I've heard from Club users that the Mandy packages crap out.
The reason is (of course!) the xorg 6.9.0 crap. For the same reason, PClinuxOS is also forbidden ATM. The glitches (almost always xorg related) are simply too many to mention here.
Kanotix is a few days away from a new release, it's MUCH better than Mandriva or PCLOS, but it ain't a newbie-friendly distro for sure (Debian Sid can be everything BUT n00b-friendly)...
Maybe Mandriva will become noob-friendly after a couple of months- provided that xorg 6.9.0 will keep the time schedule and be released next month.

This post has been edited by scarecrow: 15 November 2005 - 01:35 PM

[static]

hey aRTee - congratulations on getting your review on slashdot!!

[chalex20]

Is it just me or there indeed is some little bug in your review?

Quote

One more level up, scannerdrake clearly indicates that the remote host is known to the system.

After this sentence, you put some image to illustrate your words.

Quote

And finally it is clear that the remote scanner is available (naturally, after switching it on):

Here, the image appearing is the same as the previous one. It should have been different, IMO.
Otherwise, well done :-)

[aRTee]

chalex20, good catch! I'll fix it right away.
Thanks for reading (to all who did so)!

BTW guys, please keep the discussion here on the review - if you have complaints about Mdv06, there's plenty of other topics about that....

Thanks for the on-topic feedback!