I'm a relative newbie to Mandriva, always been a Fedora fan...but decided to take the plunge after I saw that the look and feel of Mandriva is far better than Fedora and in some respects urpmi is a better than Yum. So I downloaded the 2007.1 GNOME Live CD version, and popped in the CD to check it out. The bootup logs indicated that the Nvidia modules are included by default...and nothing could be better than that for my FX5200 card, so i'm a very happy camper! The overall look and feel is extremely slick...far better than (K)Ubuntu Feisty, PC Linux OS etc. 3D eye-candy is enabled by default, Gnome 2.18 is included...all the usual suspects as far as software is concerned are present. So I decided to go ahead and install it.

The install process was extremely smooth and surprisingly fast. It took me approx 7 mins to install the Live CD, as opposed to Ubuntu Feisty which takes anything between 20-25 mins. The installer prompted a reboot and I did so. I finished the network and username/login settings to be greeted by a shiny, spanking desktop...great fonts, fantastic 3D effects, great wallpaper..a 10/10 out there!

Now to setup the urpmi sources, I got a great link from http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=40466 (thanks a ton jboy!!), added main, contrib, non-free and the plf sources. Got a notification that some 70 updates are needed, and I said...allright..lets do it.

Now thats where the trouble started. I noticed that the dkms, ati and nvidia modules were lined up for upgrades. I thought that this was odd since the Live CD included this right off the bat. Then I noticed the difference, the updates were coming in from plf and not nonfree. Even though the versions were the same...for some strange reason the installer wanted these files. I thought maybe urpmi was borked and installed smart instead...same result!! Now this was not limited to the graphics card kernel modules, but also the gstreamer libraries. I decided to upgrade the gstreamer (audio) updates from PLF...and thats when it completely borked my sound card!! I had no sound, my ALSA was broken...the sound modules were uninstalled or I dont know what happened.

I had no need to add PLF as a sources, since everything I need is present in the original install CD..except for Opera and Flash Plugin (both available as rpm downloads from their websites). Now I can't fix my sound card and the only option is that I have to erase and perform a clean install.

Moral of the story: I wont add PLF to my sources list...yet. Its gonna mess with the gstreamer libraries and also will try to push the dkms and nvidia modules...so beware!! 2007.1 now includes a non-free source so I guess that should suffice.

Other than that...i'm loving it!!

-Anshul


[moved from Installing Mandriva - arctic]

There is the package "urpmi-recover" available from the mirrors. It should (in theory) allow you to roll-back the rpms to their previous status. You could give it a try.

Bugs are still expected as 2007.1 is not yet officially released.

Actually with 2007 and 2007-1 there is really little need to set up easy-urpmi initially.
Now when you open MCC and select Software Management then Select from where software packages are downloaded when updating the system you will see a tab titled Add.
When you click on it it will open a windowlet giving two choices. Click on Official Updates and follow through. Then repeat but this time select Distribution Sources and follow through.
Do both before downloading anything including updates.

This new procedure also includes plf but it does the whole lot in one run rather than having to to do Main, Contrib and PLF in turn.

It is also best to Remove all the Mediums presently listed first.

This new procedure should also help to over come some of the audio related problems I have heard about reference some changes in some of the audio protocols rpms.

hope this helps. Cheers. John.

True, however those "Add..." buttons add sources with "synthetic" metadata, not full metadata.
If you often use urpmf, or if you'd like to see the description of packages in rpmdrake, then those buttons are totally useless. It's a shame they didn't add a small checkbox to choose between partial and full metadata :(

Yves.

Just a quick followup to this thread, I don't know whether to create a new thread or not for this. It seems like there is some conflict between the Official and PLF repos as far as audio issues are concerned. I've noticed this with respect to VLC in 2007.0 and 2007.1. The VLC in the official server (for 2007.0 and 2007.1) dosent give sound, whereas the PLF one does give sound. It could be that PLF hosts some restricted codecs.

Now with regards to sound, after performing an upgrade...my sound is still broken. I've uninstalled and reinstalled 2 times atleast. Even to the extent of segregating my sources like Official/Distribution through MCC and PLF through smart. The one thing that bugs me the most is that if I use PLF in MCC, urpmi still sees the nvidia kernel modules as an upgrade (even though the 2007.1 GNOME CD comes with nvidia)!!! The versions are the same...9775, 9631 and 8774...why does urpmi and smart too try to push this upgrade?? This is no upgrade...just a change in the name of the rpm files!

-Anshul

"It could be that PLF hosts some restricted codecs."

That's exactly it. When there's both MDV and PLF versions of a package, it means the PLF version includes some extra support that is legally problematic. In the case of multimedia apps, this almost always means the PLF version includes some codecs that are patent or license encumbered.

PLF packages with the same version-release as MDV packages will always be seen as 'upgrades' on alphabetical grounds. This may seem a bit odd, but RPM has to consider alphabetical ordering as well as numerical ordering as some packages use letter-based versioning schemes (1.0a , 1.0b , 1.0c...)

Adam,
This is exactly what I had thought too, alphabetically "PLF" would be an upgrade to "MDV". So, if I need to perform a full system upgrade, won't this present a problem? Then I think i'm better off installing a Free version and then building it by adding stuff like nvidia drivers, vlc, mp3 codecs from PLF than use the official ones provided in the One version.

-Anshul

well, you can always temporarily disable the PLF repositories as appropriate. actually, replacing the MDV build with the PLF one shouldn't be a problem as far as I know.