Excellent work with this distro (Mandriva 2008-RC2). This is the first distro I have tried that recognizes my ATI X1650 right away and am able to use the 3d desktop effects without much tweaking. I have tried 10 distro's to date and this is the 1st one that I did not have to spend lots of time enjoying the 3d effects. Actually all my hardware was properly detected and after 1 week of using it I have not experienced any bugs. I also found the installer Mandriva has is superior to anything out there.
The only thing I would offer as feedback is improving the package manager to something similar to Synpatic which is used in Ubuntu. Currently when one does a search for a program it lists lots of seperate files/depencies which are not acutal programs. Example would like when you do a search for XMMS, it will list dozens of files related to XMMS in addition to the core program. Is there any way to filter these out and also have a rating system which gives you an idea how popular the program is? Other than that this is as close to a perfect distro I have come across and am seriously considering switching back to Mandriva once the stable version is released.

One question I have is where is KDE 4?? I thought this distro was going to have it but still see KDE 3.5

FYI, Mandrivausers.org is a community-run forum. We don't have any direct ties to Mandriva, and aren't involved in the development of the distribution. We do have a few Mandriva employees who read the forums, and they may take your suggestions, but I would also suggest going to Mandriva's website (mandriva.com - seems to be down right now, looks like they may be updating it) and submitting it in the appropriate place there.

You are probably doing a search for a string, and when you do that kind of search you're going to get back anything containing the string you searched for. This isn't particularly something you can fix, and IMHO I wouldn't change it (if I'm looking for a specific xmms plugin and don't know what it's called, and the system was setup as you suggest, I would never find it), but the fact of the matter is that is how search works. The computer can't know that you only want the XMMS package and nothing else, it can only know that you want things containing the string "XMMS" when you search in this manner.

Thanks for the input and pointing me in the right direction.

According to the wiki page, the default desktop is KDE 3.5.7, with KDE 4 as an optional preview. You'd have to install the KDE 4 packages (and most likely uninstall all the KDE 3 stuff) in order to use it. Just remember that 2008 isn't officially released yet and even when it is, the KDE 4 packages are still described as "experimental", so there may some rough edges here and there.

Hi, I'm one of the Mandriva employees tyme referred to.

The 'just applications' mode for rpmdrake is an interesting idea that has been proposed before, but we haven't yet had time to look seriously at implementing it. I'll have to talk to Thierry about it once we get 2008 released.

As neddie wrote, KDE 4 is experimental in 2008. KDE 3.5 is still the default. To get KDE 4 you must set up the official online repositories and then install the relevant packages. If you have the ATI proprietary driver working I guess you must have set up the online repositories already, but just in case, the instructions are here:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tas...tions_available

installing the kdebase4 package should pull in most of KDE 4. It should then appear on the login screen as a desktop choice.

Thanks for all the reponses and tips. I will try and get KDE4 working when I get home from work. I am impressed by the quick reponses and people wanting to help someone trying out this excellent distro. I look forward to learning everything about Mandriva 2008 and hopefully share and help others from my experience.

Tyme brings up an excellent point about the importance of showing everything available in a search. Perhaps a filter option to show (programs only) would be nice.

I just looked up your profile. It is 1:18 PM EDT, but your Wisconsin local time shows as 05:22 PM. Somebody must have moved Wisconsin.

Now that is a great idea, considering the enormous number of packages and wide variety in popularity. The only snag is, how to generate this information, how would it be possible to rate the popularity of programs? Counting the downloads would be a bad idea, and anyway technically unfeasible given the number of mirrors; phoning home would also be a bad idea, and a separate voting system would just be open to abuse. Mandriva already must have some kind of ranking system (packages included on install CD, included on install DVD, included in repositories) so I guess that could potentially be made visible in the rpmdrake gui, but that would probably just cause arguments!

I am not sure, but maybe some voting database included in bugzilla might be an idea. That way, apps could get only one vote per category by every user as you have to register then with your email for filing bugs and voting... The chance of abuse is thus significantly limited imho.

Or they can just use an already working voting system. Like take the results of sourceforge\freshmeat\etc votings.