Just thought I'd give some feedback on the Alpha version of 2008.1.
Quick summary:
Longer summary - feels much more polished than an alpha, haven't got it to fall over or even stutter so far, after a brief trial. On the other hand it doesn't look drastically different from 2008.0 so maybe it should be pretty polished by now anyway.
Hardware detection is great, as was the 2008.0 One CD, everything on the laptop works, screen res is correctly detected, USB trackball fine, USB thumbdrive works fine, sound ok. When I try my cameras, it's a bit better than 2008.0 (this alpha at least reads my Canon Ixus ok, thanks to the fix from a few weeks ago no doubt) but it still refuses to talk to my Panasonic FZ5. Exactly the same symptoms as when 2008.0 came out.
My Gps works fine though, through the serial port. Browsing works, pretty amazingly smooth all round.

Adding / removing software works, and the adding of the repositories is simplified and much neater.
And, amazingly, java works out of the box! On a live CD! It calls itself IcedTea 1.7.0 but works ok (although the fonts look like s**t in the gui - maybe this is fixable after install?)

With the DVD, I had a problem with the new task bar in KDE4. I lost all of the functions in it--menu, clock, everything. I could launch new buttons from the "add widgets" button in the corner, but I could not get it to incorporate into the task bar. Launching "kicker" got the old task bar on top of the new one! I ended up deleting my .kde4 file whcih fixed it. But, I do not know what I did to cause the problem and i still do not know how to relaunch the new task bar.

Boy I'm glad I had no HD space... just when every thing works in 2008!

Radioear is chicken.

I've installed 2008.1a and I too am amazed how stable it is. The Epson Scanner, Firewire connected, worked immediately without fiddle of any sort unlike in 2008. Same for the printer.
Since I now have a LeadTek capture card, I have had to put its sound section into blacklist as well as the Mainboard audio to get sound to work properly from my Creative Audio card.
I had to do this also in 2008 but NEVER in Spring.

When I first brought up XMMS it would crash when I clicked the play button. Did it repeatedly. However when I downloaded and installed a number of xmms packages such as xmmx-alsa, xmms-oggre, xmms-normalize, xmms-crossfade, xmms-cdread, xmms-skins, it has been crash free ever since and plays beautifully. I suspect the xmms-alsa package probably fixed it somehow.

The left thumb button still does not work (same as 2008) despite installing imwheel. I have the Mouse connected as PS/2 and have not tried it in USB connection so I don't know if this will make a difference.

Grub will not install the bootloader on to a floppy. Tried numerous floppys that work ok with anything else.

I discovered that it installs a laptop kernel as default. Since when has Mandriva decided that laptops are the default devices
I finally decided to, for the first time, to do the dkms install procedure of the nvidia latest driver and it worked AOK. When I did a desktop kernel install and booted into it, naturally I needed to reinstall the nvidia driver. learned that you have to uninstall the original dkm nvidia package and do a reinstall of it other wise you cannot get it running properly.

I have to say I am much more impressed with this Alpha version than I was with 2008 official.

Cheers. John.

Installing laptop kernel is a known bug, it's in the Errata - the desktop kernel somehow got left off the images, so the installer falls back to the laptop one.

Sound should be handled by PulseAudio so you *should* be able to get it working without blacklisting anything. Try running 'pavucontrol' and messing around with the settings there.

Just out of curiosity, how do you blacklist hardware?

It depends on distro... not having Mandriva handy right now, but do you have a file "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist" or not? This is the file used by Mandy, if I can recall correctly... or not?
In my distro (Archlinux) you simply put it in the list of the modules to be preloaded (rc.conf- same as in FreeBSD or any BSD flavour I'm aware of), but you print an exclamation mark right before the module name- and voila- it's blacklisted...

Thanks as always Adam. I will try that when I next boot in to 2008.1a.

Somebody must have been asleep at the wheel to make that kernel mistake and I'll bet it was not you.

Cheers. John.

Great, cheers for info, i need to blackmail erm blacklist the USB card reader on my printer.

Actually, it is /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-mdv

Hello Adam.
I tried using the mouse as usb but that made no difference to being unable to use the left (thumb) button. This a bit of a disgrace actually considering it worked in every Mandriva I have used with it except for 2008 and now coming into 2008.1a. Note: I do have imwheel installed.

In MCC I have discovered that one cannot remove download lists to select another preferred mirror site or to remove reference to the install disc (in two parts). However was able to select another site by clicking ADD and then the mirror of my choice and it seemed to overwrite the former mirror settings. A couple of problems here.

For the sound solution I tried the pavucontrol in both root mode and also account in konsole and it does not work. It just says "command not found"

During boot up it stops at "setting up udev". Tried this 5 times and same result. Sensing this to be a usb problem, I switched on my usb printer which happened to be off and rebooted. It went on no trouble at all. So there is definitely a problem in this area.

So no further advance yet.

Cheers. John.

You're right AussieJohn, I'm chicken. Seem like every time I change to the latest greatest OS update, I end up with half the apps I want to work, not working. The last time I change version was to get SoundJuicier to work again. 2008 free is working right now, I like to leave it that way. Maybe if I add another 120gb drive I might play a little. I have two now, one for XP and the other for Mandriva.

I know exactly what you mean. I'm still with Spring and very happy with it. Everything "worked out of the box" so to speak.

On the other hand, 2008 was/is a complete disaster even with all available updates most of the problems still exist. In 2008.1a only one of the problems has been fixed.

2008 final won't become my main unless it also basically "works out of the box". I am even prepared to wait till the 2009 if the 2008 Spring doesn't measure up.

Cheers mate and a Merry Christmas to you and your family. John.

I'm just now giving the alpha2 a try, and see exactly the same problems as with the alpha1:
* Can't connect to my Panasonic camera, just like 2008.0 and 2008.1alpha1. Maybe 2009 will support it again just like my 2007.1 does? here's hoping. In any case, there's a Bugzilla entry from October about it here: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=34793 It's a deal-breaker for me not to be able to download photos from my camera as I haven't got a card reader.
* Readme still refers to 2007.1 Spring!
* Firefox still defaults to spellchecking in Portuguese.

Apart from that, same as the last one as far as I can tell...

I installed 2 Alpha in dual boot mode, but it wiped out my grub.lst and I had to edit it by hand to get access to my 2008.0 back. I also couldn't get it to recognize my second monitor, but didn't spend much time on it. At that point I was already tired of dual booting, so thought I would try again using VirtualBox. I got VirtualBox installed, but haven't had a chance yet to try to install 2001.1a as a vm.

What mirrors is one supposed to use for updates, installations, etc?

mirrors

I think he meant what kind of repos can he use.
Currently the cooker repos should be used for updating, installing.

Yep, that is what I meant. Thanks. Guess I'll have something to do this weekend.

I've played with 2008.1 beta and now with RC1 on my laptop (Acer Aspire 5315) and everything works fine. Sound and W-lan didn't work with 2008.
The only thing is, when i boot i hit the Esc-key so i can see what is happening during boot i see "UDEV" and it stops there for about 2 a 3 minuts. I find that to long, with 2008 you see "UDEV" an booted further.

I am still unclear on this point. Which cooker repos should be used for updates? (not installation)

Only the ones with 'update' in the title?
The above + Cooker Main?
All of them?
All except backports?
Some other combination?

I have tried the first two of these options and it makes a huge difference to what is offered when you elect to 'Update System'.

One other question on this topic. I downloaded cooker rc1. If I continue to update it does it eventually turn into the next release candidate then finally the finished product or is it necessary to download the next version each time one is released?

Yes. More info here: 2008.1_RC_1#Testing_wanted

Since Cooker is the testing ground of Mandriva it doesn't make any sense using the backports and testing tree of cooker. You can use the rest.

During the testing phase cooker becomes frozen (no new version only bugfixes) and eventually becomes the stable distro. Mandriva puts it into the public mirrors then opens cooker again. So if you're not careful enough you'll have another unstable system again.

Greg, Dexter, Thanks for the info, I better add a few more repos when I get it going again. It's broken at the moment so the question is a bit academic.

Info here if you are interested:

http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...st&p=393294