Before you read this you should know that I am a great fan of Mandriva, 2008 is the best distro I have ever used and that is why I thought I would have a go at 2008.1 rc1. I chose the Mandriva One version. I downloaded, burnt and booted the live Cd and everything was perfect, even my bluetooth connected gprs modem was correctly detected. I was seriously impressed, so I pressed the install button.

Install #1 - no boot - grub error 2. Reinstall.

Install #2 - booted this time but as soon as I got to a desktop I was bombarded (and I really mean that) with kde crash handler windows (all reference artsd). They popped up so quick that it was like being on an unprotected windows system, the more I shut them down, the more they appeared. At about the time my system tray was flooded with these things I pressed the power button and switched off, they didn't give me time to shut down normally.

Boot attempt #3 - this time a warning box appeared asking if I wanted to disable arts output. Given my previous experience I answered yes and this prevented a repeat of the former error message bombardment. I was then able to contemplate what I had actually got.

Mouse (usb)- doesn't work
Keyboard (usb) - doesn't work
Internet connection - doesn't work (wired or wireless)
Sound - doesn't work
Graphics resolution - totally wrong.

And when I say 'doesn't work' or 'totally wrong' I mean after I had tried to configure it with MCC as well as before hand.

The last time I had anything this bad was using Suse linux.

The thing is that all the above items work perfectly in 2008.0 and all work perfectly from the live cd. So what gives here? I know it is only a release candidate but you seriously cannot even think about releasing anything this awful and hope to survive.

that's why it's an rc, tthey haven't released the final product yet. the point of the rc is to find bugs like this.

could you provide some more information? graphics card, network card, sound card, monitor, mouse and keyboard models. all of this would help in determining the problems. right now we have nothing to go on...

I read some bad things about 2008.1 RC1 but nothing that would come close to this. So let's start at the beginning. Did you check the download and the burn?

To save you any further pondering on this question I would like to announce that install #3 was perfect. and now the installed image behaves just as well as the live cd does.

I can't explain the artsd bombardment that I had on the first install, but I might have some idea about the lack of functionality on install #2. In order to explain this I will have to take a little time out to explain how I run grub on my pc.

I long ago found out that reinstalling grub from scratch was an awful lot harder than simply having multiple instances of grub and switching from one to the other if you screw up one particular version (it only takes 2 very short lines of code to swap between them). Since then I have always installed grub on the first sector of the partition I am installing to not the first sector of the drive. I then copy the menu.lst entry from the new installation into the menu.lst that I am using at the time and boot from there.

This is the procedure I adopted for the first two installs and both times it resulted in disaster. When I looked at the output of this morning I found that install #2 was booting kernel-laptop 2.6.22 for which it had a kernel source file (I don't know where it came from?), but no config file, no initrd image, no system map file and no vmlinuz image. In other words it was a miracle it booted at all. I guess this must have been something to do with my use of grub, but that has never happened before and I cant explain it now.

Anyway I reinstalled a third time and this time, before exiting the live cd I switched to the grub instance from the one I was using before to the newly installed one rather than transferring the menu.lst entry. This worked perfectly and here I am posting on the cooker version and all is well so far.

I haven't had much time to look at it yet, I wanted to post this first before I did anything else, so I may find one or two other problems later, but at first glance it looks perfect.

I apologise if my first post was a bit alarmist, but I was alarmed!

Oh no, it has happened again.

This morning I thought I would do a few software upgrades using the 'Mandriva Recommended' section of MCC. I thought I was being quite conservative with my choices, new splash screen/themes, get rid of some language options that I didn't want, a new version of rpmdrake and some KDE stuff (but only 3.5.9 not KDE4). However as soon as I rebooted I was faced with the same situation I described before, I was bombarded with KDE crash handler messages about artsd failures. These beggars are really persistent. They pop up at the rate of about 1/sec steal the focus from whatever you are doing (so it is impossible to do anything else, even shutting down is next to impossible without the power button) and this time they did not cease when I elected to 'disable arts output'.

A real shame this because I spent a lot of time yesterday configuring it to my taste and it was running pretty well, but not any more! I don't have a disk image of the working install and I have no idea how to fix this otherwise so I guess I will have to reinstall again.

All part of the fun I suppose - at least it doesn't take long with Mandriva.

I experienced this on cooker a couple of weeks ago, but it was very quickly fixed. You may want to check bugzilla to see if anyone else is experiencing this now. I don't recall seeing any recent reports.

Jim

Good to know that I am not alone.

Anyway I have now fixed it (again). The software upgrades that I undertook somehow crippled KDE as well as giving me these arts warnings. The solution was to remove kde completely and then reinstall it. I now have both sound and no warnings. (and also got a look at IceWm in between times)

Along the way I also picked up KDE4 - interesting.

I am now off to do a disk image before I break it again!

I like this, this is fun! I have been testing Kubuntu since Gutsy Alpha 1 right up to Hardy beta 5 and it is never as interesting as this is.