I just installed Cooker rc1 today and I foolishly thought that somebody out there might be interested in my experiences of it so here goes.

The install process is quite slick now, but one aspect of it worries me slightly. This is the point at which the 'One' installer tells you that you really don't need the following 'X' number of packages on your system and would you like to remove them? Now don't get me wrong, this is a great idea, but the question that leaps into my mind is simply "How much can I trust this?" I first met with this aspect on the previous beta, and I must admit my answer to the installer on that occasion was - no, you cant remove 60 odd packages. This time, I reasoned that as this was only a testing installation of a testing distro I might as well answer 'yes' and see what happened. I don't think it made a great deal of difference in the end. I did run into difficulties during the install- which I will discuss shortly, but I doubt it was due to packages removed by this process. The point is though that this is a hell of a big question to ask of a newcomer to Linux, particularly as it only has a yes/no answer and no real information as to what it might be basing its decisions on. My own personal preference would be a 'yes but' answer meaning that I will allow you to remove some of the packages but not necessarily all of them.

So the install proceeded and indeed completed. My first task on installing any distro is to add Krusader to it - Linux without Krusader is like a planet without air -uninhabitable. This was where the problems started. On attempting to run either MCC or urpmi I got the following error:



You will see that the error message mentioned var/lib/rpm, so I took a look at this directory and found that both its owner and group were shown as 'rpm'. Now I have never heard of a user or group of that name and I certainly don't have one on 2008.1 so I decided to change the user and group to 'root' to see what happened. Initially, nothing happened, but after a reboot things went back to normal and I could update and add new software again. This error was not exactly obvious to me, to a newcomer it would have been very difficult to overcome.

With the rpm database problem fixed I was able to update the installation. This involved amongst other things getting hold of the rc5.7.1 kernel. This is totally useless, I tried it on my previous install (beta2) and again on this install. On every occasion it fails with the message:



One other complaint, and I have voiced this one before, I thought it had gone away, but now it is back. That is the damned splash screen that obscures the boot messages whatever you type in menu.lst. However, I may have found a way around it (although I am not sure about this yet). It seems that all the usual entries in menu.lst (nosplash, verbose, quiet, etc etc) make no difference whatsoever, but deleting the entry 'splash=xxx' completely seems (for the time being at least) to have succeeded in ridding me of this bothersome splash screen. I don't know if this is coincidence or by design, but I do wish there was some way that design changes like this could be notified to users/testers so we don't have to suffer these annoyances for weeks before we stumble upon our own workrounds.

The last problem with it of course is KDE4. But then Mandriva devs are not responsible for that piece of hideous nonsense.

And that is about as far as I have got for now. If you discount KDE4 it is working pretty well, but you can't discount it really because it is there. It is hideously ugly and in terms of development would be better called KDE 0.4.1 rather than its present designation. If I ran a distro the default KDE would be 3.5.9 (or 10 if that appears) and KDE 4 would be the option not the other way around - I wouldn't want to lose customers becuase of someone elses miscalculation.

Nice for the input

I've never tried cooker, but maybe I'll try it in vmware or something and see how it works out. Most people would probably think that I've already tried it but never done testing/unstable much as of yet.

Thanks for sharing your impressions. BTW: [flame]Who cares about KDE?[/flame]

On a more serious note: The package removal is a nice idea, but it could make some people nervous, that is true. BUT: If I were a complete noob and would see the distro telling me that a number of packages is not needed, I would always go the safe route and click on "no" and thus stop the removal process. After all, harddisk-space is not as limited and expensive nowadays as it was ten years ago.

Thanks for the useful review, interesting to read.





If it's a newcomer to Linux, from where will the system remove the packages?

I'm currently trying to locate an ISO, or do I have to upgrade an official release?

/newbie

EDIT:

never mind, finally found it. Mandriva's site isn't easy to navigate.

Caveat: I have not used Cooker or any beta or release candidates from Mandriva.

I believe the purpose of the "'One' installer tells you that you really don't need the following 'X' number of packages on your system and would you like to remove them?" is to remove packages that your hardware does not support. For instance, if you have an NVidia card, you would not need the ATI drivers. In previous versions of 'One', you got drivers for everything under the sun, whether you could use them or not. A side effect of all this is; everytime you update the system, these useless drivers got updated as well, using up time, bandwidth, and disk space.

I took Mandriva 2009 RC1, but during division onto partitions installer does not see partition /home, it claims that board of partition is damage and format of whole disc proposes. However in MDV Beta1 is all OK. Next mistake of core whether so is in reality it . It comes together me more and more more ranks and information, I would want to put one system ...Lex

Here is an update on my previous post.

1) To my surprise the method of not adding anything related to splash screens in menu.lst seems to have worked - I still have no splash screen on boot - Hooray! To test this I booted again with 'splash=nosplash' added to the boot line and the splash screen came back. Pretty conclusive I would think although not very intuitive.

2)I have solved the problem with the rc5.7.1 kernel not booting. It may well be something that only affects a small minority like myself. I will attempt to explain what went wrong in case anyone else out there is affected the same way. If you never mess around with menu.lst after installation you can probably stop reading now.

To my mind trying to mount or boot anything by UUID is a laughable idea as they are not human readable. On the other hand mounting by device has its problems too, especially if you mess around with partitions a lot (they get renumbered and you can't boot). I therefore always mount and boot everything by label which solves both problems. Therefore a typical menu.lst entry on my machine will look like this:


(I don't bother changing the 'resume= entry' as I never use hibernate/suspend anyway)

A typical fstab entry will look like this:



Now the problem with the rc5.7.1 kernel was that its menu.lst entry looked like this:



The entry "root=/dev/disk/by-label/mandriva2009" works in fstab, but it doesn't work in menu.lst and this is why it wouldn't boot.

Note of course that the menu.lst line is automatically generated when the kernel is upgraded, it is not hand written by me I just forgot to change it to the correct format. But you have to ask how it came to write it in that format in the first place?

BTW whilst I have been writing this post I have come up with another little problem as well. Middle clicking to paste from Klipper doesn't work, you have to open Klipper, highlight the entry you want, right click in the document and select paste.

I downloaded the RC1 iso last night, so I'll install in VMware, and have a little play and add some input here.

Well, I thought I would install it and it also asked me about packages to remove. I can only think it was comparing the LiveCD environment that was running, versus what it would install for my hardware. Therefore, nothing too major to say yes go delete all the crap packages that it listed. It had listed nvidia, and god knows what else, which was completely irrelevant for my machine (all Intel hardware).

Just applying updates to the system now that have become available since the release of the RC1 iso.

Yeah, I know that is what it is doing, but on my system it also listed Nvidia drivers and kernels to be removed - but I do have an Nvidia card, that is where the confusion comes in. As I said in the first post I agreed to its suggestions and everything seemed to work, I still have an Nvidia driver, so I guess it knows what it is doing better than I do!!

Mind you that is not hard

I know that when I installed Mandriva One 2008.1 Spring in VMware, I had a lot of nvidia, ati, and other crap installed for hardware that I don't even have. Even if it had of been installed as a real machine, than virtually. Seems that Mandy does put a load of packages in by default, that means that it covers all hardware without it being selective about what will and won't work by default. This in itself is good, but just means that for me, I have to clean up a load of packages before I update my system.

I also found I had languages installed, that I know I would definitely not use as part of OpenOffice, or even as spell checkers, so they got removed as well.

I agree with you totally Ian, one of the chores I perform after every 'One' install is to go through all the installed packages and remove those I think I don't need. Different language packs are one of the more obvious things to go. Don't get me wrong I think the removal (or perhaps non-installation would be a better term) of unwanted packages tailored to every individual machine is a blinding idea - if it works properly!

David Batson is correct on what the package removal does. Viking, I suspect it was just removing all the *other* NVIDIA drivers, not the one you need. There are four different NVIDIA drivers - 71xx, 96xx, 173.xx and 177.xx (which is named 'current'). Your card will use 177.xx ('current'), so 71xx, 96xx and 173xx can all be safely removed. We have to ship all four on the live CD in order to support all available NVIDIA cards, but post-install, some can be removed.

Please file bugs for your other issues, particularly the boot issue. Thanks!

I updated a 2008.1 to 2009 yesterday and all went well mostly, there are still a few bugs here and there and kde4 is still not on the same level. I did notice one very bad bug/feature though: I have installed mdv on a small usb flash stick and when in mcc I had clicked on draksnapshot and exited (without touching anything) it started making hourly backups of /usr /etc and /home, it didnt take very long for my root to fill up and I could find no way of stopping it except uninstalling draksnapshot



Another big one is intel 3945, it works without wpa but once you enter a wpa key trouble starts and it doesnt want to associate even with unencrypted networks, or it takes 20 tries before it works (had to uninstall wpa_supplicant)



I still see display corruption in the kde4 system tray ark is not integrated in the service menu, also quite annoying making archives, multimedia keys don't work in kde4 and some plasmoids (mainly the menu) still disappear once in a while.

Unlike viking, I like the splash screen but I just don't seem to get one...


I am also not to pleased how installing task-kde4-minimal drags in openoffice (and mono, which some people hate)



2009 still needs a lot of attention I think, this is what I expect of a (early) beta not RC. The artwork does really look nice, it's a shame kde4 doesn't have the slideshow the way kde3 and gnome do

Next time you boot, when you get to the grub screen highlight the Mandriva entry and press F2. At the end of the options line add the entry:



Then press enter and I bet you get the splash screen back - that is how it works for me anyway.

If you want it permanently edit /boot/grub/menu.lst with the same entry.

task-kde4-minimal requiring openoffice.org-core is actually a bug caused by over-enthusiastic provides in openoffice (really, it depends on libraptor.so.1 and libredland.so.0 , which openoffice.org-core claims to provide but really shouldn't, as it has private copies of them that the rest of the system cannot use). I will fix this, or get our OO.o maintainer to fix it.