Reiver_Fluffi

Did someone mention a cartoon magician?

I tend to use K3B, irrespective of desktop, seems to be the most robust out of the lot of them...

John, the issue was the use of Mandriva within Warwick university, not the general population. Warwick, like other universities in the UK, will be hooked up to JANet, which is a very expensive network. Sorry, but given that Universities are, by and large, public property, it is in the taxpayers interest that we universities are using the funding for their core activities, rather than supporting a French commercial entity who could damn well afford to pay for the server themselves! The priority of our academic institutions is the education of our students and research, not to support any random linux distribution that bears little or no relationship to that education/research.

That is true, but to who does the responsibility lie on, after all "Linux" is a community affair! Its one thing to be scepticle about how Dell goes about it, another to grasp this opportunity, exploit it and market it, even if it is to friends family at first. Marketing linux is not restricted to companies, companies don't make linux, the community does that!

Hi adamw, long time no see, hope all is well ;) It might be hard to believe but I have raised this issue before, however there was a good argument that users here have interests in other distro's. While many of us are here out of an interest in Mandriva, past or present, this isn't exactly a die-hard Mandriva fan club. The portal news thing is something that we as a community wanted for our own uses (dexter11 was the brains behind it and pushed the idea ), and not to be a Mandriva PR machine. Sorry there's no one cracking the whip here (well apart from Mysti, but that's O/T :P), it's about news that members of our community want to share, when they want to share it, and how they want to share it.

You spend waaaay too much time customising your desktop arctic ;)

Just heard about this, apparently the CEO of Mandriva is whinging about nationalism.... blah.... blah... blah!

Newbie-friendly isn't just about the distro, the underlying software, and how it is glued together. It is also about how the software is delivered to the user. Times are changing IMO, and making the software "newb friendly" is not enough. The gnu community is making strides in making *nix's easier to use, but it doesn't stop there. Communities need to learn to deliver their software effectively to interested and able users if Linux is improve considerably the rate of adoption. Mandriva as a company fails to understand that IMO, it fails to show strength in the one area strengthens that delivery to users, it's marketing and customer service! But Mandriva is not alone, the general linux community has this problem with RTFM mentality and the childish flaming that goes on within and between distro's, the only difference between the general community and Mandriva is teh exchange of funds, and with this we expect more from Mandriva.

Break out at the local zoo?

I agree with you on Yast, that put me off using Suse. I wouldn't say that installing propretary drivers was difficult at all. You just need to set up a couple of unofficial repos (I use livna for kernel modules, freshrpms for everything else) and you should be sorted. Unlike Suse, Fedora just doesn't include the proprietary stuff, it doesn't try to cripple it, IIRC Suse used to do this with mp3 and other codecs?

I'm with dexter11 on this one, I strongly advise trying to get a response from Adam on the club forum first, plenty of stories of people failing to get a response from other official channels!

Yay for boring weekends Thanks for the heads-up, will no doubt be upgrading come April (IIRC)

I agree with what you are saying there mate, but the point I was trying to make is that there where significant changes between FC5 and FC6, one of them being pup, which makes a significant difference to the feel of the distro IMO. I just feel that given the pace of change, it would have been more sensible to make comparisons on distro's that where of roughly the same age, and then make a decision. Like I said, it's up to the o/p to decide on the basis for making his choices.

Sorry, you are comparing FC5, which was released in Mar-06, and superseeded by FC6 in Oct-06, with Mandriva 2007 Released in the same month as FC6? Doesn't look like a sound basis for comparison IMO, but if you wish to compare a freshly picked Royal Gala with a not so fresh Golden Delicious, then I suppose that's your prerogative! P.s. it should be relatively easy to use mandriva's partitioning tools to mount your old fedora partition as home, clear out the old FC5 system files and keep your home directories as they where, the only thing is that you would have to log in as root from gdm/kdm. If you log in as a normal user, then try to run the partitioner as root, it will refuse to mount home, at least it has done for me, a long time ago though. There really shouldn't really be any need for a re-install to do it, and the gui tools are there to do it.

Nobody knows to be honest, i'm sure they have their reasons, to which I am sure the nationality/origin of a distro is nowhere near as significant!

Now......if only I had the expertise to install it from source! Looks good though!

They have done for a while now. IIRC, there is a work around using xnest, but I don't have it to hand!

Yeah I just heard about peugeot, lets hope it makes their cars better :P

Debian?

Sure is ;)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6430069.stm As much as the main concern is about saving money, IMO it's still a good step in the right direction. it would be interesting to here what progress is being made in other countries, if any (as usual, the politician bashing belongs in OTW :D ).

What WM are you using, Compiz or Beryl? IMHO Beryl has improved its stability much in the last month or so , worth a look if you ain't already got it!

Whoa! You found a dark scheme that looks, sweet

I'm not talking about regulating the net as a whole, I am talking about detering those that use it to spam and generally cause a nuisance. Spam has consequences other than dropping in your mailbox. It has consequences for network traffic that hinders not just you, but other users of the local or wide area network. We already have some government regulation concerning buying and selling on the internet, this is merely to protect buyers and sellers, not about controlling them, and it works well!