arctic

Looks more like an acpi problem imho. Try booting with the parameter acpi=off in grub.

If Ubuntu and Mandriva and any other distro manage to attract the "noobs", then it's fine with me, as long as they don't cripple the system (=take away important features that the poweruser might want to have) or as long as there are still distros available that are aimed at the more experienced, like fedora, debian, slack, gentoo, arch,... That said, I think that Mandriva made the right decisions. Quite easy to use for newcomers and still powerful under the hood and versatile. The default Ubuntu is admittedly more geared toward newcomers, but then there is still the server CD available which you can use in order to build a cutomized system if I am not mistaken. Or simply do a default install and then customize it. The tools are there. And I will not discuss the pros and cons of sudo again. We had this discussion already several times. ;)

http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/press/logo

Correct. ;)

Another short review: http://bigcatlinux.com/mandriva.html

ONE has the propriatary drivers fro nvidia and ati included, while Free is ... well ... free, based on the principles of the Free Software foundation. That means that it does not ship with proprietary drivers. They have to be installed later using the online repositories available e.g. through easyurpmi (link at top of page).

Actually I have never heard of the possibility to create a boot-cd with lilo or grub. If it exists, I have no idea on how to do it.

Mandriva uses grub since 2007 as default bootloader iirc. Here are some articles that explain grub quite well: http://wiki.mandrivausers.org/index.php/Co...grub_bootloader http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4622 http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/grub/grub.htm As with lilo, grub can be installed onto a floppy disk if you want. If you are more familiar with lilo, wel, it is still available, although, imho, grub is easier and better.

Just played around with the Live-CD. Finally, Ubuntu is able to set up the resolution of my widescreen monitor correctly (other distros did that for ages, but Ubuntu and Debian somehow were unable to do so). All in all it is a very nice release, although there are two things that were a bit puzzling for me. 1. The boot-process seemed to stall at one area, but when I checked the DVD drive, I saw that it was still reading. The progress bar not reacting at all for some ten to fifteen seconds. I was already tempted to hit the reset button, when the bar suddenly reacted again. A second try show me that the system really did not stall at all but went from one type of progress bar to another. I guess this could be improved, as - as I said - hitting the reset button seemed to be reasonable although it wasn't. 2. The release still ships with no firewall-configurationtool by default. I find that this is still a major downpoint in Ubuntu, especially as most newcomers don't know about firewall applications like firestarter or guarddog. I had hoped that they had finally included one by now... Maybe next time. The space on the CDs cannot be the issue. If it is, then they should consider dropping the "examples" folder with the videos and such stuff. That is imho the most irrelevant "package" in the whole distro. Apart from that, it feels polished and quite snappy. But I will stick to fedora and Mandriva. I am more familiar with both systems, prefer the root account and - they support my canon laserprinter, while Ubuntu is still a bit problematic in this respect. But I don't blame Ubuntu for that but Canon, who only tested their printer in Red Hat and SUSE, thus only ship rpm packages. Sure, they can be transformed into debs, but even then, the printer is more buggy in debian based distros than distros that use rpms.

Ouha. As it seems, the release is far from perfect... see this poll: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=580852 So be careful when you upgrade your system.

Well, it does say which OS they ship with. ;) Ubuntu 6.06

For that, in Gnome there is already since many years the "window selector" tool (similar to Mac OS8/9), which is by default placed in the upper right corner of the desktop. Just as fast and it doesn't need a 3D engine. ;)

I still hope that the next release will be "horny hare". :D

Well.. Mandriva has practically no Marketing budget, while Ubuntu/Shuttleworth has the money and it has a slogan, even if it is ridiculous ("Humanity to others"). No wonder Ubuntu is becoming more and more popular. Distros like Mandriva, Fedora, Debian, Slackware and others have to rely on some kind of "marketing" done by its users primarily. Not that this is completely wrong, but a few well placed and well made ads in a few magazines can do wonders. Remember: Windows is all about marketing. "Explore the internet with your computer." "Listen to music with your computer." Now, what is Mandrivas message? They need imho a damn good slogan in order to attract the masses. Remember OS/2 warp? Although it never became mainstream (and sadly vanished from the market because there were no games for OS/2), it became popular/well known through aggressive and well made advertising (around 1994 IIRC).

Maybe he left the sinking ship? Linspire6 seems to be a dead horse, according to some reviews.

I'd say 'cause it's proprietary and Mandriva didn't want to pay for it. Also, Opera is not as widely used as Firefox, Epiphany or Konqueror. You cannot please everyone.

free has a lot more packages available, but both have basically the same amount of packages available once you enable the software mirrors on your system. ONE Gnome was released a few days ago, so it should be available from the ftp-mirrors.

Working with transparent layers is the best approach. But don't forget to save the file as .png, as .jpg does not support transparency.

Well, the 3D stuff is not really necessary. It IS a nice toy and yes, it draws many people to distro A or distro B but in the end, many users still have problems with 3D support while 3D doesn't work at all on many systems. From a productivity point of view, he is right, the 3D desktop is rather a nice gimmick more than anything else but from a marketing point of view it is important to offer it (sad point: Mandriva has no real marketing strategy, nor a serious marketing budget at its disposal). But I think that Mandriva made the right decision to allow users to enable it quickly but not to enable it by default.

Right, but they are making it more public now, as the trend of the future seems to be open source while closed source seems to be the model of the last century. The market demanded that they open their business and they were forced to comply. That's imho a huge step forward. :) Now the interesting question is: What will they do/release with the new Open-Source license?

The bugtracker is here: http://qa.mandriva.com/ and here is the documentation on how you should submit your bug: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Howto/Bugzilla

Well, first and foremost, interrupting the updating process is never a good thing to do. From what I see, you haven't installed all necessary KDE libraries and - it seems that you tried installing kde4, which is still experimental. Not such a good idea imho. Try to boot into failsafe mode and perform an urpmi --auto-update once again.If KDE is still buggy, then I'd uninstall KDE4 and downgrade to the stable KDE version (3.5.6??).

Open a terminal, log in as root. Then check your partition layout with fdisk -l Once you know which partition you want to mount, run e.g. mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /mnt If that works, then chroot /mnt That's it. For exiting, type: exit and unmount the partition again.

Did you try ftp or httpd mirrors? Might be worth trying both types.

Okay, above of 1GB RAM, the 2xRam rule is overkill. Especially for average desktop systems.