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MDV2k5


VeeDubb
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I'm posting this in softtware, for those who are thinking about installing 2005, and wonder about the quality of new sotware involved.

 

Personaly I'm impressed. I just finished repairing my DVD image with bittorrent last night. For the reccord, I bought the DVD from cheapbytes, recieved the disk cracked, ripped a broken 3/4 size iso, then repaired the iso with a bitorrent.

 

Anyway, after that process and a hard drive isntall since I have no dvd burner, I must say I'm impressed.

 

Installer: The installer seemded much smoother, and for a rare change, actualy installed what I told it to. In the past, it's only installed more than 2 or 3 games if I left the box for game workstation UNchecked. This error has been fixed. I found it was generaly a very smooth install. I did not however, attempt an upgrade. The one problem I encountered in the instalation, is that my mouse, which is a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet, is not supported by the installer. This required me to navigate the menus with the keyboard. This is something I'm comfortable with, but some may not be. In any case, if you have a mouse that does not run with the universal drivers, be ready te nav the installer the hard way.

 

First boot: The actual boot up process went very smoothly. However, kde encountered problems on first boot. I inst6allerd by formatting / but not /home. This i a common method for a semi-clean upgrade. On boot however, despite the use of the same username, I didn't have access to /home/stephen who's ownership was given to 501. This may have been because /home/stephen is where the iso I isntalled from was located. If you encounter this problem you can log into X as root (I know, never log into X as root........) and change the ownership of your home back to you.

 

KDE: Well, it's kde3.3 We've seen this before. It's not as nice as thoupter's kde 3.4, but if you're not the type to upgrade dke yourself, it's a welcome update to 10.1 Generaly smoother/faster. Nothing huge. It does not include the nifty newer features in 3.4 like the auto hiding sytem tray icons.

 

Auto Mounting: Starting back in, 10.0 I believe, mandrake includes magicdev. This app actualy mounts and unmounts CD's and DVD's. in 2005, it also handles removable mass storage like flash memory cards and external zip drives, as well as digital cameras. This highly robust app is a must if you use a lot of removable medias. This is the first version of mandriva/mandrake to successfully auto mount my iomega hipzip MP3 player. On connect, it mounts it in a matter of 5 or 6 seconds, and the icon then shows up on my desktop as "Iomega Click! 40" which is the media my m3 player uses. This is of course a god-send. It did NOT however. properly handle the removal of my mp3 player. It remained mounted, and ahd to be manualy removed from /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab. Judging by the successful automount, I must assume that support for card reader has indeed been improved as adamw said it would be, but I cannot test that at this time, because I have loaned my cardd reader to my mother.

 

Firefox: This one is a no brainer. Firefox=better than original mozilla.

 

gimp: Very dissapointed here. In this slight revision, the controls for pressure sensativity have been greatly simplified, and in doing, have lost 90% of their functionality. I will be removing this app, and installing the version from Mandrake 10.1If you don't have a pressure sensative tablet, like the above mentioned Wacom, you won't know the difference.

 

Under the hood: As many people know, the under the hood updates to mandriva, usualy are constrained to standard updates, bugfixes and security fixes. It's usualy newer versions of the same apps. That's not always a bad thing, but it's not always good either. This time, judiging by poking around in the running services, there are some real and significant changes under the hood. Lot's of new proccesses, some replaceing old ones. By all apearances, much better support for, well, everything. Especialy bluetooth. The one thing that still bothers be is that bluetooth should not be running on a computer that isn't capable of bluetooth. Just wasted cpu cycles.

 

Stability: This is where 2005 realy shines. My desktop, is KNOWN to have either bad memory or a bad CPU. I've checked it with memtest, and it's dying. However, Mavdriva has been running all night and all morning and it has yet to lock up on me except once, right after install, I managed to lock up kde by deleting /home/stephen/.kde not really a big shock.

 

1-10

 

sqeaky clean new fealing 8 (if you're still using a 9x series, this will be a 25 out of 10)

stability 10

newfeatures 9

updated software 6 (would be higher, but I'm upset about the gimp, and with a stable 3.4 out there, kde 3.3 seems old)

improved hardware support 10

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Cant really blame mandrkae for the Gimp changing, thats an upstream issue decided on by the Gimp developers, mandrake just include whichever version they can get their hands on at the time.

 

As for KDE3.4, its not really that easy to mandrake to just run out and grab the latest KDE a week or two before release, they need to customise it and package it, and then test it. and that takes time.

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At least they had time to backport a few things (kpdf!),

but it doesn't matter that much, I think most people will be installing 3.4 anyways,

it's the OS that matters.

 

p.s. (I personally advice installing kde3.4, it's worth it if properly done)

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I agree about 3.4. I don't really blame them for not including it, but it would have been nice if they'd found a way.

 

As for being wortht eh trouble of upgrading, I agree. 3.4 is very nice, and t'hac and crew' have done a splendid job with it.

 

Also, my error with removables not getting unmounted when I unplug them, was taken care of by turning off hotplug, which is off by default anyway. Frankly, you really odn't need hotplug for most situations now that magicdev is so nice.

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Quick correction - magicdev is no longer used (since 10.0). Automounting in 2005 is handled by the combination of udev, hal and gnome-volume-manager (yes, even on KDE, since they don't have their 'own' frontend for hal-style automounting yet and there's nothing GNOME specific about the GNOME one).

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I will keep that straight from now on. Since you're poking in adamw, what's the deal with hotplug in 2005? There's many devices, that as far as I know, still don't work without hotplug, but hotplug and udev/hal/gvm don't seem to get along. Since hotplug is mostly scripts, why were the scripts not edited to ignore devices handled by udev/hal/gvm? You may not have the answer here, but I figure if anyone did, it would be you.

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Well, pretty much any removable device,m including two different card readers with a plethera of differnet cards, and Iomega HipZip mp3 player and a generic USB key all were glitchy and failed to unmount correctly if hotplug was enabled, and all worked beautifuly with hotplug NOT running.

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Am I hijacking this thread if I report my experiences with 10.2 :cheesy:

 

The good

A blank screensaver!

Icon spacing on the desktop has been fixed!

Fonts are more clear.

 

The bad

Icon spacing in Konqueror is too close. My folder names are being truncated. :angry:

 

I purchased a 6 CD set so that I would have easy access to the NVidia driver (and to see what other secret cool stuff was available :mr-green: ) The firefox that is installed using the RPM is slower than the firefox I download directly from mozilla.org. The Scragz rendering test gave about 3.8 sec for the RPM version and about 3.0 sec for the mozilla.org version.

 

A google search will show that the Scragz download tests rendering speed.

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