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Mandriva 2006 review


aRTee
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One of the weaknesses of Unix/Linux is that most of the documentation addresses the details only, and it is very difficult to find an overview. Man pages are excellent once you know how the system works if you need to go find the details of some command or other, but if you are a novice, they suck.

 

I installed Mandy 9.1 about three years ago, and all I ever found on the package management system was man pages and web pages that described the rpm switches and the urpmi switches and examples of what magic will occur after typing this stuff into the command line. In the process of stumbling through the commands I mostly ended up in Dependency Hell with no way out. In some cases I ended up with programs incorrectly installed in /usr/share (how about /user/share/firefox/firefox..... don't ask :o ). I also ended up with a hermaphroditic GTK when I tried to upgrade to a newer version in support of newer browsers etc. Version 2 claimed that it was installed, but it was not accessible..... etc etc. etc.

 

Now to the good bits. I just recently installed Mandy 2006 after reading aRTee's excellent writeup. The explanation of the package management system did make the light go on, and I set it up by the book. I was able to download programs not included in the distro (e.g., inkscape) and also was able to upgrade important apps (e.g. OOo2) with very little effort. It just worked. I almost even started to trust it! :lol2:

 

Anyway, many thanks to aRTee for filling that overview void. Linux would be percieved as a lot more friendly if there were more writeups like that one.

 

Banjo

(_)=='=~

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