Mandriva 2006 review

[Trio3b]

Thought I'd comment on how right you are ( in part one MDV 2006) about software installs on linux. RPM installs are pretty much a breeze but getting there was very hard at first. Documentation was EXTREMELY non-intuitive. In the beginning, I destroyed one or two nicely running installs by downloading packages meant for OTHER MDV releases and not once did I stumble across that fact thru weeks of googling. Also, when a package file is listed on a site, there may be several almost identical sounding files with no way for the newb to figure out which one to use. Also MCC software mgr has too many options that are NOT explained for the newb to know how to add repository locations to where they are getting their packages from.

 

Anyway, the reviews seem to be very thorough and helpful and will be sticking with MDV 10.2 for now.

Thanks

Edited December 8, 2005 by Trio3b

[ljones]

A good review, and I've just finished installing and I've been using Mandriva 2006 for a little while. Unfortunatly, I'll only be using 2006 for a little while as I've decided to go back to LE2005!

 

From time to time it seems that mandrake (now mandriva) releases "bad" versions of mandrake linux, i.e. versions of linux which seem to have been rushed out and that have bugs. For example, Mandrake 9.1 was actually quite good and worked well, but 9.2 felt really slow (slower than 9.1) and had broken KDE menus. 10.2 was good too, but 10.1 also had problems. 10 itself was ok though, and was faster than 9.2 (might be round the other way). Maandriva 2006 unfortunatly comes under this "bad list" too -- problems to date I've found are;

 

* If you use konqueror, you can use it to go onto the web, as it's a web-browser. I found that if konqueror puts up a box to ask you something (usually it has Ok and Cancel buttons) you can press enter to choose (say) ok. Under 2006, the button seems to get "jammed" if you use the keyboard,and then you have to click on it.

 

* Ndiswrapper seemed to be completely broken x.x and complained after install that it couldn't find the ndiswrapper interface. LE 2005 worked fine with no problems.

 

* The atmel AT76C503 seems to not to be supported any more. The 2006 install put up a little message about where to get drivers, but installing these didn't work at all. Eventually I got something to work by using the old 2005LE drivers, but the AT76C503 (it's a USB wlan) card just displayed as "unknown: atmel at76c503" in mandriva's installer program and it *refused* to configure it properly. In the end, I had to use the command line, and had to use ifup and ifdown to start and stop the wlan!

 

All in all, I'm thinking I should wait for Mandriva 2006.1 .

 

ljones

[Bill Lewis]

Just some tips regarding the video overlay, there should be some option to set in the X conf-file to move overlay to the secondary display or display on both (i have an ati-card, don't know the nvidia well) Try "man your-driver-name"

 

My system includes two cards, an ati radeon9800 AGP with two displays for work, and an ati radeon 9200 PCI for movies.

 

By applying this kernel- and Xserver-patch: "http://www.ltn.lv/~aivils/" I am able to run two instances of X active at once. One X for the r9800 with a mouse and a keyboard displaying on the dualhead desktop , and one for the r9200 with just a cordless mouse displaying on a TV.

 

The impact of watching wideo on a 2GHz machine is quite low, so it's no problem working (ok, coding / surfing the web) while my wife watches a movie.

 

The only drawback i have found is that my tty:s don't work anymore, so i have to stick to the gnome/kde consoles.

 

-KKn, running Gentoo

 

 

KKn,

 

If you still monitor this board check this out. Had the same problem as I use anywhere between 16 and 50 pty's simultaneously. The tty:s problem is a configuration FU with pty's. I had the same problem and fixed it by modifying /etc/udev/rules.d/50-mdk.rules.

 

Change the following 2 lines:

 

KERNEL=="tty[p-za-e][0-9a-f]*", NAME="pty/s%n", SYMLINK+="%k", GROUP="tty", OPTIONS="last_rule"

KERNEL=="pty[p-za-e][0-9a-f]*", NAME="pty/m%n", SYMLINK+="%k", GROUP="tty", OPTIONS="last_rule"

 

To this:

 

KERNEL=="pty[pqrstuvwxyzabcdef][0123456789abcdef]", NAME="%k", GROUP="tty", MODE="666", OPTIONS="last_rule"

KERNEL=="tty[pqrstuvwxyzabcdef][0123456789abcdef]", NAME="%k", GROUP="tty", MODE="666", OPTIONS="last_rule"

 

The 2006 install creates 256 symlinks to 11 actual pty devices which is bullshit. If you make the change you will get 256 actual pty devices as on every other linux distro that I have ever seen(going back to '94). Someone at Mandriva needs to pull his head out of his butt.

 

-bill

[banjo]

aRTee,

 

I just found your review and installation writeup. You did a terrific job. I have been sooo confused by the whole package manager thing that I could not make it do anything. After reading your articles I understand it much better now.

 

Thanks a ton for spending all of that time and effort to do the writeup. Mandriva should put a pointer to it in huge letters right on their web site. That information is just way too hard to find for a newbie.

 

I have been running Mandy 9.1 now since 2003 with very few problems. I have 2006 on order as I type this. I am looking forward to using the upgraded system.

 

Banjo

(_)=='=~