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Mandriva 2007 Beta 3 Report


spinynorman
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It's no secret that Mandriva have released Beta 3 to their upcoming 2007. I saw the news carried on just about every Linux site out there. I'm not sure why all the excitement and attention this time, I must have missed something. I mean, I'm always quite excited, but that kind of press is usually reserved for major releases or developmental milestones. Perhaps beta 3 is a milestone. There are some nice new features this time and perhaps this is why it was so noteworthy. It took me over 24 hours, but I finally got the 586/x64_86 dvd downloaded and burnt.

 

Read the review at tuxmachines.org.

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I surmise there are still issues with Mandriva's implementation and nvidia chips

 

I have stopped reading after that. Funnily enough some "experts" haven't realized yet that aiglx is still no worky with ANY version of the Nvidia driver and xorg 7.1, and the issue isn't Mandy- specific... oh well.

Or rather, I quickly saw a few lines after the claim that gnome-volume-manager is working with hal not running, and had a very good laugh... :P

Edited by scarecrow
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Pretty good honest review. I just installed the 32bit version off the dvd, didn't feel like trying the 64.

 

Even though it's beta it's far more useable for me compared to 2006. I had to wait for the Dec club edition to even have a working installation (sort of). The April One edition would not install for me either. It was such let down I let my silver membership lapse.

 

Aiglx worked out of the box on my x800pro. The Xgl option was greyed out however nor did ppracer or cromium work.

I spent almost 10 hours getting working 3D using the ati drivers from plf (8.28.08). It was only by using the Lost 3D ability thread here in the hardware section as a guide was I able to finally get it working. It only took 1 re-install because I botched it so badly :P Now I have 3D and Xgl and the Aiglx is greyed.

 

Other than that installing the drivers for my Canon wasn't too bad. I had 2 dependencie's that urpmi or rmpdrake couldn't resolve no matter what mirror's I used. Googling around I happened to find rpm.pbone.net. What a treasure that site is in a matter of seconds using the search I was able to download both elusive dependancy packages in mdk 2007 rpm's :thumbs: no source compiling had my MP500 up and running in no time.

 

Anyone new to Linux and Mandy or any rpm distro needs to have rpm.pbone.net bookmarked.. wish I had found it before.

 

Now it just a matter of getting some of the extra's.

 

Even though I like Kubuntu 6.06.1 LTS and Sabayon, there is something about Mandy that keeps calling me back.

Hard to explain but in some strange way I feel more comfortable. I can learn without feeling so inexperienced/intimidated.

 

Opps sorry a bit longer than I had intended

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I had the kororaa livecd and this is gentoo-based. Didn't work with my nvidia machine at home either. Only managed to get it working on my intel-video based machines.

 

I think it's not only common to Mandriva. I downloaded Beta 3 the other week and installed in vmware to test first (yes I'm a scaredy cat :P ).

 

When I have a free machine, I'll give it a go, or wait for stable ;)

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Bought a new printer/all in one (epson rx700 - great machine), so I had to update. No time for anything really, hence my absence here, but anyway...

Tried to update just gutenprint, no way, then thought: a new install (not throwing away the old working one) will be faster than figuring out exactly what to upgrade...

I was wrong - it took me some hours. I had no graphics, didn't follow development so I didn't know the nv driver is now a separate package. I have an agp nvidia gf4200ti on my main monitor, plus a pci ati 9250 for my beamer. Yeah, combo from hell.

Anyway, this was all with the beta 2, didn't know the beta three was out.

Seems some stuff was quite broken, couldn't select packages during install, etcetc. Good looks though. On 3GB I got 1.2GB new after pointing at cooker and doing urpmi --auto-select...

 

After getting the nvidia driver working (never used the nv driver, first had it missing, then got nvidia working, then saw a message at some point flash by: installing xorg-nv-something...) and disabling my ati card: bliss in 3d desktopland.

Apart from the fact that I really like kwin and my config of it, compiz lacks so many usability features and has just soo many eyecandy options that I'm having a hard time with it... all the looks but not so nice to use...

 

If I actually had time I'd write a real review (of the final),... not sure if I will find the time...

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I thought I'd try installing 2007 Beta 3 in VMplayer. It went ok. I had the 2007 One KDE .iso so I booted the VM with that and then installed to the virtual HD from the LiveCD image. I also applied cooker updates.

 

Everything seems to be working except sound (and 3D video), but I don't have the time to fool with that right now.

 

I'm very impressed with the performance. It seems almost as quick as a native install.

 

I read somewhere that you may not be able to boot directly into X with Mandriva in VMware and that was what I found. So I booted to the 'linux 3' command line and then executed startx from there. If I tried to boot directly into X it kept re-prompting me for network and user setups and would not take the settings or allow me to break out of an endless loop of prompts. Of course, the network and user configurations had already set up, so I'm not sure what's going on there, but booting to runlevel 3 and starting X from there is a workaround.

 

The video driver was automatically set up during the install using the "VMware Virtual Video" driver. I wasn't able to change that to use the ATI fglrx driver for the ATI 9200SE card on the physical machine. But this VMware driver works fine. Translucency worked ok, but I turned it off cause it responded too slowly. I'm not sure if this VMware Virtual Video driver can be configured for 3D, I haven't tried yet.

 

CD/DVD and USB functionality all worked fine. Haven't tried setting up a printer yet. No problems with networking, and I was able to ssh into other machines on the local network.

 

This was the first time I tried setting up any Mandriva version in VMware. If anyone has experiences with Mandriva (any version) on VMware, please comment on your experience.

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jboy,

 

Strange you experienced that. I used it on my vmware server (which is free now) and it installed and worked straightaway with X. I made sure all options on the summary screen were configured before I finished the install, and it's been working fine.

 

The only problem I was experiencing today was the network connection wasn't working for the internet, and I kept having to do ifdown and ifup to get it functioning again. After a few attempts at this, I gave it a static IP address, and it did go a few times after this, but was stable enough for me to download updates. I went to easyurpmi and added the 2007 community. Then I got prompted for options 1 - 5 to choose from Discovery up to PowerPack Plus, of which I chose Powerpack Plus. It first downloaded 4 updates, so I ran it again and it started to download 351 updates, about 1.1GB.

 

Should be finished in the morning for me to continue and have a play with it :P

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VMware always uses the vmware virtual video. It's a virtual machine, so you'll never get the same hardware that the physical PC has ;)

 

Yes, I just installed Odin Beta 3, and then rebooted and everything worked straightaway. VMware server allows you set up one machine and store the images on here, then use the console client to connect to the machine over the network. Really neat :P

 

Otherwise, carry on with VMware Workstation, or whatever you're currently using. You can use vmware server standalone and install the client on the same machine and just connect locally. I also do that too, have my Mandriva 2007 Beta 3 running this way right now.

 

EDIT:

 

bummer, after yesterdays updates, it told me to update repository, and now I have another 1.1GB to download :cry: guess this beta stuff is constantly updating. I think after I've done this update, I'll leave it and use it, and wait for stable. I noticed after the update yesterday that the login theme wouldn't work, although I could still login even though I couldn't see me entering my username and password.

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Thanks. I am very impressed with VMware. I had also tried MS Virtual PC 2004 but its performance was a dog in comparison.

 

Add virtualization to the many, many things I learned about first through MUB. I remember you've talked about VMware here in the past, so thank you for that great tip. Currently on each of my machines, I have at least 2 separate partitions dedicated to a different OS. Now I'm thinking I can eliminate some of those extra partitions and just go virtual.

 

------

Ian is a Virtual Geek Guru

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Yeah you could do. For example, get rid of Windows :P

 

Then if you need it, just fire up vmware and do whatever you need to do. I use Windows 2000 in vmware, cos XP would be a dog. And 2000 is good enough anyhow and just as good as XP anyhow without the resource hogginess.

 

Just also found that if you like the gui package manager, it's not there by default. Or at least not on mine, so do:

 

urpmi rpmdrake

 

and you're sorted. It's now only one element for adding/removing programs unlike what it was before.

 

Currently have 512MB allocated as memory for my vm and 1GB swap and 19GB space to /. Enough for my testing. Made a couple of speed tweaks, disabling tty's that I don't need and swappiness level. Got transparency enabled in KDE, and no problems with that at all.

 

One thing, don't try opengl. I did this:

 

urpmi mesa-demos

 

to get glxinfo and glxgears. Glxgears works fine around 150-200fps, but using glxinfo will restart the X server. I presume this is only something relating with vmware, but dunno for sure since I've not tested a real install of this on a normal PC.

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You should give smart a try it's working very well in beta 3, also install the smart gui.

At the bottom of the gui there are tabs that will tell you everything you need to know about the software and it handles dependencies very well.

After that use easy urpmi/smart urpmi select the same mirriors you have for urpmi but select smart in the drop down box and paste those commands into the console.

 

Then install KSmartTray. It will automatically track for updates and notify you when they are there. (not plf however) It's the same program used in Ubuntu since the guy developed it for Mandriva and brought it to Ubuntu when he left.

 

No more mdkonline for me :)

Edited by DarkFoss
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