Rate Mandriva 2007

[arctic]

Time for a poll. B)

[ffi]

Difficult choice, for me there were several small issues some fixed, some not fixed and some new minor stuff introduced together with the really annoying occasional (30-60%) hangup at boot with the normal kernels (the mm kernel do work however)

[lavaeolus]

For one computer it works nearly perfect, the other worked well until I installed an ati crossfire-graphics-card, after that no graphical environment whatsoever (but I didn't really expect it to work on this box, and yes I know that crossfire is not supported by the linux-ati-driver), funny thing is CentOS 4.4 Live-CD booted on this box into a graphical environment, haven't yet tested if it can get installed, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 didn't work either, so it seems a problem with x.org 7.1, therefore I won't blame Mandriva, but ati (and to some extent myself, for doing such silly things :D ).

Edited December 25, 2006 by lavaeolus

[lawsonrc]

I am every disappointed in that up until 2007, I was able to use 3D acceleration to play TuxRacer/PenguinRacer (or whatever it's called now) with the Nvidia Card in my Toshiba 5000 series laptops, but now I can't. I can only use the "nv" driver. Also, this means no more 3D accelerated screensavers.

 

The laptops would not boot at all into Mandriva when first installed until I re-installed and choose the "nv" driver.

 

I haven't installed it onto my Desktop yet, but I think I'll have better luck. I'll update soon on that, probably before New Year's. (As a silver club member, I have the PowerPakDVD).

 

A few days ago I downloaded LinuxMint and plan to burn it onto a disc this week. I'm a KDE fan, but it will replace by Libranet, so I hope to have fun with it. I liked what I read about it on Distrowatch and also from their website. It should have just about everything that MDVPowerPak has, and for free. I'll give a report later on it.

 

Happy New Year!

 

Richard L.

[tyme]

I am every disappointed in that up until 2007, I was able to use 3D acceleration to play TuxRacer/PenguinRacer (or whatever it's called now) with the Nvidia Card in my Toshiba 5000 series laptops, but now I can't. I can only use the "nv" driver. Also, this means no more 3D accelerated screensavers.

Have you tried to install the nvidia drivers from their website? or via one of the 3rd party repositories (i.e. PLF) that provides them? Until you do that, you won't have 3D acceleration with an nvidia card. if you're having troubles installing it, then post a thread (unless you already did, in which case it must have slipped through my usual browsing of all the new threads).

[mystified]

This is the worst Mandriva yet. It took me three hours to get my wireless network working, I have to manually mount my cds. Everytime I boot I get an error message from kscd. I haven't tried printing yet which didn't work well in 2006. Whatever happened to that great distro that just worked out of the box?

[tyme]

mysti...you're using ndiswrapper for you wireless, which is immeasurably unreliable and unstable. it may be that the problem is with ndiswrapper, or your drivers, and not mandriva.

[mystified]

tyme, I installed my wireless in 2006 with a new install with ndiswrapper and my windows broadcom driver and it worked immediately. The problem was I had to reboot and after that, even reconfiguring it, it wouldn't work. I had a problem in 10.1 with a wireless compatible card where everytime I rebooted I'd have to set up wireless again but at least that worked so I could live with it. The problems that I ran into were just screwy ones. First it couldn't install ndiswrapper from the disk. So I thought well I'll just compile it. No big deal, I'd installed development packages. But kernel-source isn't installed with development which to me is completely stupid because you need it for compiling. So I tried to install it and it wouldn't install. So I set up easy urpmi and downloaded ndiswrapper from the main mirror. Then it tells me I needed a rpm that I could only get from the club. I tried googling for it and it wasn't available. Turned out I didn't need it. Then it told me I needed bcmwl5.sys from windows which I finally found and downloaded only to find it wasn't needed either when I finally got it working. It was just one thing after another. Sorry, I'm just completely frustrated atm.

[Ixthusdan]

FWIW, mysti, I encountered some of the same issues. Yes, the rpm that Mandriva says it needs is not needed. I did figure out that compiling ndiswrapper is best for reliability. Also, not installing kernel sources after checking devel is utterly stupid. This round they were located on the 4th disk and not listed in the installation options. I suspect this was all a failed attempt at getting club membership. I had to plug my laptop into my network and get it configured for wireless. It should be able to configure without cat5, IMO.

[dexter11]

I suspect this was all a failed attempt at getting club membership.

No this is the result of having 10-15 thousand packages in the repo with 70 or so engineers in the staff. I hope both of you reported what you experienced.

[ianw1974]

Since I have a new laptop, I'm having a few problems with sound not working (prob cos needs new alsa), wireless not working (need to find out how to get the ipw3945 working), sd card slot not working and other such small things.

 

First off, couldn't get it installed, but had to disable the core duo stuff in the bios so it thought it was single processor. However, this is all OK if you have a 2.6.18 kernel - which I put on after install, and then rebooted, enabled the core duo again and booted the 2.6.18 kernel - sweet.

 

Just got to fix the rest now.....

[lawsonrc]

Thanks tyme,

 

Yes, I did try the nvidia drivers from their website and also from plf, but neither helped. I was also at my LUG workshop: Houston Linux Users Group with some really bright people, and the only solution was to use the "nv" driver to even boot up.

 

I had an earlier thread on this issue in the first week of October under Laptops and Portables, if you wish to take a look.

 

I appreciate yours and the help of all the expert and knowledgeable (sp?) people of this fabulous forum.

 

Richard

 

Mystified,

Hi from Houston! I just read a review of Linux Mint 2.1 "Bea" which as an easy gui way of using Ndiswrapper and other ways to configure wireless. You can make a Live CD of it to see if it works for you. It is based on Ubuntu with Gnome as the default, but you can download KDE from Synaptic easily (according to the review):

 

http://slashroot.blogspot.com/2006/12/linu...s-promised.html

 

and here's another review:

 

http://gnuman.com/distros/linux_mint_2.1.html

 

I hope all is well in S.A......I'm doing well in Houston.

 

Richard L.

[tyme]

lawsonrc: I have replied to your thread about the nvidia card.

[mystified]

Hi lawsonrc,

 

Thanks for the great links. I'm glad to hear you're doing well. I'm mad at your Rockets for beating the Spurs the other night but I won't hold that against you! :D

 

mysti

[lawsonrc]

You're welcome, Mysti.....

 

BTW....I quit following sports years ago, so I'm just as much for the Spurs as I am for the Rockets.....GO for any team from the great state of Texas!!!

 

Richard