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Mandriva 2008 first impressions


ilia_kr
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Just installed Mandriva 2008 One. The first thing i've noticed was Fedora like DNA spiral wallpaper. Nice, though not so original.

Default gnome icons (as seen from Firefox dialogs) are also taken from fedora.

 

Some bugs i've noticed immediatly: Firefox' spell checker marks every singly word i type, i know my english is not perfect, but not like this.

If i stick a USB disk-on-key to a usb port - nothing happens. Than suddenly after 20 minutes or so Mandriva detected it and puted an icon on the desktop. Despite that, it takes ages to browse the USB content.

The old bug i had in 2007.1 didn't disappear: menues still drop shadows even though i unchecked this option in kcontrol, that stubborn checkbox keeps checking itself every time.

 

I'm a little disappointed... :sad:

 

Do you get the same behavior as i do?

Edited by ilia_kr
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I have not had problems of a normal nature. I do run an SLI set up and 2008 plays for 3-4 minutes and then reboots the computer!! 2007 did not do this, and since windows runs fine I know it is not the hardware. I might switch to the nvidia drivers rather than the pre-packaged drivers. They would not work at all in 2007 but in 2008 they do work..... for a few minutes! B)

 

For clarity, the above only happens during game play. Otherwise, 2008 runs all day long under normal computer usage. (SLI and gaming are not normal!)

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In one word................no.

I never got any of those kind of problems in 10.1, 2007-LE or 2007.1-Spring and I don't expect to get them in 2008 either.

 

Since I do not not use Fedora I couldn't care less if there seems to be some similarities, after all, the Linux world is about sharing and swapping ideas etc.

 

I suggest too many forget that particular point. I wonder but don't care to know if or how many ideas from Mandriva is copied into Fedora or other OSs, it is irrelevant to anything.

 

I never cease to be surprised that I built my machine nearly three years ago using the then top of the line components so it is still fairly advanced by todays standards and I never seem to have these problems that allegedly run from version to version. Am I some kind of computer expert or just plain lucky. Neither.

Sure I had an install and bootup problem with 2007 Official but was able (with a little inspiration from Mandriva and AdamW) and some trial and error to get it finally installed with a work around, and it was recognised as a bug and was fixed in 2007.1. Even without latest updates installed after clean installs, of each of those listed Mandriva versions I still had workable OSs and what few little niggles did occur the were always fixed by the next available updates.

 

I guess Mandriva must have it in for your machine. Not. But if Fedora works on your machine then that must prove the point. Not. :D :D :D

 

 

Cheers. John.

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ilia_kr, rest assured, fedora 8 will look very different to Mandriva 2008, if that is of any importance for you. (the look of a distro is not really that relevant imho.)

 

On a more serious note: I had not encountered these problems but other probs with my cooker version. Perhaps, after nearly two years, my cooker partition needs a clean setup again... anyway: downloading 2008 now and going for a fresh install on my cooker partition.

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I have no complaints from my "Cooker" 2008.

The system is reasonably fast, quite stable, and XFCE4 is behaving very well. HAL events are monitored very well, USB devices do appear on Thunar's left panel, USB burners do burn stuff... and that not on a real puter, but rather on a virtual machine. Not bad at all!

Not tried KDE3, nor Gnome (and probably I never will).

KDE4 is still a huge pile of loose bricks, but AFAIK this applies for pretty much any distro that has ventured it.

Still, I find no particularly good reason to recommend it to a newbie over PCLinuxOS or the upcoming Mepis 7 (based on Debian again and with a rolling release cycle!).

Edited by scarecrow
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ilia, yep, it's probably set to a different language. A few people have reported it getting set to Spanish, but I couldn't reproduce and can't figure out why. Just go into the preferences and set it back to English.

 

The USB thing sounds like a driver problem. Are there errors related in /var/log/messages ?

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I have a question about Mandriva in general -

 

I last used Mandrake back at around 9.2 then went to Gentoo. Im currently on PCLinuxOS. I really like the distro - frankly Im to lazy for Gentoo these days.

 

What brought me to PClinux is the ability to install 2007 and upgrade the Distro from that point. No need to reinstall a new system when they come out with the next version.

 

If I install Mandriva 2008 and when they come out with the next version - whatever the name. Will I be able to simply reload my repos with the new release and dist - upgrade?

 

I have a second partition for Disto-hopping but for my main distro I always want constant - no reinstall - Im lazy. Since PClinuxis a "fork" of Mandriva and from what I see they are very much alike, I may switch to Mandriva as my main.

Edited by ac_dispatcher
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ilia, yep, it's probably set to a different language. A few people have reported it getting set to Spanish, but I couldn't reproduce and can't figure out why. Just go into the preferences and set it back to English.

 

The USB thing sounds like a driver problem. Are there errors related in /var/log/messages ?

 

I'll check that, thank you...

 

P.S. about usb: i think it is a kernel related, because on kernels prior to 2.6.20 i had no problems but Kubuntu 7.04 and now Mandriva2008 do me some problems...

 

P.P.S. What about menu shades? It is realllllllyyy annoing, and it seems like nobody knows the cure...

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OMG, what a riot. Was it too much to get the dual-mini iso to actually ask what architecture you wanted to install, rather than assuming because you didn't modify the boot options? MCC is a major PITA, absolutely hopeless when it came to setting up install/update sources, I had to revert CLI to get them set up and working (reminding me why I love yum/pirut sooooooo much :D), not very newbie friendly. Don't get me started on drak3D, I still have not got compiz-fusion/XGL set up, again it looks like I will be unnecessarily hacking config files in order to get things working, despite having a GUI tool sitting in front of me. :huh:

 

On a side note, ethernet drivers are loaded on boot, which is a surprise, but does not make up for the above.

 

I also have to agree about that wallpaper ilia, not very original IMO (in terms of discussing art, not GPL software).

 

GNOME seems to be okay, but then I only installed task-gnome-minimal, so there's time yet.

Edited by Reiver_Fluffi
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I installed mdv 2008 powerpack last night on my laptop. Generally looks pretty solid/stable so kudos there.

 

Biggest annoyance - mandriva apparently decided to "crappify" firefox with some weird extensions which are installed by default. One had to do with some blogging service and I can't recall what the other is about. I assume both are a source of revenue to mandriva similar to Dell bundling software on new PCs. I had to disable both in firefox "Add-ons". Hopefully, this trend will end here for mandriva, at least on the for pay versions. Are these extensions present in the free versions?

Edit: The extensions in question are Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, BlogRovr and ScribeFire.

 

Biggest technical problem - configuration of broadcom wireless card. There seem to be some real issues with getting ndiswrapper to create a wireless interface and stopping the open source bcmxx driver from taking control of the card. Fortunately, for the first time, the open source broadcom driver(bcmxx) actually works with my wireless card so I didn't have to delve into the problem very deeply.

Edited by pmpatrick
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Firefox does not have any odd extensions added here.

Pretty fresh installation of 2008 @ a friend's laptop done from the dualOS mini ISO.

And it's still called Firefox here - not Iceweasel or SuperDooper or dunno what other silly name one could invent! :P

These extensions might be a Powerpack bonus- but then I'd rather decline telling my opinion about Mandriva Powerpacks...

My biggest rant is ***STILL*** the urpmi frontend/software installer, which is a load of crap. I can understand that a lot of time and effort has been devoted to rewriting it from scratch, but its bugs are innumerable. To preserve your sanity, you HAVE to enable the /contrib repo and then install Smart Package Manager- which may not be perfect, but it is a few light years ahead of rpmdrake.

Edited by scarecrow
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OK, another big response :)

 

ac_dispatcher: you can upgrade from release to release using the package manager (urpmi), yes. We test this some, but not *heavily*. It is possible you will hit a few problems that need to be worked around manually (for instance, sometimes you need to remove a package to let the upgrade proceed and then reinstall it later). This generally depends on how much stuff you installed. Installing third party packages can also sometimes affect the likelihood of this form of upgrade working. Personally, I use this upgrade method on my web and mailservers as they have a fairly small set of packages installed. 2007.0 to 2007.1 worked fine, I've yet to get around to upgrading them to 2008.0.

 

ilia_kr: yeah, the USB drivers are in the kernel, so effectively we said the same thing. What you can do is install kernel-linus - which is a stock upstream kernel, no patches - and boot to that, see if you have the same problem. If you do, the bug is in the upstream kernel, not in any Mandriva patch, so you can file a bug on the kernel Bugzilla. If you do that and it gets fixed, you could then file a Mandriva bug, referencing the upstream fix, asking for it to be included in a Mandriva kernel update. Sorry, I don't know about the menu shadows thing, other than that a bug has already been filed, I believe.

 

reiver: the code in the Mandriva tools to add repositories is fine and works perfectly. What problems people have had with adding repositories on 2008 have been more related to the mirror lists that it depends on (hosted at api.mandriva.com) not being properly created / updated. They should be mostly okay now, and adding repositories via rpmdrake works okay (I've tested this), except for a NOKEY problem which I'm about to post a new thread about (see http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/10/public...rors-with-2008/ ).

 

pmpatrick: actually, no-one's paying us for those. The marketing department apparently just thought people would appreciate having them. I wish they'd asked me (y'know, the *user* representative, sigh) first. D'oh. You can, as you found, disable them in Firefox, or you can just uninstall the packages. The guy whose company makes Blogrovr came to the official MDV forums to make it clear that they hadn't paid us (or even *asked* us) to include it in Mandriva, and he seems like a nice guy, so please don't blame them. :) On the Broadcom, yes, unfortunately, there is a problem with switching to ndiswrapper if a native driver is available. The problem is that the updated hardware detection system used in 2008 (and 2007.1, it has the same problem) will *always* load the native driver for the hardware at boot time, even if you told drakconnect you wanted to use ndiswrapper. Having the native driver loaded prevents ndiswrapper working. This is possible to fix, we just need to add some code to drakconnect so it knows how to override the default hardware -> module association. I'm going to do my best to make sure this is done for 2008.1. The good news, as you found, is that bcm43xx actually *works*, rather well, in 2008. :) If you're still interested in switching to ndiswrapper, PM me and I'll give you further info on how the detection system works and how to override it.

 

scarecrow: urpmi hasn't been rewritten from scratch, not for 2008, not at any time previously actually. rpmdrake was a couple of times, but not for 2008. what exactly do you find problematic about them? Thanks!

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scarecrow: what exactly do you find problematic about them? Thanks!

 

Package dependencies are quite a few times not resolved properly, error messages when a package fails to install/upgrade are quite often not helpful at all (or even counterintuitive), and at at certain cases it's also terribly slow (a perl issue?). Sort of reminding me the dreadful yum (OK not THAT slow, but compared to pacman or aptitude it feels like a water pistol fighting a machine gun...).

Smart is failing only when while installing a certain package, you also have to select one out of a number of dependencies... in that case Smart will not offer you a choice, but spit out a non-verbose error message (rpmdrake does work in that case and tells you "one of the following packages has to be selectec" and blah-blah...). In EVERY other case, Smart is working just fine (AND fast).

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[off-topic]Yum ain't slow. :P When was the last time you tested it? Must be some years ago... [/off-topic]

 

I don't see anything wrong in urpmi either. Actually, I prefer urpmi to a lot of other packaging tools.

 

Just did a fresh reinstall of Mdv2008 and it seems that the nautilus-bug that hit me previously is gone now. My cooker must have been pretty borked.

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