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Poll: Rate Mandriva 2008


arctic
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How good is Mandriva 2008?  

49 members have voted

  1. 1. Installation...

    • ...was painless and easy to perform.
      30
    • ... was slightly problematic, some things did not work out of the box.
      14
    • ... was very problematic, many things didn't work out of the box.
      3
    • ... was impossible. (whatever reason)
      2
  2. 2. Performance / Stability ...

    • ... is excellent, no disturbing problems so far.
      19
    • ... is good. I only ran into some minor bugs.
      18
    • ... is average. I have found several annoying bugs
      10
    • ... is poor. Way too many bugs for my tastes.
      2


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John,

 

remember the old saying: use whatever works. :) For me 2007.1 was too problematic, so that I switched back to 2007.0 on my laptop; but 2008 works well again. Different hardware - different luck.

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Thanks Arctic.

 

I know, that is why I am leaving 2008 for a while until there are some significant package updates in the areas I am having trouble with namely :-

No sound, no left thumb button on the mouse, Firewire connected Scanner working but only after a file edit.

My installs are only PC so I have never had the problems associated with Laptops. 2007 was a bit of a trouble case to install until I discovered a work around but once installed 2007 and 2007.1 have worked flawlessly even before updates were installed.

What amazes me about 2008 is how few updates have become available compared with 2007 and 2007.1 in the same time frames. So either it has less flaws than ever before and the ones I am experiencing are a few freaks. I don't know which.

 

Cheers. John.

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I started Mandriva 2008 in LiveCD mode. No problems.

Started Live Install

I got to the part where it says to restart machine and remove the Live CD.

I did this.

I got the boot loader screen showing Mandriva 2008 and Windows XP (default per my selection and on a different hard drive)

I selected Mandriva 2008 and got to the screen with the progress bar.

The boot freezes.

I hit escape for the verbose mode and this is what I get:

 

setting default font [ok]

configuring kernel parameters [ok]

setting clock (local time) [ok]

starting udev: wait timeout. Will continue in the background [FAILED]

 

 

What should I do now? My WinXP will boot but I suppose I can only get into linux via Live CD.

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I have only one thing to say about Mandriva 2008, and that's: Thumbs up.

 

My first Linux distribution was Mandrake 10.0, that one and Mandrake 10.1 worked okay here, but after Mandriva 2005 LE and 2006, I was ready to switch for something els, and tried Ubuntu, OpenSuse (Suse), Fedora and Debian, but when 2007 came out, I just had to try Mandriva again and here I am, still on Mandriva satisfied as ever.

 

And I can see in the danish communities that since 2008 came out, that there are more users on Mandriva again.

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So far everything is fine, Mandriva 2008 runs on my Thinkpad r60 in 32 and 64bit, so far no real showstopping problems, only some minor glitches:

 

WLAN won't reconnect after suspend and resume, when I switch it off and on again it reconnects,

 

panel-applets in gnome sometimes crash after logging in (namely the volume, battstat, cpu-freq, and netstat ? applets), but so far nothing else.

 

Adobe Flash does not work on 64bit with the nspluginwrapper, swfdec works ok for me,so it's not a real problem.

 

Now the positives:

 

Hardware 3D is working out-of-the-box, fglrx-driver works ok, but since it does not like composite I don't use it at the moment (I want my translucent windows in KDE !)

 

The Volume-Buttons work with the tpb-rpm.

 

Fn-F5 can be used to switch Bluetooth on and off, for WLAN I have to use the hardware-switch on the front of the Notebook, Fn-F4 suspends, display brightness and Thinklight work out-of-the-box.

 

CPU-Frequency scaling works out-of-the-box, laptop-kernel is selected by the system, no extra-fiddling needed.

 

Hardware sensors are all detected (no lm_sensors needed, afaik they are not recommended for use with some thinkpads), I can see: fan speed, CPU Temp, GPU Temp, HDD Temp, I can even see the temp of my battery, Interesting thing: when running with 64bit, the system-temperature is about 1-2° C lower than with 32bit.

 

On my other box, an Athlon XP 2800+ with ati radeon x850xt I tried an upgrade from 2007.1, which has already been upgraded from 2007, at first everything went fine, I rebooted, everything worked so far, but when I tried to update some packages, I got some serious errors, and it did not install any packages, I had no real intention to try to fix this, so I did a clean install on that box (I did not try to hunt down the upgrade-problems, since my box was pretty screwed anyway even before, because I had installed and reinstalled so many things).

 

I get hardware 3D on the x850xt (seems to use the standard radeon dri-module), but when I tried fglrx on this box, it crashed, but I did not try real hard to get it working, everything else is working fine on that box.

 

The greatest experience was with a short live-cd test on my gaming-box (opteron185, 2 radeon x1950xtx-crossfire), with Mandriva 2008 i got the first time into a working graphical environment (ok, crossfire still does not work, but it is a huge step forward !)

 

I use Mandriva since 8.1 and never had any real issues, but all-in-all so far this was my best Mandriva experience

 

the new rpmdrake is fantastic, at least for me :-)

 

lavaeolus

 

edit:

 

the panel-applets crashed on my other box, too, but the crashes on both computers only appear when I log out of Gnome and then log in again, still somewhat mysterious, not really a big problem, but a bit annoying.

 

the overall impression is still very good.

 

edit 2: :-)

 

crashing panel-applets are history, the problem is known, there are already packages in testing, which cure the disease.

Edited by lavaeolus
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  • 2 weeks later...

After my mix up getting a new modem, I had waited enough...I wanted 2008 running now. I disconnected my primary hard drive (my windows partition and my data partition) , and booted a live cd PClinuxos, used diskdrake to clean up the secondary hard drive (old win 98 install along with 2 installs of mandrake 9.0 -not sure what happend there). After diskdrake i had a clean secondary hard drive. Shut down computer, reconnected primary drive, and booted into the 2008 install disk, installed 2008 to secondary hard drive.

 

All my components were recognised (except for my softmodem which I was expecting, but PClinuxos picks it up!) onboard graphics drivers installed fine (am yet to try compiz). Is able to read my XP partition fine.

 

Haven't used it much yet, but Mandrake 9.0 was very good to me and I can't see why 2008 wont be better, given its flawless and simple installation. I never had the old Mandrake 9.0 updated, but I cant wait to get 2008 fully upto date.

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Only done it to two computers so far, Had a couple of little bugs, but it runs fine.

 

Some things are better i think but against 2007 spring.

 

No major reason to use 2008 yet.

 

The only 1 thing i still have to fix is the recording the TV for my programs. I can watch I did notice that the configure the card icon vanished, Maybe me.

 

But do like it i am writing this on Spring whilst my daughter is printing something on 2008 from the Barbie web site. And no complaints from her. (Just daddy watch me.)

 

The office is on 2007 now and no problems there.50 + computers. MCC and URPMI are my friends.

 

Is there a KDE version of Firefox I really hate the file browser.

 

At least Open office uses the KDE file browser.

 

Thanks Adam.

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Installation should be fairly easy- factly,I'm always doing a netinstall and have zero problems even for installing Cooker (which is my default Mandriva installation).

And bugs... being with Cooker for a while, I'm used to it, so I can't really comment on 2008.0

KDE version of Firefox? Nothing really functional (gtk-qt engine should be your best shot), but what's wrong with either Opera or Kasehakase? The latter is lighweigt, but fully armed Gecko implementation, which is much faster/responsive than Firefox (but still gtk2 based). You should give it a try.

Edited by scarecrow
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  • 3 months later...

Your experience of a distribution really depends a lot on your experience level, a bit on your hardware and maybe to some extent on your luck as well, but I have to say that to date Mandriva 2008 is the most competent distro I have ever used (and I have used a lot). Drakconnect is brilliant, I have never known anything half as competent at setting up internet connections, and occasionally Mandriva even manages to turn my laptop off when I ask it to, there is no other distribution that I know of that can ever do that (there is still much room for improvement here though, because a successful shutdown on 1 out of every 6 attempts is still a lot worse than I would hope for).

 

I still use Kubuntu and Linux Mint, and each have their own strengths (personally I think Mint is much better than Ubuntu). The most disappointing aspect of Mandriva is package management, a simple update of the package database is so painfully slow compared to a similar operation with Synaptic that it makes you want to weep! (and yes I do use 'synthesis' packages but that is not an answer, especially when you consider that you get virtually no information with them).

 

After the horrific experience I had with Mandriva 2007 (so bad that even thinking about it brings a shiver to my spine) it is a surprise that I tried 2008 at all, but I am exceedingly glad I did because at the moment there is simply nothing to match it. Why Ubuntu gets all the limelight is a mystery to me.

 

Please keep up the good work and if it improves as much in the next year as it has in the last then it will be unbeatable!

 

Ubuntu eat dust!!

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  • 3 weeks later...

All attempts using Live CD 2008. 1st install over the top of Mandriva 2007.1 Spring (Free), supposedly clean install, but many problems, mostly with the logout screen and adding printers. Second attempt over the top of 1st, selected use existing partitions but scrubbed whole hard drive and repartitioned it! Good job I backed up first. Third attempt (after reinstalling Windows Vista and XP), used auto configure for hard drive. Got insufficient hard drive space report when doing updates, auto had only allocated 4Gb out of 200 Gb available. 4th attempt, configured partitions by hand (4Gb as swap, 15Gb as /, 30Gb as /usr and 155Gb as /home) and it works! The Internet connection didn't work although it was reported as up on eth0 and the connection icon was ticked. Rebooted and it worked. No cups installed and 182 update files installed and I finally have a working system. Then I discovered that I am only using half the installed memory. Installed a kernel with himem support but now get a lot of not found messages on bot up. Don't know what they do as the system seems fine without them.

 

Would not recommend this for the faint hearted! :wacko:

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Hello Dave.

 

Good thing you have a huge HDD. You have wasted a large amount of space. Even 1Gb swap is more than necessary. Swap is not the same as in Windows. You don't need any more than about 5Gb for / since you have /usr as a separate partition and you certainly do not need more than 5Gb for that either. Anything more is just wasting drive space. Plus there is little benefit in having a separate partition for /usr. I have never seen an argument for such that really convinced me by those few who do that.

 

You made no mention of what your hardware setup is or what your problems really were. With odd exceptions, most people have little difficulty installing Mandriva whether 2008 or earlier versions. Those who do have problems usually find it is hardware incompatibility and with help from MUB often resolve those problems.

 

I installed 2008 and had no problems installing it (or even the beta or rc releases of 2008.1). I experienced some bugs, most of which have been fixed by updates, and still have one remaining unresolved.

I too had 2007-Spring running successfully but did not do the upgrade path with 2008 and certainly not by using 2008 Live CD. I used 2008 Free.

I never use the upgrade path, I only do a Clean install. In theory it should work and in most cases the upgrade path does work but the most reliable way has proven to be the clean install. If a /home partition was set up, since all your settings are there and untouched by the clean install, the clean install is actually faster than an upgrade.

 

Unlike you I would confidently recommend Mandriva to all the faint hearted. The vast vast majority would have no problem with installing it at all, so long as they do not think that Windows experience counts.

 

Cheers. John.

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