The other Mandriva 2009.0

[theYinYeti]

This is my short and incomplete review of Mandriva 2009.0 :)

 

Two weeks ago, I installed Mandriva 2008.1 on my "salon" living-room PC (see signature). It was dead slow to boot, and wouldn't play DVDs any more! On the other hand, it could display a 1680x1050 (16/10) desktop on my great new 22" display (was on sale), something theorically impossible according to the man page for the original (old) XFree86 driver from Via; great!

 

Two weeks later, I now have 2009.0 Free installed afresh (not an upgrade). I had high expectations on the boot time and DVD issues. Besides, the release notes made a point of presenting LXDE as the new desktop environment in Mandriva, next to the other big two (Gnome and KDE), targetted at computers with low resources; and power-saving features are now for all, wether you have a laptop or not. All in all, this distribution looked like THE Linux distribution my "salon" PC had been waiting for all these years.

 

In short, I'm rather not disapointed :)

 

The boot time is not as short as I had hoped (after reading all those great articles on the net), but certainly still the shortest boot time I ever had on this computer with Mandrake/Mandriva.

DVDs play well, although I have Xine crashes in fullscreen if the resolution is set too high (xxmc driver).

As for LXDE, it was simply absent from the installer! I could choose Gnome, or KDE, or custom; after choosing the latter, with individual package selection and Internet declared as a media, I couldn't find any "task-*" package (the absence of alphabetical sorting did not help). I settled for a text-only install, after which I had to declare the Internet media again (I lost them during intallation because of a "host not found" error), and then install icewm and drakconf, and finally startx and start mcc and install task-lxde.

 

LXDE is not as nice as I had hoped. Even with one-click launching enabled, you still have to double-click on desktop icons; for the sake of consistency, I chose to disable the desktop; I ponder replacing PCManFM with Rox. Besides, I had to install gdm for the Halt and Reboot choices to work (they wouldn't with xdm). On this topic, there should be a modern light-weight alternative to gdm available. I know one exists although I can't remember the name…

 

The main thing I observed with this new installation is how fast it is! I couldn't believe it! MCC is fast (although rpmdrake hasn't changed much in this aspect). Kazehakase is fast. LXTerminal is fast. All is so fast!

 

Overall, I only had one issue so far: I couldn't change the Line-in volume up because I only saw a single control for PulseAudio. So I disabled PulseAudio. Now I have the answer though:

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=516874

 

Great work Mandriva!

 

Yves.