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MandrivaOne 2009 mini review


taupist
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First impressions:

 

The first thing that I noticed is that there was a lot of static coming from the speakers. It took me almost 45 minutes to figure out that I needed to open the mixer, configure channels, check the capture channel, click ok and then disable the capture in the mixer window. It seems that the built in mic was causing feedback that resulted in the noise.

In the future it might be a good idea to disable capture by default, just a suggestion. I don't know of any other way to deal with the feedback, so have no idea whether or not I'll ever get capture working properly.

 

I really do like the artwork, the only thing is I wonder why there is a Gnome foot in the upper right corner of the KDE wallpaper.

 

I do appreciate the fact that you folks built Konqueror so that it still splits the tabs like it used to. I'll probably be using Konqueror for a file manager more than for web browsing. There are just some changes that I'm not ready for yet. BTW, there doesn't seem to be a Home icon, I'm finding that to be a hassle, but I think I can fix it.

 

I should also note that Ekiga freezes, I can't even do the initial configuration. I have to open System Monitor and kill it.

 

I've taken a look at Drakbackup and I'm as disapointed as ever. It doesn't see the CD/DVD drive, it only see's /dev/sg0. As an added constraint, I can't log in as root to edit the configuration file, I can't even view the file. So, I couldn't fix it if my life depended on it. The Snapshot feature seems just as lame since it won't even save it's configuration. SO, a broken system stay's broken, period.

 

When browsing through the package manager, if I click on a program the Control Center basically freezes with "Getting 'info' from XML meta-data..." in the status bar. This never happened before, what's up? Is it trying to access the internet and if so Why?

 

All in all, I'm very dissapointed. Mandriva has really been going downhill in recent years. :wall:

 

 

[moved from Talk-Talk by spinynorman]

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So no positives in your review then? Everything in 2009.0 works fine for me.

 

You'd be better off posting for assistance, rather than titling a post mini-review, and then just listing all your problems and no positives. It's not really a review as such.

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Taupist,

 

It's unfortunate that you feel that way about Mandriva. I think KDE4 may be the root of all your problems, not Mandriva as a whole. I've not installed the latest release, infact I haven't used Mandriva since a month after 2008.1 was released. Have you tried using Gnome as your default DE? If you have, what was that experience like?

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As an added constraint, I can't log in as root to edit the configuration file, I can't even view the file. So, I couldn't fix it if my life depended on it.

That may be down to the security settings. On a default install it is set to High instead of Standard.

 

When browsing through the package manager, if I click on a program the Control Center basically freezes with "Getting 'info' from XML meta-data..." in the status bar. This never happened before, what's up? Is it trying to access the internet and if so Why?

To get the package info you requested.

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I really do like the artwork, the only thing is I wonder why there is a Gnome foot in the upper right corner of the KDE wallpaper.

This is a kde4 feature, they [the kde4 devs] call it the cashew or plasma toolbox, it does nothing useful however.

 

BTW, there doesn't seem to be a Home icon, I'm finding that to be a hassle, but I think I can fix it.

kde4 feature

 

I've taken a look at Drakbackup and I'm as disapointed as ever. It doesn't see the CD/DVD drive, it only see's /dev/sg0. As an added constraint, I can't log in as root to edit the configuration file, I can't even view the file. So, I couldn't fix it if my life depended on it. The Snapshot feature seems just as lame since it won't even save it's configuration. SO, a broken system stay's broken, period.

I think the snapshot thing is work in progress, I uninstalled it; regarding the root thing, this is a feature; you are not supposed to launch a full graphical shell as root; use su - in terminal and launch apps from there (in /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc however you can set allowrootlogins to true if you really really want to)

 

When browsing through the package manager, if I click on a program the Control Center basically freezes with "Getting 'info' from XML meta-data..." in the status bar. This never happened before, what's up? Is it trying to access the internet and if so Why?

It downloads information, or it should; in the past you had the very large hdlist which are now split up and the bits are downloaded when needed.

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You can configure rpmdrake's meta-information downloading policy in the Media Manager. Options / Global Options / XML meta-data download policy. You can set it to 'never' if you never want rpmdrake or urpmi to automatically retrieve extra information on packages as you query them. This will result in you not seeing the package description or list of files or changelog in rpmdrake, and you also won't be able to search based on this information using urpmq / urpmf.

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Personally, I feel your pain - my hardware hates mdv2009. You can see in the errata that there are reported problems with intel integrated sound devices that use the snd_hda_intel module. With my motherboard, intel ICH8 chipset, I can't get the integrated sound card to work at all so don't feel bad. On the beta and rcs leading up to mdv2009, I had the same buzzing sound problem and was able to correct that the same way you did but on mdv2009 I get nothing. My suspicion is that the alsa driver in the kernel used by mandriva has issues with intel sound devices as I have seen erratic behaviour with intel sound and the alsa driver for the past year. Have seen some posts that kernel-linus works but haven't got around to installing that and I see that there are some updated kernels in testing that appear to be addressing this problem. Will probably just wait for a fix.

 

Won't go into my other hardware issue(Promise Ultra 100 IDE Controller card) as that hardware is not widely used and won't effect many. My main observation is that both my hardware issues are kernel problems. The Promise bug has been around for over a year and has never been adequately addressed, probably because it's old hardware not in general use. I'm more puzzled by the intel sound issue with the current alsa driver as intel integrated sound is widely used and will effect many users. Maybe it's just my bad luck in the selection of the hardware I use, but it seems to me that these kinds of regressions are becoming more and more common, i.e. stuff that worked before stops working when you update a kernel. I don't lay the blame at mandriva's door for these kernel issues as there is not much they can do about it - if they don't have a very current kernel in a new release, they will get complaints because there isn't support for new hardware and the extent of any regressions is not fully known till after the kernel has been out for a while.

 

There are numerous kde4 bugs listed in the errata. Among them is:

 

9.17 KDE 4 applications cannot run as root via su

 

I assume that's one that you ran into if you tried to launch the file manager of kwrite with root privileges suing su in a konsole.

 

Personally, I find kde4.x to be not much better than beta quality at the present time but it does show promise. I suppose we can debate the wisdom of choosing kde4.1.x as the default for a kde installation since kde3.5.10 is much more functional and stable. However, all the other distros have taken a similar course in choosing kde4.x over kde 3.5.x in their current release; even slackware will move to kde4 in its next release. With some effort you can install kde3.5.10 on mdv2009 if you want to and that may be the best solution if you have too many issues with kde4 and want mdv2009. For me, I'll just keep my mdv2008.1 installation and play around with 2009 in my spare time until things look more stable.

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Had some issues getting my wireless alive, and some issues with the menu, resulting in frozen screens.

Installing de NVIDIA-driver took me some time, mostly because i was confused about using which kernel.

On installation my laptop got kernel-server installed, most probably because of the amount of RAM, 4 GB.

Tried playing around with Compiz, but have put that aside, not happy about performance, but even more because of the restless feel.

The problem of not getting the webcam working in Kopete, i resolved by installing aMSN, that worked right out of the box, and beside that i like aMSN much more than Kopete.

 

Now my Acer 7720G is working very smooth, nice calm, after the installation of that videodriver, and i am just a happy Mandriva2009-user.

Edited by isadora
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So no positives in your review then? Everything in 2009.0 works fine for me.

 

You'd be better off posting for assistance, rather than titling a post mini-review, and then just listing all your problems and no positives. It's not really a review as such.

 

 

Actually, I did say thanks for the way they built Konqueror.

The reason why it's a mini review is because I've been using Mandriva since Mandrake 6.0 (remember that?).

Ok, there a lot of other problems that have been around for quite a while;

Such as the way the time stamp in the Drakbackup log doesn't match the time stamp in the filename, I can't check 2009 on this because they've set up their security model in such a way that I can't fix it myself.

Is there a root file manager?

Is there a root text editor?

 

Here's a positive, when I open Control Center, go to the System tab and open a root terminal I see that the font is readable. This is great, in previous releases the font looked like 'Tazmanian Wombat 1pt'. A GREAT BIG THANK YOU for fixing that!!!

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Taupist,

 

It's unfortunate that you feel that way about Mandriva. I think KDE4 may be the root of all your problems, not Mandriva as a whole. I've not installed the latest release, infact I haven't used Mandriva since a month after 2008.1 was released. Have you tried using Gnome as your default DE? If you have, what was that experience like?

 

Back when Mandriva was my main distro I used Gnome to get around a problem with Arts, it kept causing the system to freeze.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

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That may be down to the security settings. On a default install it is set to High instead of Standard.

 

 

To get the package info you requested.

 

I've noticed that Fedora doesn't store package information for offline use. I REALLY hope that Mandriva isn't going to start doing that.

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This is a kde4 feature, they [the kde4 devs] call it the cashew or plasma toolbox, it does nothing useful however.

 

 

kde4 feature

 

 

I think the snapshot thing is work in progress, I uninstalled it; regarding the root thing, this is a feature; you are not supposed to launch a full graphical shell as root; use su - in terminal and launch apps from there (in /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc however you can set allowrootlogins to true if you really really want to)

 

 

It downloads information, or it should; in the past you had the very large hdlist which are now split up and the bits are downloaded when needed.

 

"Plasma Toolbox" . . . thanks for pointing that out.

 

"kde4 feature" bummer.

 

"snapshot" ok, I'll buy that.

 

"downloads information" again, I really prefer to have the information available when I'm offline.

 

Thanks for the response.

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