Mandriva 2006 stumbles

[wilcal]

All sorts of stories running around the web today

about the problems that the new releases of Suse and

Mandriva 2006 are running into. I suspect that it'll

take a week to get all the story(s) all straight.

 

IMO 2006 (cooker) is a fun thing to tinker with

but seeing all the bugs in there the last go

around (Ver 0.5) I'm sure there's still a lot

of clean up to do. Even on this first release.

 

Mandriva LE 2005 continues to be fully supported

and remains one of the most stable and reliable

platforms anywhere.

 

[moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

[arctic]

Well, I can hardly remember any major distro that did not have some problems with new releases. Either the servers were not synced or they were overloaded with requests... Every month the same old story. :P I simply wait two to four weeks before I start a download. By that time, the distro-maniacs have stopped downloading isos and the servers are fast again. My download of LE2005 took me only some 4 hours while surfing the web at the same time. Thus I will start my 2006 download maybe on 1st of november. :)

[Ixthusdan]

I am running .5, and I have no problems with it. Readings from the microsoft mouth pieces (zdnet, cnet) leads me to believe that the fud campaign is still considered a viable tool for micronobules.

 

Everything has bugs. Apparently, ms latest release cannot work. At all. The best prep for that is to make everything seem terrible. That way, when ms releases a version for their customers to fix, (98 and 98se, for example) it will seem less noticed.

[Rainer]

I've only used 2006 rc2 so far and I've found it to be a good incremental improvement over LE2005 in a variety of areas (with a host of new features aswell) - it's worth making a distinction between:

 

1) - Release "issues" (as outlined "again" in today's distrowatch weekly)

2) - And the 2006 distribution itself.

 

It's pretty clear that there have been some release "issues" regards club members etc etc - however, the fundemental point would be that the 2006 distribution itself is another good, solid "product" from Mandriva.

 

To look at it rationally - LE 2005 & 2006 compare very favourably with the vast majority of general pupose distributions in the Distrowatch top 100 - further, it's likely, and fair to say that Mandriva produces one of the "top 5" general purpose distributions out there - so, is Mandriva still producing good distributions - YES.

[polemicz]

So far 2006 has been quite good to my mind. There were a lot of fixes after rc2 right up to the final release. This is usual and I expect that in a month there will be many more, but so far I am very satisfied and find it an improvement in many ways to 2005.

[arctic]

... so, is Mandriva still producing good distributions - YES.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Did anyone believe that this would not be true anymore? :D Mandriva still creates one of the, if not the best out-of-the -box distro IMHO.

[wilcal]

:D Mandriva still creates one of the, if not the best

out-of-the -box distro IMHO.

I suggest that over the next 18 -> 24 months we are

going to see some VERY dramatic events in the

desktop workstation environment. OS's like Mandriva,

Suse and Red Hat are going to position themselves

with the very best offering they can produce. Expect

to see Mandriva go though another cooker to release

about this same time next year.

 

All leading up to the release of "Vista". When that

thing hits the streets it better be damn good and bug

free. If it stumbles the little Lion Cubs are gonna

eat it alive.

 

FWIW My first Mandrake box was an 8.2 running on

a Compaq Deskpro P350, 192MB, 5GB HD. That thing

ran wonderfully. It's now loaded with Ubuntu 5.10

and it's completely revived that ole box.

[solarian]

I had some problems with 2006rc2, and I'll just do as I have done most of the previous times - wait a couple of weeks or a month preferably for some missed bugfixes to arrive.

 

In the meantime I have to say that Mandriva 2005 is one of the most stable and enjoyable OSes I've ever ran.

[linux_learner]

i'm not sure what problems your refering to with suse 10.0. google news reports it as a hit. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q...tnG=Search+News

[pmpatrick]

There's already a fairly extensive errata for 2006:

 

http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main...Linux2006Errata

 

Some of those look pretty serious. The new xorg in particular is causing a lot of problems. I'm getting a lot of freeze ups and crashes. I beginning to think arctic has the right idea; sit back, wait a month or two, let the bugs get fixed by updates and then install.

[aRTee]

Comment of one colleague to whom I passed Mdv2006:

"The best and easiest OS installation EVER!"

 

This guy has seen his share of Linux distros, and has always found MSWin to be easier. Until a few days ago.

With CentOS he had to fiddle to get his tvcard to work - which I think he didn't manage; it worked out of the box. With some info from my website on lirc he managed to get his remote to work - now he has some config left to do, but all in all I've rarely seen someone so ecstatic about a new Linux...

 

I'm seeing some high loads, but not logrotate or kat - in my case it's 'kded', no clue what process that is.

The cpu load can go up to 100% and stay there - for hours!

I left my wifes machine like that, and checked back later - still 100% loaded. I've actually deinstalled kat on that machine, it was slowing it down too much...

 

And I'm seeing a lot of 'wrong signatures' for packages, even lots of packages on the dvd. This is not good, teaching people to ignore that - whereas those sigs should be the thing preventing trojans from entering the system..!

 

I've not seen any of the Xorg issues - for me all my 3 systems are fine except for the points mentioned above.

[solarian]

Almost the first thing that I did was uninstalling KAT. (before returning to 10.2)

It's a bit sad, because the idea is nice, but the cpu load that KAT or related processes cause is just too much.

[aRTee]

Like I said, I did uninstall it on my wifes machine. The high load remains. Process is kded.

 

I've seen it spike the load on my other two machines too.

 

Is no one else seeing this? That would utterly surprise me..

[scarecrow]

Don't forget that the new release cycle for Mandy is yearly, so they have all the available time to bugfix 2006. You shouldn't expect it to be rock solid when shipping with a prebeta xorg revision, should you?

[pmpatrick]

aRTee, check out my post here:

 

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...22&hl=konqueror

 

That kded thing was a widely reported bug in mdk10.1 as well. My post in the above thread deals with a workaround:

 

I tried to open konqueror from the command line and it just would hang w/o any error message. I then opened up another console to check the running processes with:

 

$ ps aux

 

and a process called "kded" was taking up 95% of my cpu!!! A little googling around and I came across this solution which seems to work:

 

The problem is with mountwatcher.desktop which is part of kded. It needs to be disabled but it's not easy to do that. First go to /usr/share/services/kded and you will see mountwatcher.desktop. It doesn't look like a text config file but it is; open it with your favorite text editor as root. Go to the last line which will read something like this:

 

X-KDE-Kded-load-on-demand=true

 

Change "true" to "false", save the changes. Go to kde control center>LookNFeel>Behavior>Device Icons and untick the "Show device icons" box. Log out and log back in.