Linux Review: Mandriva 2009.1

this was originally posted on July 3rd... I have come back to edit it as I gave Mandriva another shot. Click "read more" to see the update

Mandriva

This was really a disappointment. I really wanted to like this distro, but that just wasn't in the cards.

The liveCD booted up nicely, came up to an attractive desktop. Everything seemed to work right out of the box. However, Firefox did crash a few times--but I figured this would be resolved once the OS was actually installed.



I really liked the "linux control center", and rpmDrake looked pretty cool (click "read more" below for a couple more screenshots).

After playing around a little more, I decided to go ahead and install. It plodded along normally...and then froze. nothing at all was happening, and I had to shutdown. This was a good way along with the install process, too.

Conclusion:
It may have been a hardware conflict or something of that sort, so I will definitely be trying out Mandriva again. In the liveCD, I didn't see anything that would particularly make me want to switch from Ubuntu, but it does look interesting!









Mandriva

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July 5th - Re-review

So I decided to give Mandriva another chance. I tried to install again, and it did freeze, but I let it sit for long enough and it unfroze and actually completed installation. However, then I messed up the part of installing the bootloader... Mandriva did not show alongside my Ubuntu installation. Doh! So I went ahead and did the install again, but this time there was no Ubuntu alongside the "linux" entry (which I renamed Mandriva). Luckily I had made a backup of /boot/grub/menu.lst so I added my ubuntu entries back in.







NOW...everything is working normally. So far, no firefox crashes. The updater is doing lots of updates. System is up-to-date.

I don't really use a lot of software, but it seems like everything that I use was already included:

• the Gimp
• Openoffice
• Firefox
• Brasero
• Pidgin

I did have to install gParted, though.

this seems like a pretty solid OS, and it seems to have several things that I like...

• video drivers installed (although not totalliy free [as in freedom], it works!)
• with the "Linux Control Center" it looks as though setting up Samba MS Windows shares and otherwise connecting to MS Windows is made to be pretty easy
• the RPMDrake package manager looks like it works well, as does the software updater
• good amount of software options in the rpmDrake repositories

That's about all I can say, really. It WORKS, and it would do everything I need to do. Although there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with Mandriva (aside from the initial install flop), there is not anything that "draws" me to it over any other distro. For now I most certainly prefer Ubuntu (or even Fedora).


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