Mandriva 2009.0: Much improved since last year

Last year I gave a mixed review to Mandriva 2008.1 (Spring) and I would like to take the opportunity to retract many of the bad points:
After having gone over 2009.0, both Free (on my desktop) and One (on my laptop), I feel that Mandriva 2009 is much improved, I’ll go over some talking points here.

Installation:

On the Free DVD, there’s not really a whole lot you must mess with, you can if you want but there’s not much return on investment as most of the defaults with the preselected desktop environments are fairly good and you probably won’t need to remove more than a package or two when it’s done anyway.

I chose the GNOME edition, and there’s a few things I want to point out with the installer itself:

1. Mandriva is one of the few distributions that lets you have the  XFS file system on /boot with GRUB as your bootloader, so all you really need is SWAP and one / partition with XFS if that’s all you want. Ubuntu will stop you, complain that you should use LILO as your boot loader instead, clicking continue will go ahead and install then fail to install GRUB, even though you should expect that it would use LILO instead, since it did let you continue and there are no user options to let you pick your own bootloader. The work around ends up being a small  /boot partition on Ext3 if you want to use XFS with Ubuntu.

This has supposedly been fixed for Jaunty starting with Alpha 5, but due to bugs in the Ubuntu installer, I ended up having to work around it anyway, whether Jaunty Final will be any better with that is anyone’s guess, in any event I appreciate Mandriva giving me choices instead of simply assuming I’m too stupid to set up my partitions.

The One CD perhaps has better bootloader options, but you can fix anything you don’t like in Free by going to the Bootloader preferences in the Mandriva Control Center, I have it clear /tmp on every boot and changed it from 10 seconds to 3 for the countdown before booting the default kernel.

2. In the case of the Free DVD, I ended up getting the Server kernel somehow, but in looking around, I noticed that Mandriva has many other kernels you can use (Ubuntu has generic and generic), so I ended up using kernel-linus-smp, which is the kernel straight from kernel.org with no modifications, et up for multi-processor/multi-core systems, I set up Nvidia as a DKMS driver so that it build modules for kernel-linus automatically, so I am impressed.

Ubuntu on the other hand uses heavily patched kernels based on Debian’s already heavily patched kernels, these can produce a better kernel, but they also introduce bugs that don’t exist in the vanilla kernel or even in other distributions.

3. You do have to edit your Timezone and monitor/video card settings or else it may reboot with the wrong resolution and using the unaccelerated VESA driver (And set for New York’s timezone), I selected 1680 x 1050 Generic Monitor with Nvidia 6100 or later, this brings the system up with the 2d accelerated NV driver until you can get around to installing the Nvidia binary module.

Last year, there was no option for 1680 x 1050, and even after installing the Nvidia driver, I still could not get my monitor to go higher than 1400 x 900.

You can get Nvidia and other drivers and codecs by simply enabling the Penguin Liberation Front and Mandriva Non-Free repositories using Easy URPMI, then visiting the hardware configuration section of Mandriva Control Center, it should offer you any packages you need to make your wifi work just by going there with the PLF/Non-Free repos enabled, but to make your video card driver install, highlight it, select run config tool, and then it should pop up offering you the binary driver for it, it’ll ask you to log out and back in, but you should reboot to avoid trouble

(For Broadcom users, just follow the steps for the firmware you need for kernel 2.6.25 or newer here, Mandriva does have the B43 firmware cutter, but you need to visit the hardware applet so it can offer you wpa_supplicant and a couple other things, Broadcom has never been an exact science on Linux laregly because they’re uncooperative and the driver has been the product of reverse engineering)

One already has 3d video drivers and can play MP3, I really haven’t dug into that too much cause my laptop is fairly old.

If packages seem out of date, you can enable the backports repo and update them, I do recommend cherry picking what you absolutely need and then disabling Backports again though.

To get better multimedia/dvd playback, remove codeina and install gstreamer-ffmpeg, gstreamer-plugins-ugly, gstreamer-plugins-bad, libdvdcss2 (lib64dvdcss2 if you’re on X86-64), vlc, easytag, and Banshee (if you dislike Rhythmbox)

4. Compiz is there, but you have to visit the 3d effects applet in the hardware section of MCC, and it’ll download everything you need.

5. If you don’t want to be bugged for your CD every time you install something, disable the CD repositories and it should grab everything from your online ones.

Office:

Mandriva 2009 has OpenOffice 3.0, It’s mostly Microsoft compatible and can even import Office 2007 XML if you don’t mind the formatting being a little off, OpenOffice is fairly standard, it also includes Scribus, Planner, and Homebank, so you should be able to get by without things like Quicken as well.

Gaming:

Mandriva has most of the usual suspects in the repos, a notable exception was Sauerbraten which I had to build myself, pretty much the same deal as in Fedora, if anyone knows of any good place to stuff a tarball, I’d be happy to upload my build.

Wine in the repo is really really old (1.1.4), I installed the Wine from the Mandriva section of WineHQ (1.1.16), but the sound won’t work unless you install libalsa-plugins-pulseaudio, after that, Mandriva will of course support any Windows games which Wine does. (Quite a few more these days than it used to), I’ve got Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Microsoft’s Age of Mythology, Steam with Portal and all the Half Life and HL 2 games, Halo Combat Evolved, good stuff.

Connecting to Windows shares:

Mandriva saw my Windows shares out of the box, and could browse them through Nautilus immediately.

Look and Feel:

Mandriva sports the Ia Ora theme, which is quite pretty, the only things I felt compelled to change are wallpaper and default Compiz settings, you can get ccsm (CompizConfig Settings Manager) and all the extra Compiz plugins and tweak it all you want.

Screen savers? xscreensaver and the Really Slick Screensavers packages will give you dozens.

Overall:

On my completely subjective rating scale……4.9 out of 5.

Never Gonna Give You Up!