This is what I posted on a friend’s Facebook wall:
mate, i had a dream last night about installing a linux distro on a piece of crap laptop with all sorts of exotic hardware. and then you were there, and russ was there too and she said you bought her a laptop with oem ubuntu and it ran cleanly. i then played with unity and you guys said it was just like a normal window manager.
I miss being able to mess around with Linux.
Not much is going on in sunny and hot Samoa, besides slight anxiousness about the start of the soccer season here. I also had a dream about being able to download 10 torrents simultaneously at good speed at home…pretty much shows you how much I miss always on, fast, and cheap internet.
One other thing that I’m missing is playing around with Linux Distros that interest me. Here’s one that I’ve been wanting to check out: Bodhi. Also available are some screenshots.
Whilst I love and use Mandriva / Mageia, I’m very interested in this distro, despite it being based on Ubuntu. Why? Well, it aims to be a lot leaner than Ubuntu and it’s based around the E17 desktop environment. I’ve tried playing around E17 (Enlightenment17) in Mandriva, but have found their packages to be quite buggy, incomplete and generally lacking polish. I think that’s pretty much the case with E17 in most major distros. However the Bodhi guys have apparently polished E17 integration and incorporate any upstream improvements and fixes very quickly. I have loaded up a live cd in a Virtual Box environment, and it feels fast. But I really need the internet to get it to anything interesting, as out of the box it is very spartan without many of the programs I would like to use. What would be ideal is to chuck this on an old machine to play around with, see how it handles older hardware, maybe give it an extra lease on life. I know Arch Linux did wonders for my old 2005 Dell Laptop…but I lack my old PCs / laptops and the internet here in Samoa. š
This one hit me unexpetedly hard. CmdrTaco quits Slashdot
I’ve been going to the site for years now, and always spending an obscene amount of time there. It feels like another part of my youth is gone. Especially reading the summary he put up of all the big posts and discussions that’s happened on Slashdot, and all the old timers coming out of the woodwork to comment. Good luck CmdrTaco…thanks for the slash and the dot, and for getting me onto Linux.
I started writing this review back at the beginning of July. Well, it’s the last night in Sydney for a year and I still haven’t written it. So I’m going to give you the gist of it very quickly.
I migrated off Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 1 release back on the 23rd of June.
It wasn’t that I was dissatisfied with Mandriva in anyway. I was very content with my installation and have been for a while. However the new fork based on Mandriva was out and I thought I should give it a try, especially since it has the majority of the former Mandriva contributor community onboard. Another reason is because Mandriva 2011 is still not released, and they have been mucking about with the UI apparently.
Despite a clear migration path from Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 1 being officially supported, the exercise did not go well. Here are my problems documented. Basically X and Dbus issues caused by a change in the default user UID, according to the forum. I had already solved the problem with a fresh install of Mageia on top of my Linux partition.
So the conclusion after restoring my files from backup on a fresh Mageia install is that it is quite nice. There are some nice touches in terms of the audio just working without configuration, and other little bits and bobs. But overall I have had a little more trouble with it in terms of stability than the old Mandriva release. Which makes me sort of want to return that distro once 2011 is released for a test drive.
It’s still a great distro, but it just feels less solid somehow than its predecessor. There’s a bump up in smoothness and speed but that shouldn’t come at the cost of stability. This is a more thorough review of the release. Basically it’s early days, and the first release is solid rather than great.
The Mandriva fork, Mageia, has just released their 1st Alpha iso of their Linux distro. As a long time Mandriva user and fan, I’m quite excited about this.
Mandriva 2010.2 is quite nice (well it’s just 2010.1 with some new artwork and bootsplash, maybe a KDE upgrade – although I tend to run the most up to date KDE available anyway). But Mageia offers a direct upgrade path from 2010.2 to their first release. Looking forward to running it in Virtual Box so I can compare to Mandriva 2011 when that gets released.
Oh yeah, tomorrow night, I should have ultimate sigh web chat available for testing. All two of you will use it once. According to stats, I have had no visitors for last couple of days, although today there were 4 today. š
Good news. Mandriva is going to come out with a 2010.2 release, a refresh and update before shifting to a new annual release cycle. It seems there’s still life in the old distribution yet. Let’s just wait and see if it’ll still be of the good quality that I’ve come to associate with Mandriva. š
Looking forward to the refresh regardless.
It has been a while since posted the first part of my experiences of the Mandriva 2010.1 Spring upgrade. Since that time Iāve done quite a few things including going on holidays to Vietnam. Iāve also already upgraded to KDE 4.5.2, which contains more bug fixes.
Pros of the 2010.1 upgrade:
Cons of the 2010.1 upgrade:
Another note of caution or trick is that despite KDE being able to āintegrateā Google Desktop Gadgets into their Plasmoids system, actually choosing to initiate Google gadgets causes Plasma-desktop to crash every single time, although native Plasmoids work beautifully. The work around is to run Google Gadgets directly, through ggl-qt (assuming a KDE environment) and adding gadgets through there.
All in all Iām quite happy with the result.
Appears this time, Mandriva is actually done. Most of its full time devs have either left or were pushed. Indeed those guys have forked the Mandriva proj and are working on a new derived distro called Mageia.
Mandriva itself is looking to become a BRIC desktop distro with most of its desktop people to be hired in Brazil. I have no probs with a BRIC focused desktop as long as it still serves my needs. But I fear this time it’s real, and Mandriva/Mandrake that we have come to like will be replaced that’s Mandriva in name only.
For the time being I intend to keep my desktop running Mandriva and see what’s happening with Mageia and also the state of Mandriva. It’s already slow in getting the point release of KDE. I hope all goes well with both distros and communities.
It looks like there are some really ominous things in the future of my favourite distro: Mandriva. This comes on the back of Silver Bullet biting it. But the signs are there, first:
Mandriva up for sale
and now:
KDE maintainer leaves
Things aren’t looking so good for the reliable and easy to use Mandriva. I hope that they pull through this. I’ve tried Ubuntu and a few other distros, but Mandriva is still the one I use the most.
I hope this Mandriva forum poster is correct.
Mandriva’s present situation, if we really do appreciate this distribution’s capabilities, we shouldn’t panic. We need to realize that, although opensource in nature, Mandriva itself must attain some kind of financial independence and a secure one at that. Having your community panic is just one other hurdle to deal with. While not saying that Mandriva is not the creator of its present demise, I think that we should also shoulder part of the blame for the lack of advertising of the great distribution that it is to the public at large. The Ubuntu community does not seem to have problems extolling the virtues of their distro on various message boards and comment sections of magazines. We should also be doing the same. Getting the name out in circulation lends itself well in the viability of a distro’s survival.
I have tried other distros and still find Mandriva one of the most “user experience” distros around. It just needs more publicity to create that demand. I intend to stick with it till it degrades to the point where it becomes an un-trustable distro. Which it is not at this point.
Let’s keep our cool and keep contributing as a good and helpful community that we are.
I’ve been running Mandriva 2010.0 with KDE4.2 and then 4.4 on my desktop tower since I got back from China in Feb.
Mandriva is my favourite distro. It is rock solid, has a great set of user tools (i.e. quite user friendly) and those tools allow for some great flexibility without needing to delve into text config files, although the distro is structured so that it is fairly straight forward and transparent to delve into it if you want. I’ve tried a few distros over the years, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Arch Linux and I have to say Mandrake and now Mandriva is in my opinion the best balance between flexibility and friendliness. Although I do have a soft spot for Arch, which is currently powering my ancient Dell laptop, you could do worse than choosing Mandriva if you are going for a distro that is stable, with up to date packages, good tools and general professional feeling smoothness. I won’t go into the pros and cons of other distros as this post is about my recent upgrade experience.
To be continued.