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I'm looking for a new distro for my wifes lappy, and am considering mandriva, but I'm honesly completely confused by their tiering and their different club levels. Could you explain this to me? Do you understand it? I'd like her to have a fully functional lappy with suspend and hibernate, and I'd like updates to be easy. Is this really going to run $150 a year if I use Mandriva?

I messed around with One yesterday, and it looked OK, and my wife really liked the compiz stuff.

Well, let's see... Standard club membership basically gives you access to the proprietary driver downloads as well as demos of some commercial packages (like 30 days of Cedega and Crossover Office).

Silver membership allows you to download full commercial versions of Mandriva PowerPack and Discovery, as well as access to the Kiosk service (not functional under 2007 as of yet, only 2006) and the Mandriva updates notification service (keeps track of the packages on your system and notifies you/upgrades your system when updates are available).

Gold membership gives you access to PowerPack + and the Multi Network Firewall distribution.

Personally, I went with Silver because I felt I got more value out of my membership, but mostly to show my support for the distro. and the people working at Mandriva.

You really don't need to have a membership to get all the bells and whistles of a Mandriva desktop. You just need to do a bit of searching on the web to get all of the RPMs you require. Downloading Mandriva 2007 Free then heading over to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ will give you a pretty robust Mandriva desktop system. As for the Nvidia and ATI drivers, it's pretty easy these days to compile and install from source. Some great HowTos can be found over at http://mandrivausers.org/

To tell you the truth, when I held my Installfest last November, I was installing Mandriva One 2007 (the free download) and then ran a bash script I wrote that wget'ed all of the RPMs needed to "complete" the set-up.

Anyway, I hope this helps somewhat.

Oh, and about the updates....

Easiest updates and the most stable I've experienced thus far (the jury is still out on Zenwalk, but so far it's looking good), as long as you're not looking for "bleeding edge" package updates. Which is why Mandriva is so stable. They do conduct a lot of testing, contrary to what some people have to say about them.

By the way, Free versions of Mandriva also have security and bug fix updates. You don't need to be a club member for those. Those repositories, along with official and contrib are made available to the general public. Club members get access to the "commercial" repositories, which contain the Macromedia, Acrobat and "legal" DVD support sort of stuff.

Cool - thanks for the clarification! I do have one more question, though - if I decide to purchase a silver level club membership is that "per seat" or "per household?" $300 a year for my wife and I is kind of on the steep side.

I would consider it "per household" because you'd be doing all the maintenance, I'm assuming. You can register more than one PC with the club facilities - like linking to club repositories and using Kiosk.

I have a few PCs running Mandriva 2007 (including the one at the office) and I'm downloading from the club repositories on all of them. And until Kiosk is working under 2007, I set my father's PC - running Mandriva 2006 - to access it with my account information. At least someone is benefiting from it.

If there's anything else you'd like to ask, feel free. I'll help if I can.

Well, I downloaded One a while back and played with it some and finally decided to install it. No man pages - WTF? Looks like they weren't included due to size restrictions. I'm planning on downloading the full iso and trying that in a while. In the meantime I've installed the 2007 rc3 of pclinuxos and have to say it's pretty nice, and the community appears helpful though very newbie-centric.

Some more questions since I couldn't figure this out, and couldn't man:

What is the equiv of apt-get update, apt-get upgrade/apt-get dist-upgrade, and apt-cache search? I already dislike the package installer - it bugs me way too often "Is this OK?" and I find it difficult to wade through. I much prefer to do my package installation from the command line. Does menudrake (or whatever) actually work? I chose original style rather than the (IMO) cumbersome mandriva one but nothing ever changed. I could import my xdg configs from another box, I guess, but that often ends up messy and I'm too lazy/xml-impaired to hack them by hand.

Snarkout wrote:Well, I downloaded One a while back and played with it some and finally decided to install it. No man pages - WTF? Looks like they weren't included due to size restrictions. I'm planning on downloading the full iso and trying that in a while. In the meantime I've installed the 2007 rc3 of pclinuxos and have to say it's pretty nice, and the community appears helpful though very newbie-centric.

Some more questions since I couldn't figure this out, and couldn't man:

What is the equiv of apt-get update, apt-get upgrade/apt-get dist-upgrade, and apt-cache search? I already dislike the package installer - it bugs me way too often "Is this OK?" and I find it difficult to wade through. I much prefer to do my package installation from the command line. Does menudrake (or whatever) actually work? I chose original style rather than the (IMO) cumbersome mandriva one but nothing ever changed. I could import my xdg configs from another box, I guess, but that often ends up messy and I'm too lazy/xml-impaired to hack them by hand.

Yeah, no man pages with Mandriva One. Kind of a bummer, but keep in mind who this version of Mandriva is really geared for. Newbies do NOT want to see a command line, and want to read a man page even less.

Anyway, the command line package manager is Mandriva's version of RPM, called urpmi. You can find a nice tutorial of it here - (Google is your friend ). Urpmi works much the same as apt-get.

Mandriva One is great to test drive the Mandriva distribution, but Mandriva Free is a much more complete system when installed. Of course, you can wind up with the same results if you start out with either version. One just needs more stuff installed after installation.

PCLinuxOS is a very nice distro. Heck, it's built from Mandriva, so why shouldn't it be? Tex certainly puts a lot of effort into his distro. If there was no Mandriva I could give to my novice/newbie users, PCLinuxOS would be my next choice for them.

(Note - this isn't aimed at Judland in particular. It's just my first impressions of the distro, and I figured I'd include them in an existing thread rather than create a brand new one.)

OK - I installed 2007.0 yesterday and did all the updates, and then begin trying to figure out the repo stuff. This is honestly where I start to get tired of distro-shopping. At this point I have all sorts of crap in my urpmi.conf, including basically everything from easyurpmi and the seer of souls repos. I'm sure there's a huge amount of overlap in there, and frankly I'm reminded of running fedora and adding all of the dag and friends repos w/o breaking things.

I'm kind of surprised at how limited the default package selection is for a distro that is intended to be for-pay, but since I *haven't* paid and added the club repos, this might be unfair. Currently, though, there is no katapult (w/o adding the seer of souls repos) and no knetworkmanager (even after adding those repos) - I'm perfectly fine using iwlist and iwconfig, but I cannot ask my wife to do this. Netapplet may work in this case, though it's not ideal since my wife is used to knetworkmanager and likes it. Oh, and 2.6.17 for a 2007 distro is a little on the old side - I imagine that they are backporting patches and fixes to the kernel, though, no?

My impressions of urpmi so far: slooooooow. It's usable, but really reminds me of early yum. It's also not very intuitive - I suppose I've been using apt for so long that I'm used to it, but I've learned yum, up2date and pacman in recent years, and none of them seemed as difficult to grok to me. It could just be a personal thing, though. I'm just not digging it at all, obviously, but at least it's easy enough to use (so far). I'm hoping that you get access to faster mirrors when you join the club since the us mirrors I've tried so far have been very slow, generally. Most of them seem to be hosted by universities, though, so that's not entirely surprising IME.

The distro itself is nice. The graphical tools are very well thought out, and changing from the fugly mandriva-style menus to the regular kde style ones was painless (I'm sorry, but once an app is buried 4 sub-menus deep, there is something wrong with your menu structure). I can't say I personally care for the cutesyness of a lot of the artwork for the distro, but I don't mind it terribly and can see how it might make people feel at ease. I can also see a corporate manager looking at it and dismissing it as childish crap instantly. I suppose they had to strike a balance, though. Still, it has a friendly approach that someone who is a little timid might find comforting.

Anyhow, so far I'm not exactly feeling the mandriva love, but I'm not dismissing it either. I just don't quite understand their model, and don't quite see why I'd want to pay $135+ a year for the full dose when other alternatives exist for free. Please keep in mind I have no problem paying for software, but when the $$$ is just for access to repos and a few tools, it's hard for me to understand the business model.

Judland wrote: As for the Nvidia and ATI drivers, it's pretty easy these days to compile and install from source. Some great HowTos can be found over at http://mandrivausers.org/

They are up on the PLF non-free also avaialble from EasyURPMI.

Yup, it's a real "balancing act" that Mandriva is trying to maintain. Some of it's great, while other things could do with some improvements... like the speed of urpmi.

However, after trying all the different OSs and distributions of Linux, Mandriva has proved to be a very solid and predictable choice. Especially so when I'm asked which version of Linux is good for a novice/casual computer user.

It's been a year (at least) since my return to Mandriva as my main OS and urpmi has not broken my system once through all of the updates I've done. I can't say the same for any other distributions (or OSs) I've tried. Yes, some of the apps and the kernel are lagging from the "bleeding edge", but having a stable environment from day to day is the trade-off... and a darned good one, if you ask me.

Again, it's what you're willing to bargain for, as a computer user. Mandriva has it's strengths and its weaknesses, as Snarkout has pointed out.

As for the business model: well, all I can say is I certainly feel that I get much more from my club membership that what I'd get as a Microsoft customer. It's more expensive than, say, Ubuntu, but I don't feel "ripped off" in the least... and that's what's important.

P.S. I haven't looked into it personally, but I believe the Corporate Desktop version of Mandriva has more of a business look to it than the "home" version.

Judland wrote:
It's been a year (at least) since my return to Mandriva as my main OS and urpmi has not broken my system once through all of the updates I've done. I can't say the same for any other distributions (or OSs) I've tried.

Correction: Slackware and Zenwalk (so far) have not broken, either. However, in all fairness, Slackware doesn't have an official package manager. So, I'm not sure who to give the credit to in this instance.

I've only just started testing Zenwalk/Zenserver, so it's only been a couple of weeks. Looks good so far, though.

Well, my comment about the kernel may have been off base. Mepis 6.0 comes with 2.6.15 and PCLOS comes with 2.6.18. I guess I'm used to Arch.

One thing that is very amusing about mepis is that it's repos are all straight up ubuntu repos at this point, though they were a mixture of several releases, IIRC. This could actually be a good thing for me, since I'm completely happy with ubuntu as a whole but am really against some of the things the devs have been doing to the kde desktop. I guess I need to install it and see what an updated system looks like before I can judge anything.

This sort of thing does make me scratch my head though. People bag on CentOS for being a redhat rebuild, but at least they are stripping all of the RH branding and maintaining their own repos. People bag on PCLOS as being a mandriva rebuild - this is actually inaccurate, but whatever - again, at least they maintain their own repos, packages, etc. I haven't heard too much dissent about the decision to base freespire or mepis off of ubuntu, and ferchrissakes they are *USING* ubuntu repos. Sorry if the humor is lost on everyone else, but this sort of thing just makes me chuckle.

edit: interestingly, PCLOS has quite a variety of kernels available from vanilla to xen (0 and U) to ck patchset. That's very nice.

Judland wrote:However, in all fairness, Slackware doesn't have an official package manager.

This is not accurate. Slackware is not LFS. Slackware certainly has an official package manager: pkgtool. It may not handle dependencies, but it most assuredly is a package manager. It _manages packages_ and very well, I might add.

Chess wrote:This is not accurate. Slackware is not LFS. Slackware certainly has an official package manager: pkgtool. It may not handle dependencies, but it most assuredly is a package manager. It _manages packages_ and very well, I might add.

Ah, well, I stand corrected. I guess what I was referring to was PMs like Slapt-get and Slackpkg.

As for PCLinuxOS, well, if Mandriva ever went bust, I think PCLinuxOS would be the newbie/novice distro. I'd be recommending. I have used it on a co-worker's PC that Mandriva had problems with. It was an EMachine and I just could not get Mandriva to recognize the bult-in media card reader.

I've read that this problem with some built-in card readers is fixed in Mandriva 2007.1.

Mandriva really seems to be pulling out all of the stops for it's next release, 2007.1!

Check this webpage out!

They've improved on their 3D destkop manager and provide users with not just one 3D desktop but TWO to choose from... Compiz/Beryl and Metisse.

Once again, I think Mandriva's going to be setting new boundaries for the Linux desktop.