Mandriva Live/Install CD - One

[Judland]

Today I downloaded Mandriva's new Live / Install CD, called Mandriva One and thought I'd give it a try.

I booted it up on this older Dell Latitude laptop (PIII with 256MB of RAM), here in the office, and it works pretty well. It didn't boot up as fast as Knoppix 4.0.2 did, but it wasn't too bad.

It's actually pretty slick. This laptop isn't rigged for WiFi, but everything else seems to have been detected okay.

It doesn't have as much software (at least it seems to me) that Knoppix has, but it has all of the "standards" most any regular user would need.

There's also an installer application that is used to install the OS from the CD to the hard drive. I wonder if our IT dept. would notice if I wiped Win2000 and put Mandriva on.

One thing, though, was the launch of OpenOffice.... slow.... as in, 96 seconds from mouse-click to blank page. But, that could be due to the lack of RAM in this Dell. It would probably be much faster from the HD if it were installed.

Anyway, I think I'll put Mandriva One through its paces over the next couple of days. I just hope I don't accidentally click on the "Install to HD" icon on the desktop as I'm doing so.

[Linc]

Today I downloaded Mandriva's new Live / Install CD, called Mandriva One and thought I'd give it a try.

I booted it up on this older Dell Latitude laptop (PIII with 256MB of RAM), here in the office, and it works pretty well. It didn't boot up as fast as Knoppix 4.0.2 did, but it wasn't too bad.

It's actually pretty slick. This laptop isn't rigged for WiFi, but everything else seems to have been detected okay.

It doesn't have as much software (at least it seems to me) that Knoppix has, but it has all of the "standards" most any regular user would need.

There's also an installer application that is used to install the OS from the CD to the hard drive. I wonder if our IT dept. would notice if I wiped Win2000 and put Mandriva on.

One thing, though, was the launch of OpenOffice.... slow.... as in, 96 seconds from mouse-click to blank page. But, that could be due to the lack of RAM in this Dell. It would probably be much faster from the HD if it were installed.

Anyway, I think I'll put Mandriva One through its paces over the next couple of days. I just hope I don't accidentally click on the "Install to HD" icon on the desktop as I'm doing so.

Interesting you brought this up. I tried this live cd a couple days ago (came with a magazine) on my workstation here - a 3ghz 1gb ram. I was not anywhere near as impressed as you were. I thought it was extraordinarilly slow and buggy. No detection of my nvidia which plunged me into a forced 80x600 resolution from which rebooting was the only escape. An Ubuntu live cd, however, is many times faster and detects my (standard old) hardware just fine. I hate to say this, but as far as I am concerned, I have been waiting and trying new releases since the beginning of their company in the Mandrake days and I have yet to see anything I would consider running. I just think they are missing the boat somehow.
I know there are people that just love Mandrake/Mandriva and to them I say "Great for you". I wish them happiness with it, but from *my* past experience, I have to give the distribution the stink finger.

[Gomer_X]

I played with the Mandrake Move CD a few years back and thought it was pretty good as Live CDs go. I believe it had an install option, too. They seem to do a good job.

In the end, though, it's still Mandrake.

[Judland]

No detection of my nvidia which plunged me into a forced 80x600 resolution from which rebooting was the only escape.

Hmm... that's too bad. I took the CD home and tried it on our main PC (with an Nvidia GForce 2 card) and it seemed to come up just fine. I don't think it had 3D support, but at least I wasn't forced into a lower resolution.

[Judland]

Oh, I forgot that during boot up I had to press F1 for Mandriva boot options and then specified a screen=1024x768 setting.

My apologies for mis-leading you. I tried it late last night and didn't initially remember that I had to do that.

[Judland]

Well, I guess I should correct myself again. I just tried M-One again at home and my resolution settings were fine without any input from me. 1024x768 on my nVidia G-Force 2 card.

I was trying a couple of new live CDs the other night, so it must have been one of them that required me to specify screen resolution manually.

[Judland]

Well, I'll have to stand by my original comment about the latest Mandriva... pretty slick.

I just finished installing the default system for Mandriva Free 2006 (the latest three CD ISO set), which I believe the boiled down version of Mandriva One is built from, and I'm convinced that Mandriva has improved itself since the last time I used it's version of Linux.

Install was really easy and now I'll go do an upgrade of the system and make some modifications to my RPM repository list. I'll also have to do the steps to get 3D support for my Nvidia graphics card.

Even though I was using KDE 3.5 under Underground before my install of Mandriva, when I logged into to my account, everything started up just fine... no breakages from what I can tell (Mandriva Free 2006 uses KDE 3.4 by default). It even configured my HP 3-in-1 printer under XSane just fine.

I really don't find that much of a difference in respose times... other than boot-up. Arch was pretty darn quick and I didn't expect Mandriva to beat it. But the desktop environment seems fine.

I'm pretty pleased and will keep Mandriva for the time being.

[snarkout]

I hereby crown you "Head Chieftan Distroslut" - I'm pretty sure you have Pat completely shutdown at this point, but I could be wrong.

How's your slackware install doing?

[Patrick]

I hereby crown you "Head Chieftan Distroslut" - I'm pretty sure you have Pat completely shutdown at this point, but I could be wrong.

I like "King Pimp Daddy of Distros" better! Yeah, he's definitely got me beat even though I'm going try out Suse 10.1 when it comes out on Thursday.

[snarkout]

I actually try a lot of distros on my testing box, but my workstation is still arch. Arch has its share of problems, but I have yet to find something else I'd rather run fulltime, and everytime I look, I am able to reaffirm this opinion. My testing box has one of those slide-out drive bays, and I have 3 dives in carriers. One of those is Windows, which is mostly only used by my wife, and only on occasion, but I've actually had need for it myself recently. Cisco sims, etc. do not tend to run on linux or mac. The other two are linux.

Oh, and I run kubuntu on my lappy, and not particularly happily.

[Judland]

Well, I don't know what to think about that... good or bad.

I guess one of the reasons I go looking for other distros now and then is that I seem to be a "consultant" for many people who are not computer savvy (friends, family, and co-workers). So I'm always on the lookout for the most straight forward, simplest, friendliest and stable distros. available. I do try a lot of them. And in order to be as honest and accurate as possible, I feel that I have to be confident that at least I can use the system effectively before I recommend it to anyone else.

Reading reviews is great, but I really can't learn all that I need to know without trying it for myself.

I also don't recommend the same distro. for every situation I'm presented with. Some distros are better than others under certain circumstances.

I guess I just like to stay informed as to what Linux solutions are out there.

I'm still running Slackware on the oldest PCs in our household have it running on a couple of PCs owned by my fellow co-workers (older PCs that would be much too slow for other distros). It's still running good and I'll keep it around so I can at least have a test box to help answer questions from my co-workers when they come up (ie: the latest question I was asked was how to get Real Player running on Slackware). Because these people are newbies, I like to try a process myself before "advising" them.

What got me motivated to look at Mandriva once again is the interests our office LUG is generating. I can sense that more people in the office are considering trying Linux at home. Mandriva is what introduced me to the Linux world and I thought perhaps they've come far enough now that it would be a good distro to recommend to people with more modern hardware.

But, before I start recommending it, I should at least see how well it works for us.

I like Arch, but it ain't for the newbie... especially the newbie that's been kept in the Microshaft closet for too long.

[snarkout]

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 JINX!

You have to buy me a coke.

[DaveQB]

I guess one of the reasons I go looking for other distros now and then is that I seem to be a "consultant" for many people who are not computer savvy (friends, family, and co-workers). So I'm always on the lookout for the most straight forward, simplest, friendliest and stable distros. available. I do try a lot of them. And in order to be as honest and accurate as possible, I feel that I have to be confident that at least I can use the system effectively before I recommend it to anyone else.

Thats exactly my mind set and circumstance.

After first dabbling with Red Hat for a short period, I then found and stuck with Mandrake for years. Its a great distro. Only reason why i left it was :

1) so slow
2) my Logitech game controller didnt work in it

Great to see, now, Mandriva still offering a nice distro.

[Judland]

Well, I'll be the first to admit Mandriva ain't no Arch when it comes to speed. But what you do gain from it, I feel, makes up for it... especially for the novice user.

The MCC is very intuitive and when upgrading packages. It's nice to be able to read about why certain patches are required. The Mandriva package manager does have some good documentation and details to it that I think novice users can take advantage of.

As for being one of the more "bloated" distros. and it is nice to see that it is installable and usable on older systems (like my PII test box). Many of the people I'm "tutoring" still use older PC components like this. So having the latest and greatest software capable of running on not-so-modern hardware is a plus, in my book.

[Judland]

Well, after showing Mandriva One to our LUG members today, the only negative thing we've come away with our experience is the lack of some proprietary plug-ins available out of the box.... like Java.

However, everyone was impressed at how well Mandriva One identified and connected to Bluetooth devices right "out of the box".

Got to make a few copies of the ISO for people who want to try it at home now. I did cover how adding proprietary plug-ins was simple enough if:

1) they installed the OS to hard drive and just added the appropriate repositories

2) bought a boxed set from Mandriva.com with all of the proprietary stuff on the CD(s).

Overall, a pretty good response from everyone.